
Cockroaches becoming resistant to most chemical insecticides - pseudolus
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/06/cockroaches-may-soon-be-unstoppable-thanks-fast-evolving-insecticide-resistance
======
stirfrykitty
Mix baking soda and sugar together and put them in a bowl. Will kill them dead
without toxicity to humans.

Boric acid has no resistance.

Bay leaves repel about every insect known to man. Roaches hate bay leaves and
will not be in the same area with them.

Editing to say that bay leaves can be crushed in a coffee grinder, put in a
plastic ketchup/mustard bottle as a powder, and the resulting powder "puffed"
into areas where they have been. This can be done outside as well. Combine
this with orange oil concentrate and your house will be insect free fairly
quickly. Cheap, too.

Editing to add, here in the south, loads of people also buy concentrated
orange oil from places like Tractor Supply and mix it with water in a pump
sprayer. Spray the permimeter of your house and zero insects will cross it.
It's toxic as hell to the insects because it dissolves their bodies, but non-
toxic to cats, dogs, lizards, etc. They will NOT develop a resistance to being
melted by the citric acid.

~~~
orblivion
I hope you're correct, and I have used diatomaceous earth (not in your list,
but similar in nature) to mitigate travelers as I moved out of a cockroach
infested place.

But broadly speaking, I have to at least be a little skeptical - if all of
these things are such easy fixes with no cost to human health, why are we even
having this conversation about insecticides? Why was the market created in the
first place? Is it just good advertising?

~~~
stirfrykitty
I live north of Houston. We have more insects, snakes, and critters than most
places on earth. Just in my area we have spiders (wolf, black widow, brown
recluse, among others), roaches, ants (fire and normal), scorpions,
centipedes, mosquitoes, and more.

I have successfully used these to combat insects inside my home. My wife does
not like the smell of the orange oil, so I use it judiciously inside (laundry
room), but outside around the perimeter. My children aren't exposed to toxic
chemicals, but the bugs don't cross the perimeter much. Orange oil appears as
"expensive" per liter, but it's concentrated, so I mix it in a gallon sprayer
with water and spray. I might actually try soaking bay leaves in the water
with the orange oil overnight. In this heat and humidity, the resulting water
just might be really nasty for insects.

My grandmother swears by spreading cayenne pepper in lieu of bay leaf powder.

I think the market sees an opportunity, despite health risks, to market this
stuff as an easy solution, but it's like doctors prescribing antibiotics for
everything. It's efficacy is wearing thin as insects develop an immunity. I
guess nature knows a thing or two about handling insects, so I appeal to the
non-toxic stuff as much as possible.

~~~
orblivion
Cool, glad to hear it's working. I've also used cayenne pepper and cinnamon on
ants, and tried cleaning their trail with vinegar. They're the Argentine kind
(San Francisco area) which means they are _legion_, so I had limited results.

~~~
Fnoord
We use balsamic vinegar (or wine) to lure fruit flies. I make a trap with
paper, scissors, tape, a glass, and vinegar. Get a clean glass and fil it with
a few cm of vinegar. From the paper cut a funnel with a small hole (2 mm or
so) on the bottom. Use the tape to attach the paper to the glass (use more
tape if there are open holes cause else they might escape). The paper will
slowly get spots from the flies/liquid. Lasts a couple of weeks. Be careful
when you toss it away, so that no flies escape.

We zap flies with an electronic zapper (looks like a tennis racket). There's a
couple of tricks I learned from it but yeah just make sure you clean up the
mess. The zapper resides on the fridge because we got a young human being
frolicking around.

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ARandomerDude
Headline is misleading because the conclusion is premature. There are other
obvious reasons why the roach population may not be decreasing, other than
adapting to pesticides:

1\. Incomplete treatment -- apartment buildings are large and exterminators
likely can't access all interior spaces, providing ample breeding ground.

2\. Reinfestation from outside sources -- roaches live in all kinds of tight
spaces (e.g. corrugated cardboard boxes), and the number of people in an
apartment virtually guarantees cross-contamination.

3\. Inadequate amount of pesticides applied.

I'm hesitant to jump to the conclusion that neurotoxins are failing without
removing other, much more likely factors.

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nobrains
How will they evolve against this:
[https://4.imimg.com/data4/RH/CQ/NSDMERP-28172796/kainchishoe...](https://4.imimg.com/data4/RH/CQ/NSDMERP-28172796/kainchishoes-500x500.png)

~~~
coldtea
Getting much faster, flying, or even human-sized?

~~~
petre
We could use Tokkay Gekkos to get them. Then the cockroach problem becomes a
gekko problem. Then we use a cat and the gekko problem becomes a cat problem.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokay_gecko](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokay_gecko)

~~~
goda90
No, that's the beautiful part. When winter rolls around, the cats simply
freeze to death.

~~~
wumms
Since Skinner recommended gorillas:
[https://youtu.be/P9yruQM1ggc](https://youtu.be/P9yruQM1ggc)

... I had to check [0]: at least mountain gorillas can survive temperatures
below freezing.

[0] [https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/mountain-
gorilla](https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/mountain-gorilla)

------
wickerman
I used to live in a slaughterhouse district where the damn things would crawl
out of sink, bidet and shower plugs, making every single trip to the bathroom
a very anxiety ridden experience. Plus they were of the flying variety, and
occasionally, of the albino variety. I personally hate them and I relish on
the fact I live somewhere where they're not that prominent, but I do recognize
they're as essential as any other insect and a potential food source.

~~~
pard68
They are all 'of the albino variety' at certain times. A white/albino
cockroach is just one that has freshly molted. Shell will harden up and darken
in a day or so.

~~~
wickerman
The more you know! I am ashamed to say I barely know anything about them
despite them being persistent pests in my life.

~~~
pard68
I would know much less if I didn't raise roaches as a food source for my
reptiles. They have won me over, in part, and I consider them to be pets,
though only me and my two year old appreciate them...

~~~
Ididntdothis
I used to have crickets for my bearded dragons and after a while I also took a
liking to them. I feel that if you watch almost any animal closely for a while
you see interesting traits and behaviors that make them likeable.

~~~
hombre_fatal
> if you watch almost any animal closely for a while you see interesting
> traits and behaviors that make them likeable.

I used to burn leaves with a magnifying glass in the sun as a kid. Once, I
hovered the infernal dot over an ant and watched his abdomen pop. I then
observed, in zoomed-in horror, as the poor thing kept trying to feel its
missing abdomen and then clean its own juices off its antennae. Other ants
would come and inspect the dying ant and their antennae would tap each
other's. The fallen ant was then carried back to the hive, and I felt so bad
that I spent the afternoon clearing a path for the highway of ants.

To this day, I feel bad killing ants and will try to avoid it, like blowing
them off my patio table before scrubbing it. It gets a brow-crinkle from my
friends, though.

~~~
yeahitslikethat
You have empathy for something mostly despised as a pest. Hackers are thought
to have little, but sometimes I suspect we have more, so much more that is
really the lack of reciprocation for our empathy others show for us that is
the problem.

------
cascom
Wonder if Diatomaceous earth still works

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatomaceous_earth](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatomaceous_earth)

~~~
jasonl99
Living in Florida, and being married to a wife who considers the presence of
cockroaches a dealbreaker for living together, I've managed to keep a roach-
free home for several years now without _too_ much effort.

I use this as one part of a multi-pronged approach, dusting around areas they
would need to cross to get into the house. It's super-cheap and lasts a long
time.

It does need to stay relatively dry, though. When I've needed to repair
drywall on occasion, I dust a bunch in the opening figuring it will basically
last forever and not get wet.

I also use a bait with boric acid placed in various random areas. I also use a
product that slowly emits a vapor in closed areas that basically neuters any
roaches that get near it (for places like under the sink). Finally I used Home
Defense spray around the outside.

I treat the condo once every three months, and it takes about 30 minutes. I've
seen maybe two cockroaches in the past few years, and both were belly-up.

------
baybal2
I recall unkillable "soviet" cockroaches that shrugged of all neurotoxins that
pest controllers had.

In the Union, things like dichlorvos were used very liberally, even inside
living quarters. That eventually led to roached evolving resistance to just
every insecticide.

What has lead to their near extinction after the Soviet Union's collapse was
rising income levels, and better sanitation.

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tropo
Sulfur candles, commonly used before DDT, probably still work. They burn
sulfur, producing sulfur dioxide, which is the water-free gaseous version of
sulfurous acid.

It's cheap. It wipes out mold spores too.

A downside is that stuff like cloth can get bleached. Metals may get
discolored.

------
Havoc
Well on the plus side the things won't constantly die when we start farming
them

~~~
maxaf
Cockroaches are a great source of protein. Cockroach farming is a greener,
more sustainable activity. What you eat for dinner tonight was eating
someone’s dinner leftovers last night! This is organics capture at its finest.

~~~
athenot
There's a very strong health consideration that you're overlooking. You don't
want random pollutants to be a part of your food intake, and roaches are not
picky at all so they are guaranteed to be feeding on (and contain) various
contaminations.

This is good for the primary role of roaches, to be the cleanup crew for all
sorts of organic matter in nature and helping in the breakdown cycle. But if
you were inclined to use them as food, you'd have to maintain a much more
controlled (farmed) environment.

By way of comparison, the wild snails you migh eat in France are first fed
with a diet of clean lettuce for a week to help purge them of whatever they
were munching on in the wild. And they only eat plants to begin with…

~~~
throwaway5752
I think the commenter addressed this with "farming" \- that implies a
controlled feed stream.

~~~
maxaf
Correct - this would be just like alligator farming. I never miss the
opportunity to savor gator meat whenever I'm in Florida, but obviously this
isn't wild caught gator. Who knows what it might have eaten last night? I
don't wish to be dining on poor Jim Bob who may have blundered too far into
the Everglades after a night on the town...

In fact, the only gator meat that can be sold legally is farmed gator.

------
hanoz
I can't help but think that AI plus robotics is going to have pest control
sewn up in the not too distant future, rendering these chemical brute force
attacks largely redundant.

~~~
andrewl
I've wondered about that. Could small crawling robots, perhaps 3-inches long,
be built to roam around houses and inside walls and under sinks and so on to
seek out and kill cockroaches and other household pests? I doubt anything can
develop resistance to being torn apart by a robot. The answer is probably that
it _could_ be done now, or fairly soon. Whether it would be _economical_ is
another question entirely. But I don't like the idea of spraying chemicals
around my house. Robots would be non-toxic.

Perhaps in the future every building will have a fleet of tiny robots roaming
around functioning like macrophages. Maybe iRobot could come up with
something.

~~~
tsss
Fairly soon? We're barely getting man-sized robots that can open doors and
walk over stairs. You would need thousands of much better robots that can not
only walk more difficult terrain but also navigate and search completely
autonomously and pursue at a high speed (some cockroaches can even fly) while
having enough strength to crush them.

~~~
andrewl
You're probably right, I'm too optimistic.

Perhaps the better model is army ants, or driver ants. I read they will sweep
through a village and kill or drive out roaches, spiders, mice, and other
vermin. The human inhabitants welcome them. Like all ants and termites,
they're individually dumb, but the colony can accomplish a lot. So maybe the
answer is thousands of one-inch crawling robots which bite anything that
moves.

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S_A_P
I had a cockroach come in my garage the other day. had some wasp spray nearby
and doused it. While I could tell it was probably unhappy, it just kept on
moving albeit in a half drunken path. Not sure if it actually died, as it
turned around and left but it definitely lived much longer than a wasp does
with the same dose.

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not_a_cop75
Perhaps it's time to seriously reconsider our rejection of roaches as a food
source. Anything that has the ability to survive well beyond us certainly has
the ability to sustain us.

------
bobthechef
Perhaps their extinction could be engineered genetically, like mosquitoes. Or
we could introduce innocuous species that eat them. Cold also kills
cockroaches.

All of these have blowback, however.

~~~
tropo
The hatchet wasp lays eggs in the cockroach egg cases.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaniidae](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaniidae)

------
otabdeveloper4
Haven't seen a cockroach in a decade.

Not so hot as they were hyped up to be during the 70's and 80's.

~~~
Spooky23
#suburblife

Cockroaches infest all urban areas. If you’re around a dense population of
humans, you got them. If you’re in the US south, you got them. If you’re in
the hood, you got lots of them. If you’re in an area with lots of transient
people, you’re near them.

My dad was a fireman. I recall him describing an apartment fire where they
encountered a “moving wall” in a stairwell, a 5ft square cluster of roaches
trying to escape the flame. When they ran into situations like that, they
removed their gear and rode back in their underwear if necessary.

~~~
chrisseaton
> Cockroaches infest all urban areas.

Not in all urban areas - they're really not very common in the UK. There's
only a couple of smaller species here and they're pretty rare so that people
may have never seen one.

~~~
coldtea
Not very common in the UK? You'd be surprised.

------
SquishyPanda23
You have to hand it to the mighty cockroach. Nature has engineered a
remarkable machine.

------
seapunk
I read somewhere that "cockroach" is the new term for bootstrapped startups.

~~~
NIL8
(Anonymous smirk)

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badrabbit
Yeah,I literally use a blow torch for this.

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pard68
Meanwhile I struggle to keep my cockroach colony reproducing fast enough to
keep up with the demand for them that my other animals have.

------
Santosh83
Why should humanity 'stop' everything as it sees fit with imperfect knowledge
and burgeoning ego? Cockroaches have a valuable role to play in degrading the
vast quantities of biological waste we put out. We don't need to stop them.

~~~
tuesdayrain
You must not live with cockroaches if you feel no need to stop them.

~~~
alistairSH
Inside the US, they seem to be present in large numbers in the deep south (FL
through TX). Are they present in the southwest as well?

Here in DC, we get them, but generally only in homes that aren't kept clean -
which can a problem in large apartment buildings, as it only takes one
slovenly neighbor or poorly tended garbage area to let a colony grow and
become a visible nuisance.

And what about Europe? Probably too cold in most of the continent, but present
in Mediterranean regions?

~~~
itemGrey
Don't think I've ever seen a cockroach in my life living in Europe.

Seems like a U.S exclusive bug.

~~~
hvidgaard
They are rampart in the Mediterranean area. I don't think I've ever been to a
holiday resort there where I didn't see them.

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RosanaAnaDana
Well good for them.

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ssener2001
their bodies must be created resistant to these substances before or for ready
or Someone changes their body defense. randomness has no knowledge of
chemistry. we, human beings, have difficulty in understanding how it works.

