Roaches! Hate them to bits! No, I’m not scared of the bloody insect, they’re just simply annoying! Like, listen, have you ever gotten out of bed in the middle of the night, groggy from sleep, walking barefoot heading for the bathroom to heed the call of Mother Nature and then….squish!….something you stepped on felt crunchy and then slimy, and you finally turn on the bathroom light on, you look at your foot , and lo and behold, a fossil-like remnant of a of a cockroach clings tightly on your bare skin! Hideous creatures!
How about that time you went to a grocery store to stock up on your weekly grocery supplies? You absentmindedly pull over at the pile of cereal and a cockroach crawls over on your out stretched hand, and so as a natural reflex, you jerk away in disgust only to knock a fellow shopper who looks like Keannu Reeves standing behind you, and you both live happily ever after!
Seriously, let’s get to know about these scumbags of the Earth!
The cockroach is a reddish-brown creature with a flat body, which enables it to slip between the tiniest cracks. It has long, sensitive antennae, which are constantly waving about this way and that way. The male cockroach has four fair-sized wings; the female cockroach has very small wings or, in certain cases, have no wings at all. Cockroaches are fairly good-sized, as all insects are; some species are several inches long.
The native North American cockroach species are outdoor creatures, which live under stones and rotting logs and in damp places generally. The cockroaches that have become household pests in North America have all been brought in on ships from foreign lands. Europe has sent the Americans the German cockroach; this is often called the Croton bug, because it first appeared when the Croton Dam water system was being piped into New York City. The Oriental cockroach comes from the Far East.
It matters little which species of cockroach one has in one’s house; they are equally most unpleasant! They are to be found not only in homes but in a great many other places where food is prepared or stored – in restaurants, bakeries, hospitals, ships, market places, and grocery stores. But as population grows, and pollution worsens all over the world, cockroaches can now be seen almost everywhere; along the sidewalks, churches, schools, movie houses, some public buildings, and even inside buses! They are at home near water pipes and steam pipes, underneath floorings and in walls, where the slightest crack permits them to enter. They have tremendous appetites! They thrive on almost all kinds of food; they have also been known to eat shoe polish, as well as the paste in the bindings of books!
An effective method of ridding a place of cockroaches is to dust the places where they have been found with borax, Pyrethrum or sodium fluoride. To prevent them from entering a dwelling-place, all cracks in floors, walls and around pipes should be filled in with plastic wood, putty or plaster.
In short, want to have a cockroach-free house? Keep your house clean both indoors and outdoors. That’s it. Roaches can’t stand a clean environment.