I was about ready to flip my lid on Friday when we found out that they were going to be treating our entire apartment building for roaches for the second time this year. When you’ve gone your whole life without ever having to deal with any sort of bug problem, that’s the kind of thing that can give you a complex. Am I doing something wrong? What’s the matter with everyone else in this place? Whose ass am I going to have to beat (I wouldn’t mind slapping the stupid off the person down the hall with the constantly pissing cat, actually.)? This is a nice enough building, but should we still be living here?
I started to calm down though when I realized that at least they’re giving us a good amount of notice this time so that the preparation won’t have to be done in a mad rush again. that sucked. And remembering this article I read last month also made me feel a little better.
It seems that they’re becoming a bigger and bigger problem in quite a few places, including some neighbourhoods that are so close to us that they might as well be ours. Even worse, the damn things are starting to figure out that some of the stuff that’s meant to kill them is…well…killing them and now they’re not so eager to eat it.
“We’ve seen a huge increase over the last three years. It’s slowly been building, and it’s pretty severe,” said Bryan Maier, the company’s Kitchener branch manager.
“It’s not just in our region, it’s throughout Ontario for sure,” he said. “Some units that we’ve gone into there are thousands upon thousands of cockroaches, and there are people living with that.”
“It takes a lot more effort to bring issues under control compared to 20 years ago when we’d service a unit once and never return again,” he explained.
A synthetic pyrethroid pesticide that’s been on the market since then doesn’t eradicate the pest like it used to, Maier said, and in Canada and Ontario there are strict regulations on new pesticides being introduced.
“We had employees working five years who had never even seen a cockroach, but cockroaches are what they are and they’ve even become bait-averse – not so much resistant to the bait, but shy of eating it.”
Maier says spraying kills cockroaches but also pushes them further into areas that are difficult to access.
“So the long story short is controlling them has become a lot more difficult.”
Hopefully after this we won’t have to worry about it for a while, if ever again. But if we do, at least we can take some comfort in knowing it’s not just us and likely has little to do with anything we’re doing or not doing.