While German cockroaches are known to be the most common of indoor cockroach pests, one the more difficult cockroach pests to detect and control is the brown-banded cockroach. While most cockroaches seek out moisture when looking for indoor harborages, such as German cockroaches, brown-banded cockroaches are one of the few species that can not only tolerate, but prefer warm, high, dry areas. This makes locating and controlling their infestations much more challenging.

Brown-banded cockroaches are dark brown in color, with two light colored horizontal bands stretching across its wings and abdomen, and around ½ inch in length. Their preference for dry areas greatly increases the number of possible hiding spots throughout the house. Other indoor cockroach pests such as German and American cockroaches need more moisture heavy environments, and are most often located by a moisture source such as the kitchen sink. Brown-banded cockroaches, on the other hand, can be found in any part of any room in a home, including on the wall behind pictures, inside closets, behind dressers, near tables and chairs, as well as typical locations like inside the pantry or the bathroom. The brown-banded cockroach is sometimes referred to as the “furniture cockroach” because they can be easily introduced to a home through transported furniture and other items newly brought into a home from some other location.

Like all other cockroaches, brown-banded cockroaches are attracted to check out an area that has food they can consume. While brown-banded cockroaches can eat pretty much anything they can find, what makes them unique is their preference for starchy items, including in particular glue used to bind books, wallpaper, and furniture. This broad diet and decrease in environmental restrictions makes this cockroach pest difficult to just to locate let alone eradicate.

Using baiting systems to control brown-banded cockroaches seems to work better and have a number of advantages over other methods. The best way to go about this is by using glue traps first to assess the number of cockroaches present in different areas of the house, helping you locate the best areas to place the bait traps and how much bait you will need to use. A small amount of bait can actually have a significant impact on a cockroach infestation because of a phenomenon known as horizontal transfer. Even after one cockroach consumes the bait, many more cockroaches can be poisoned when another cockroach consumes that first cockroach’s feces, exchanges oral secretions, or the dead carcass of the poisoned cockroach is eaten by other cockroaches. Baits can still take time to work, though, and seeing a significant drop in numbers does not happen instantly.

Have you ever dealt with an infestation of brown-banded cockroaches in your home?