Every summer I get ants. I thought the doggos tracked them in on their paws but when they passed, we still got ants every goddamn summer. So many. Then spiders. The big ass thick butted ugly ass spiders. Those bitches just don’t care about their lives. My daily routine in the summer is rinsing at least three spiders down the drain while I shower.

Cockroaches. First it was larvae. I was scared of rice for months after that. But my whole apartment was unhealthy, I moved.

I had bed bugs, we had to throw bed and mattress away, wash all clothes again and again, use steam everywhere until we moved, what was planned anyway. We didn’t bring any bug with us but we use some pesticide on our furniture.

I dealt with food moths few times, but that’s easy. I just threw the food where the moths are –rice, tea, floor…–, deep clean the kitchen, put everything in the freezer for 48h minimum, then put all the food in glass jars. Now, I still put my floor and sugar in the freezer before storing it, and try to put all dry food in glass jars or metal boxes for tea and coffee.

When I have ants, I leave something sweet outside, on their path, so I don’t have to kill them. It works.

I had a pantry moth infestation as a result of inheriting birds. No matter what you do if you buy seed you will get moths again and again. It was pretty fucking bad at its worst… at night I would spray a paper plate with cooking spray and just swat them down with it next to the light. Highly effective.

But then I stumbled across trichogramma wasps. And it was literally life changing.

They are stingless, self-fertile (all female due to a bacterial infection, if you give them antibiotics they produce males again!), egg parasitic wasps, about the size of a grain of sand. They lay their eggs inside the host species eggs and their young consume the host egg. Once they hatch you never see them again. Tiny dots. You order them 15k or so at a time (depending on website and country probably? but they should be pretty widely available) and if you release them outside as intended, they kill off 95% of the target species (they prefer what they hatch from, which is usually moth eggs, but they can parasitize tons of pest insects). Indoors they can wipe out pest eggs. Then they die off because they are obligate egg parasites. No host eggs, no more wasps.

You need to release them for several waves to be sure, due to moth life cycles taking many months to complete, but they are cheap af (I paid $12 USD/15,000, ordered them every 3 months for 1.5 yrs, zero moths after) Zero work, and no chemicals.

I tell everyone who has birds about them now. I gifted the local bird rescue a 2-year delivery schedule, and made sure to tell everyone about it so they could pass the info along to any adoptees who might be turned off by the moth problem down the line and decide against adopting the bird(s)

Jehovah’s Witness ? Yeah, told them to fuck off amd they did.

mice,family members(hoarders) refuse to clean up thier house is too lazy(also too lazy to paint the front of the house because pain has been stripping off for quite a while and neighbors are starting to make noise about it(through subterfuge), had 3 infestation, coinciding with weather, '16, '20 and currently one that started in the garage. we only used glue traps. but if mice dont get caught, they start to recognize the traps and avoid it, only naive and young mice get caught. we still manage to catch quite a few of them as the infestation was not as heavy as the last 2 because we were prepared with traps we recently bought off amazon. and i started noticed they are picking up the glue traps that are totally unusalbe from the trash and trying reuse them,hoarding.

Mouse. Singular. Cat.

A few years ago we had a problem with teenage girls in the bathroom. Basically made it unusable for most of the day.

Glad to say they have now graduated college and the problem worked itself out.

We got roaches from an Amazon package, I suspect. My wife and I are both compulsively clean people, but we live in an older place so there is ostensibly decades worth of random organic material around to sustain roach colonies. It started one spring with seeing some instars around the kitchen every few days and then it became full roaches about a week later. I did not take it seriously at first and just treated with hardware store sprays and powders. This was insufficient.

What eventually worked was baits and a little chemical called Alpine WSG. I bought a sprayer and basically coated the entire house in it twice, six weeks apart. We have not seen a single roach since then. I respray once per year just in case.

Also, boric acid doesn’t work with German roaches. It is a waste of time. If you solved roach problem with that or diatomaceous earth, then you had a entry problem, not an infestation.

We also had racoons breeding in our attic at one point, which is a very awkward situation because I felt bad trapping them so I just waited for them to leave and then sealed where they were getting in.

Flying ants. We bought a new house that had a major problem with “alates”.

Tried dealing with them on our own, but they just kept coming and because there was no food supply for them, they’d die anyway in 24 hours or so. Our windows got full of dead ants.

Called Orkin. They came out, did their thing, gone in 24 hours.

https://www.orkin.com/pests/ants/winged-ants

Cockroaches. It was bad. They were everywhere. You couldn’t open a door without them falling from the cracks in the doorframe on your face.

Boric acid is what helped as recommended by reddit. We used to clean, and spray with Pyrethrins before that but that only kills the visible ones. Most of the roaches are in their holes and you’ll never reach them like that.

What’s great about boric acid is that it kills slowly meaning they can infect each other before they die in a chain reaction. They infect even the hidden ones when they go groom each other.

So clean the area, dry it, then just spread the powder where they usually hang out. It’ll take a week to notice any effects. Apply again if area gets wet.

Another great thing is unless you ingest a huge amount or inhale it in your lungs, boric acid is mostly safe for humans. Unlike the sprays which always gave us symptoms.

Where I live, there are American cockroaches. The good thing is that they don’t nest in homes, so their presence isn’t a commentary on your cleanliness. But they do wander into homes looking for food. And guys, they’re huge! Like you can hear them crawling.

I asked the pest control guy if there was a way to be finally rid of them and he said “move”.

I lived in a cheap studio in Boston that was infested with roaches. Every 3-4 months I would spray Raid where the walls met the floor and that always worked well until they gradually started appearing again.

I lived in another studio that got a bedbug infestation. My building’s management paid for the place to be heat treated – they wheeled in two giant space heaters and had them powered by a generator on a truck five stories below on the street. I never saw another one again, but it destroyed all my books.

Nowadays I’m way more picky about where I live and I haven’t had any pest issues in over a decade.

Bed bugs made us burn our furniture. In the end we still paid several hundred dollars for an exterminator cause they were that persistent.

Termites.

Mutiple professional treatments to eradicate them from the property and surrounds, then major structural repairs, for which the place had to be vacant.

0/10, do not recommend.

Wasps nested in my walls. I sucked them out with a Vacuum then put in some insecticide.