How to Know if You Have a Roach Problem
- 1). Sprinkle a tablespoon of sugar onto a flat surface in your lighted room. Leave your room and turn off the lights.
- 2). Return to your room at one-hour intervals and turn on the lights quickly. If there is a roach presence in your household, the roaches will be attracted to your sugar within an hour due to their acute sense of smell. When you enter your room, be sure to look at the sugar instantly and identify any roaches.
- 3). Note whether the roaches run or stay still when the lights come on. If the roaches run instantly, your roach population in your home is bearable but still present. If the roaches stay in the open and make no attempt to run in the light, you have a serious problem. That one roach in the open represents up to 300 roaches in nearby hiding spaces. Quite literally, the roaches that don't attempt to make a dart for cover are unable to do so because there is simply no physical space for them and they will be driven off by the other roaches which are using the hiding space. The hiding places are so densely compact with roaches that the internal drive to run from light (comparable to our drive to remove our hand from a hot surface) is overpowered by the insect's sense of having no place to go.
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