n n n The best insect repellent is not a brand, it is an EPA-registered active ingredient applied to all of your exposed skin, and for most people that means picaridin or DEET, with oil of lemon eucalyptus as the solid plant-based choice. What sets how long you stay protected is the active and its […]
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\ \ \ You walk into the kitchen and there are suddenly six flies on the window when there were none yesterday, and the first question is always the same: where did they all come from. The short version is that a sudden swarm indoors almost always means one of two things, and which one
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That sound keeping you up is a courtship call, not random noise. Crickets chirp because the males are singing, partly to attract females and partly to warn off rival males, and they make the sound by rubbing a hardened scraper on one wing across a row of tiny teeth on the other, not by rubbing
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\ \ \ You found a cricket in the basement or heard one chirping behind the dryer, and the question is whether it can bite and whether you should worry. The honest answer is that crickets are about as harmless as a house pest gets. They can technically bite, but their jaws rarely break human
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\ \ \ You found a cricket in the basement or heard one chirping behind the baseboard, and the first question is simple: what kind is it, and is this a house problem or a yard one. The fastest tell is the body shape and the wings. House and field crickets are the familiar brown-to-black
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n n n You found a cricket indoors and the first question is which one, because the answer changes how worried you should be and what you do next. The short version: a chirp and a pair of wings mean a house cricket; a humped back with no wings and no sound means a camel
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\ \ \ A single chirping cricket somewhere in the house is maddening because the chirp seems to move around and stops the instant you walk toward it, and that is not your imagination. The cricket feels the vibration of your footsteps and goes silent, then starts up again in what sounds like a different
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If camel crickets are springing at you every time you go down to the basement, the good news is that you do not have a true infestation, you have a moisture problem. Camel crickets, the humpbacked spider crickets that jump when startled, only thrive where it is dark and damp, so the real cure is
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If you keep finding crickets indoors, the thing to understand is where they are coming from. Crickets in the house are almost always walking in from outside, pulled in by warmth, light, and moisture, so getting rid of them is really about closing the door and drying things out, not just squashing the ones you
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If a cricket repellent or bait is on your shopping list, here is the honest framing first: these two work on crickets from angles a spray never touches. A repellent makes a basement or garage surface unappealing so crickets move along, and a granular bait scattered around the foundation gets eaten and thins the population
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