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Hello, Ben here with Ben’s pest control and it’s time for another one of our Ben’s pest control podcasts. And as most of you if you follow along know, I like to do episodes on things that we’re seeing on a regular basis. And today is no different lately, it seems we’ve had a lot of calls from people who have roaches in their cars. And it has been actually quite a few. And what people need to know is that, yes, even though they’re used to seeing roaches in houses and apartments and restaurants, and businesses, roaches can get in and thrive in a car. So what I want to go over is just kind of the two different scenarios that I’ve seen. I had one car that is actually a truck, and the owner of the truck, they have a business and it seems that they had been towing some or hauling some, what I believe they said was dirt bikes. And one of the dirt bikes had bumped into the front of the truck and actually broken the light on the top of the cab, and they decided that they were going to fix it by just putting duct tape over that area. But they do believe over time that moisture had gotten into that light and that even though they duct taped it, that wasn’t adequate enough to keep the water out of that area. So what happened is as the truck stayed parked over time, moisture was getting into the cab of the truck and then roaches got in because it was a nice place to live, it was protected by things outside and they had moisture getting in. So it was a dark wet area that they just found completely acceptable to move in. And when we’re talking roaches what most people would call Palmetto bugs, and Florida, the larger roaches, your American roaches, your Australian roaches, some cases, your brown banded roaches, that’s what they got into the truck. And it wasn’t the German roaches that a lot of people get in their vehicles, but in this case, it was the larger roaches. And the lady who contacted us was telling us that she had given the truck to her nephew, and that the nephew had lost his vehicle due to a bad accident and that one day he was driving down the road and one of the roaches ran right across the ceiling and almost caused them to have another accident. So this is an example of one type of Roach that we can see in cars. And we were able to go in and treat the vehicle with bait and hopefully get them their car back and and usable. But I did have to explain to them that they still needed to fix the light on the back of the cab because as long as moisture was getting in, you would continue to have an environment that was conducive for the roaches. Now what we normally see and the roach that’s a bigger problem are the German roaches. The German roaches are the infesting roaches, the ones that a lot of people fear. And we had one person who called us up and said that her car was infested with roaches and the car had been used by a friend of hers. And her friend had been a young mother with a baby and that when she came back when this gal came back from college, the car was just infested with the roaches, and blue what I believe happened was that her friend probably had a roach problem in her house. And that over time the roaches tagged along whether on the car seat or something that she brought out of the house, whether it was snacks or our food drink, and they got into the car and they got established and they survived very well in the car. And so that was another situation we had seen recently, we had another one where the gentleman had a car that he was fixing up but it was pretty much just kind of storage, there was a lot of garbage in the car, food, clothing, and the roaches got in they they thrived in that environment. And they did extremely well. So it was a situation where in his case the car was more of a I mean, I call it storage but there was a lot of stuff in there that people probably would have just thrown out. And in this case that opportunity that environment was was very conducive. And then we had another gentleman who had a work van that was infested with roaches and what he believed as he stopped at a restaurant, he picked up some food, put it in his vehicle, went back to work left the food in his vehicle and by the time he came back out his work van was It is just starting to see more and more roaches and they were breeding in the van and, and even though his van was clean, he, he saw a lot of roaches over a long period of time and got to the point where he didn’t want to deal with that anymore. He didn’t want to have to worry about it. So he came to us to get the van treated. Now one of the things I would tell you, no matter which situation we’re talking about with these three vehicles, what I would tell you is this, all living creatures need food, water and shelter. I’ve said that many times on different episodes. So understand that the car is going to provide shelter no matter what. And if the car gets run a lot, you can get moisture from the condensation just from the AC running. I mean, most people realize that in summer when they move their car after it’s been parked, there are puddles that are underneath, and that moisture actually comes from inside where the cooling unit is for the AC. And that’s that’s an opportunity for them to get get water. So the only thing they’re missing is food. So what I would tell you is this, if you are trying to control roaches in a vehicle, the first thing you need to do is control the two of the three things that you can control the food and the moisture and the water and the drinks. And when I say that, obviously, if a car is running, you might not be able to control the air conditioning. But if you leave soda cups in there, if you leave drinks in there, if you leave food in there, no matter what you what you do that can support those lifes of those roaches, the lives of those roaches Forgive me, you are making it easier for them to survive and more likely that they will survive. So when you remove any of that stuff in every situation that we’ve had come up, we had to tell people listen, get all the food out, get the drinks out, and then clean out the car. I mean, we can’t treat cars that have a ton of personal belongings and so the cars needed to be cleaned out. And then we could proceed with treatment. And depending on the vehicle, we may have to put out baits because they’re they’re more likely to be okay around electronic components. In some cases where the cars had nothing electrical, we were able to at least spray the floors and do a treatment in that regard. But you definitely have to watch what goes in and out of your vehicle. And there are things that people can pick up that can have the roaches and then once you get them access to the vehicle, you’re opening up the door to possibly get an infestation. And the last thing anybody wants is to be driving down the road and have something jump out at them or end up running on them and possibly causing a severe accident. So if you think your vehicle has a roach problem and you’d like us to inspect it, please give us a call at 772-878-1972 thank you and have a great day
