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Michael Stewart
Welcome to the Faith Pest Control podcast. I’m Mike Stewart, your host and we’re here with pest expert Fred Talley. Fred is the pest expert when it comes to German Roaches and all kinds of roaches but especially today we’re going to talk about German roaches. If you’ve got German roaches in Jasper, Ellijay, Blue Ridge, Big Canoe, or Ball Ground, Georgia, Fred is your man to get rid of them. So Fred, tell us all about the bad evil things that German roaches do. Why everybody can have them in their homes. And what Faith Pest Control does to get rid of German roaches and probably any kind of roaches but it sounds like German are one of the worst in North Georgia. Tell us all about it.
Fred Talley
Alright Mikey, yes German roaches do have a specific treatment protocol that is different than other roaches in many ways. And I will normally start off my conversation with a customer that has a problem with German roaches in saying that there is no shame in getting German roaches in your house. The shame is not doing something about it when it occurs. Kind of like if your kid gets lice from school. There’s no preventive measure for that. There’s not much of a preventive measure for German roaches. You know before the fact typically people bring German roaches into their homes. They’re typically German roaches are not much of an outside bug so they don’t travel you know from your from your yard into your house. You generally bring them from the grocery store Walmart, the drugstore, Amazon packages are notorious, not so much for German roaches, but they do you will get the bigger what people will call Palmetto bugs or water bugs. They are they are roaches. But that being all that being said the the the preferred method in my mind for servicing roaches is a baiting system. And we call it a system. It’s a baiting service, I guess we’re probably a better word for it. But you will, if somebody is trying to sell you the idea that they need to spray some insecticide for roaches, you need to turn the other way and run because that is not a successful long term solution. When a female Roach is impregnated, she’s she’s pregnant for the rest of her life. And she goes through a cycle where she is carries an egg sack for 21 days. And during that cycle that she carries an egg sack she’ll get in some void areas like a wall void or something in your house underneath the cabinets to someplace out of the way and she doesn’t eat nor does she drink a lot during that period. But when she when she gets rid of the egg, she goes on a 10 day cycle where she is eating and drinking rather abundantly. So that being said, if you come if somebody comes in and does a great baiting program in your kitchen and or bathroom because that is generally where German roaches do occur or live you’re going to have a you there’ll be very successful in killing a lot of males and very successful in killing females that aren’t gravid aren’t carrying an egg at that point in time. But the segment of the population that you know that is basically unaffected is the female that’s carrying the egg and you don’t know how many females are because you can’t count them because you can’t see him. So when somebody comes in and bait you are going to put you should see results within a couple of days. A lot of dead adult roaches. But what you’re you will also see a lot of live baby roaches. Now the baiting will still work with them. It just takes time. Babies roaches feed through truffle axis. And what that means, I guess in crude terms is babies eat the Mama’s poop and so the bait flows through her system. And when the babies are feeding, they’re ingesting it into their system, so that it will eventually get rid of of all of the roaches, but you will see a lot of dead roaches right off the bat and then a lot of live babies and after a couple of weeks you’ll start seeing dead babies. That just is kind of the way it works. The best way that we’ve ever come up with to get rid of them is we don’t even spray anything. For German roaches, we do use a a specific type of bait that has what in our industry to call the insect growth regulator in basically it prevents juvenile from being able to reproduce. It does a couple other things, but that’s the biggest thing it does is keeps the juveniles from being able to reproduce. So if you break that production reproduction cycle, you can get a handle on the infestation. They are, they do have can contribute to asthma. When when the roaches molt, which is when in their growing process they will shed their exoskeleton when they’re growing from one stage to the next because the skeleton becomes too small. We refer to those as the castings, they kind of will get ground up somewhat into a dust and you can inhale them. And it’s especially in public housing housing projects is a big problem because of the asthma, triggering asthma attacks and children. To prevent cockroaches from infesting a home, if you can maintain a very clean kitchen cleaning up crumbs, spills, vacuuming, avoiding piling up dishes in the sink. These are all good ways to to help with a prevention. If you can imagine I mentioned cleaning up crumbs of German Roach is probably Oh a half inch long, maybe five eighths at the very most. So you can imagine the size crumb it would take to maintain their level of nutrition for a day. It’s not a whole lot. One crumb can probably sustain them for multiple hours at a time. So cleanliness is an important factor. But just because you’re clean, like I told you earlier about how you get them, you bring them from the grocery store, the drugstore, the department store, that kind of thing, or some somebody else can bring them into your house. Cleanliness is not going to stop it, but it can limit the effects of it.
Michael Stewart
Well, it sounds like with all these tips that we can do a whole lot ourselves to minimize the infestation. But obviously, you know no one is immune from getting roaches. I remember years ago I heard one of my mentors who was a pest control expert say no home or mansion is immune from from cockroaches because they can get in there looking for food and water and when you feed them with crumbs in your toaster and grease in your backyard grill and you know you’re in hot water, you’re you know, they’re gonna come they’re looking to have food, water and shelter. And when you provide that forum, you can have roaches and it doesn’t matter what kind of home it is they’re not sitting around and looking at the quality of the home or the quality of the home owner. It’s it’s all about roaches are in our on our planet. And they’re looking for food and water. And what you got to do is you’ve got to get a professional to keep that home, pest free. And that’s what Faith Pest Control does. Our podcast is a service to the north Georgia community of folks living in Jasper, Ellijay, Blue Ridge, and Big Canoe, and Ball Ground to help you know the pest control tips to get the pest things you can do to make sure that you don’t have pests in your home. So I’m Mike Stewart for Fred Tally. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast where you get your favorite podcasts, like Apple, Google Spotify. And now Alexa, and we’ll see you on the next Faith Pest Control podcast.
