How To Draw Out Roaches

Roaches are good at hiding and can lock themselves into your furniture, walls, or even electronics. The last thing you want to do is spray any of your home appliances with a can of insecticide spray. So, how do you draw these annoying pests out of hiding? Below, we will walk you through several methods you can use to do that effectively.

Aside from the draw-out techniques, you will also learn a few ways to prevent these pests from entering your house.

Drawing Roaches Out of Hiding

Roaches will not easily come out of hiding. These pests know that they are small, vulnerable, and often surrounded by predators. So, if they feel exposed or threatened, they will remain in their hiding spots or come out only at night.

What you need, at this point, is a lure. It is a thing used to entice and draw them into the open. But first, understand that these pests only come out of hiding to find food or breed.

So, you want to use their hunger against them and set your trap at night when they are most active. Below are some professional and do-it-yourself lures that can work.

Professional Lures for Roaches

You can draw roaches out of their hiding spots with any of these professional or commercial methods.

1. Glue or Sticky Traps

Glue traps are some of the most effective and safest methods of luring out and trapping roaches. These traps are made from tubes or sheets covered in a sticky substance.

Enticed by the smell of the trap, roaches crawl to the strip to enjoy the aura in a much fuller concentration. Once their underbelly or feet touch the sticky substance on top, the strip captures them.

To use sticky traps to lure roaches living in your home, put them in places where you have noticed their activities. This may include places like underneath the sink or behind your refrigerator.

After placing the strips, monitor the glue strips for a couple of days. If the roach infestation is acute, you may need to leave the glue strips on the floor for up to two weeks.

Once the strip is full or you no longer notice any roach activity, gather the strips and properly dispose of the trapped roaches.

2. Liquid Concentrate

Another easy way you can lure roaches is to use liquid concentrate. Liquid concentrate is a concentrated liquid substance that you can dilute and spray into areas where roaches are hiding.

Depending on the roach activities in your house, some of these areas can include crevices and cracks. Having identified their hiding spots, follow the guide below:

• Pour in about two or three bowls of water in a mop bucket.
• Next, dilute some liquid concentrate in the water.
• Use the solution to mop your floors.

This fast-acting remedy will drive roaches out of their comfortable hiding spots and prevent them from returning.

If you consider liquid concentrate unsafe for you, keep reading to learn other effective ways.

3. Roach Bombs

Roach bombs or foggers operate by spraying a pesticide in the air. As the pesticide falls to the ground, it coats your indoor surfaces and kills the target pests.

Standard roach bombs are better placed in the center of a room before activation. People often turn to this remedy when they don’t want to hire an exterminator.

However, like liquid concentrate, these roach bombs can be extremely toxic and flammable. So, they are not suitable for homes with pets or little children.

In addition, you will also need to evacuate your house while the roach bomb works, especially if you have underlying respiratory conditions. The last thing you want is to become ill because you want to rid your house of roach bombs.

Since there are other safer and more effective methods to deal with roach infestations, you may want to leave this method to try something else.

4. Bait Stations

Bait stations are easy-to-use plastic containers with gel or liquid substances mixed with grains to attract crawling insects. This pest control method features a palatable base that attracts roaches to poison.

It uses a lure-and-kill technique where a piece of bait is coated with insecticide to attract roaches.

Once the poison gets at a roach, the poisoned roach distributes it throughout their colony. Other roaches will eat the dead roach and die as well.

Bait stations are considered some of the most effective methods of dealing with roach infestations in homes.

DIY Lures for Roaches

If you are on a stiff budget, you may not be able to afford the professional measures above. In that case, you can try these at-home DIY remedies.

1. Duct Tape Trap

If you can’t afford store-bought sticky traps, you can make yours at home. All you need to do this are some strips of duct tape and peanut butter. To create a makeshift sticky trap, cut out a strip of duct tape and place the sticky part upwards where the roaches hide.

Then, drop a dollop of peanut butter in the center of the tape. The peanut butter serves as bait to draw roaches to the tape where they will be stuck.

Suppose peanut butter is not available. You may use butter as a substitute. Regardless of the spread, remember to check your makeshift trap at least once a day before the spread starts to rot.

2. Jar Traps

For this DIY method, you need a jar and some petroleum jelly. To create a jar trap, coat the inside of the jar with a generous amount of petroleum jelly.

Afterward, add a bit of food like bread and place the jar near the spots where the roaches hide. The trap operates by luring roaches into the jar and preventing them from leaving.

As the inside of the jar is coated in petroleum jelly, the roaches cannot climb out. This method is less wasteful than the duct tape technique.

The reason is that you don’t need to replace the jar often. Once you have captured enough roaches, you can clean the jar, replace the jelly and bait, and reuse it.

3. Boric Acid

Boric acid is one of the most efficient homemade remedies when dealing with hiding roaches. For this do-it-yourself method, you need to make a dough by mixing equal parts of boric acid, flour, and sugar.

Once the dough is set, roll it into small balls. Now, set these balls at different spots in your house for roaches to feed on. You can put the dough balls behind cabinets, under the refrigerator, stove, and beneath other home appliances where roaches are hiding.

While the flour and sugar draw the roaches out of their hiding spots, the boric acid finishes them off. Although this method is pretty effective in killing roaches, boric acid can be dangerous for pets.

4. Baking Soda

This is another household substance that fits right into your home roach-fighting arsenal. Before, you probably knew baking soda as a baking ingredient, teeth cleaner, and a chemical mouthwash. Well, it does work well in dealing with roach infestations too.

So, if you have it in your kitchen cabinet, you can try it out on the roach colonies in your home. Like boric acid, baking soda is dangerous for roaches.

To draw out roaches with baking soda, mix baking soda with something sweet, like sugar or onions, to bait the roaches. Then, place the mix in high-roach traffic areas and wait.

Once roaches eat the sweetened baking soda and consume water, their insides will bloat, and they will start dying. So, dispose of their bodies and enjoy the benefits of a roach-free home.

5. Essential Oils

Essential oils are effective when dealing with unwanted insects like roaches. To use this method, make a spray from a combination of essential oil and water in a bottle.

Then, spray the mixture in areas where roaches hide or may enter. Some essential oils that are effective for this purpose are citrus essential oils like lime, lemon, and orange.

They work because citrus peels contain a chemical called limonene, an ingredient commonly used in insect repellants. Other essential oil options include rosemary, oregano, and kaffir lime oils.

Scaring Roaches Out of Hiding

Apart from luring roaches through baits, you can also use some techniques to scare them out of hiding. Scare techniques work pretty well on roach colonies.

To scare roaches out of hiding, you have to locate their nest or hiding location, then scare them to stumble into your traps.

If the roaches hide under your closet or shelf, you can shine a light on them. Alternatively, you can douse them with a soapy water solution.

These two methods work well to scare roaches out of their hiding spots into the trap you have already set. However, bear in mind that this is an uncomfortable technique.

You may face a large number of roaches head-on, and they may scurry on or around you. Also, uncovering their den may further expose you to airborne remnants of shed exoskeletons, feces, bacteria, egg sacs, roach corpses, etc.

For safe roach scaring, wear a protective face covering and ensure the area is well-ventilated before proceeding.

If the colony is too large, abort the mission and try any of the baiting methods provided above.

Conclusion

Finding and eliminating the roaches hiding in your room can be tricky, but not anymore. Apply any of the methods above that suit the nature of roach infestation in your home.

However, be careful with your choice of draw-out method if you have pets or little children in the house. Methods like the use of liquid concentrate, roach bombs, and boric acid should not be considered if you have kids and pets with you in your home.