Have you ever had problems with bugs in your home? / LJWorld.com

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Asked at Massachusetts Street on April 25, 2008

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“We have an abundance of lady bugs, but we’re counting them as good luck.”

— Becky Baldwin, sales engineer, Lawrence

“Yeah, silverfish, crickets, spiders and other things that fly in.”

— Luc Alvarez, Kansas University sophomore, Lawrence

“Ants. This time of year they like to creep in through the cracks and find their way inside.”

— Tristan Smith, visitor services director at the Natural History Museum, Lawrence

“I’ve had some ant issues. I try to keep it as nontoxic as possible because of my cats, so I tried the all-natural approach and vacuumed them all up in their little marching lines.”

— Lora Powell, stage manager, Mission Viego, Calif.

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snap_pop_no_crackle 5 years, 1 month ago

Volkswagens should be kept outdoors.

sgtwolverine 5 years, 1 month ago

Nope. I've never said anything worth listening in on. But I suppose there could be electronic eavesdropping equipment that I haven't yet found...Yeah, I took the obvious route with this question; somebody had to use it. I was actually hoping one of the respondents would misinterpret the question and start talking about electronic eavesdropping, but I guess that was too much to hope for.

farmgal 5 years, 1 month ago

"We have an abundance of lady bugs, but we're counting them as good luck"Those aren't lady bugs. Lady bugs are red with black dots. The orangeish ones are Asian beetles. They don't really "harm" anything inside your house, other than they really bother a lot of people's allergies.

RETICENT_IRREVERENT 5 years, 1 month ago

sgt,I have an inkling that the respondents on the street may be getting the benefit of the "back-story" when they are asked the question. Of course some may choose to answer a question about participating in a demolition derby with a story about husband and wife sidecar motorcycle racing.Are you just sweeping for RF and low frequency microwave bugs with a omni-spectral correlator? You should consider adding a high frequency microwave downconverter to your equipment as a lot of the newer bugs are operating in the 3 - 21 ghz range. You still have to worry about those pesky infrared light beam carrier bugs. And then there is the issue of securing your WOPR computer. Just playing a game could be dangerous.

trinity 5 years, 1 month ago

cornmeal for ants. works like you wouldn't believe! i just put a teaspoon here&there on my kitchen counters, and within a few days the lil' buggers are gone gone gone. my kids think i'm nuts for having these little cornmeal pyramids-but i don't have any ants! :)lived in an old old house for a long time; bugs were just part of the deal.

RETICENT_IRREVERENT 5 years, 1 month ago

blue,Think of it this way...Termites are capable of producing up to two liters of hydrogen from fermenting a single sheet of paper, making them one of the planet's most efficient bioreactors. You are sitting on a potential gold mine. Just convert the Escape to hydrogen and you never have to shell out another cent for fossil fuel.

OldEnuf2BYurDad 5 years, 1 month ago

"so I tried the all-natural approach and vacuumed them all up in their little marching lines"Sorry, but that's a waste of time. She's fighting a land war in Asia.

OnlyTheOne 5 years, 1 month ago

OldEnuf2BYurDad (Anonymous) says: She's fighting a land war in Asia.OH NO! I certainly hope this doesn't give Bush more ideas!

snap_pop_no_crackle 5 years, 1 month ago

Bugs? No problem. Don't get me started about Daffy, though.

acg 5 years, 1 month ago

Our son brought home this awful flea-ridden cat last summer and wanted to adopt it. He hid it in the basement for two days and fed it gerbil food and stuff he stole out of the fridge before my husband and I realized that we had this cat. My hubby took the cat to the humane society and our house was infested with fleas. The cat was never even in the upstairs floors but still, the whole house had fleas. I had never seen anything like it, it was crazy how many fleas came off this stupid cat. We bombed three times and then they all went to the basement. We had to cover the entire basement floor with diatamacious earth for a month before it finally killed them all off. I was so aggravated. We also have a recluse problem. And they're huge. I don't know if it's because we live out by the lake, or what, but they're freakishly radiation poisoning big. I have pics of spiders I've taken where the body of the thing is as big as a quarter. It gives me the willies.

sgtwolverine 5 years, 1 month ago

Don't worry, R_I: I have a shorcut to tic-tac-toe on my desktop.

Dejacrew423 5 years, 1 month ago

We used to live in an old farmhouse in the country that has been remodeled and we had the biggest brown hairy spiders I'd ever seen. Some had legs the size of the middle parts of Q-tips. Plus we'd always get black snakes in our yard or mud room when they mowed the fields near our house. I felt like a prisoner in that house. To this day I refuse to buy a fixer upper because I'm afraid that it'll be infested with something.

sunflower_sue 5 years, 1 month ago

ACG, we have the recluse spiders, too. They keep themselves to the basement and have not bitten anyone...yet...so I just let them be. Pretty impossible to kill off but you can put out sticky traps and just sweep up the other insects (as TOB mentioned) that is what they are eating, anyway. No food, they might go away, but more of their food just keeps coming in. Hint: put the sticky traps under a nightlight. It will attact the other bugs which will attract the recluse. Are you sure that the "body the size of a quarter" spiders aren't wolf spiders? They are hairy and get as big as tarantulas. We have those, too, but they pretty much stay outside, although occassionally one will wander in. Creepy!Mostly we have those tiny little ants that wander in in the spring. Terro knocks them out fast. And our garage is full of those nasty Asian beetles. It looks like a scene from "Beloved."

sunflower_sue 5 years, 1 month ago

Oh, and we have a trap-door buffalo infestation in the yard. We've tried to spray for them but their hooves make it impossible for their body to absorb the toxins. We really don't want to get that close to their dens to fume them for fear we might lose one of the children when we have them place the hose.

acg 5 years, 1 month ago

No, they're not wolf spiders. We get wolf spiders and those freak me out, too. I don't care for the fact that they're hairy. For some reason a hairy spider is just creepier to me than a smooth one. When we first moved here, my aunt told me about the recluses and she showed me the fiddle on their back and told me all about how the old timers call them fiddlebacks, etc. to prepare us for living around them so I always check for the markings before I kill it. I know, logically, that they're good for eating other bugs, but so are other spiders. So when I come across a recluse, I kill it. But other spiders get to live and are just taken outside. When we first bought our house, a recluse bit me on my inner thigh (it was in our bed) and that was a very unpleasant experience, not to mention gross.

sgtwolverine 5 years, 1 month ago

I sleep in the basement of an old farmhouse, and the miniature wildlife and I have an agreement: if they don't invade my bed, I'll leave them alone. Only once has a spider broken the agreement, and he paid for it; otherwise, they haven't bothered me, and I haven't bothered them.