The German cockroach is one of the most “iconic” pests in the US. This cockroach, which originated from Asia, is known to spread dangerous diseases and trigger allergies and asthma reactions. Difficult to eradicate when it infests a single home, the German cockroach becomes a much larger problem when it infests a building with multiple residences, such as an apartment building.
Integrated Pest Management
When a large apartment building is infested, integrated pest management or IPM methods need to be applied, and in order to do this, the pest control specialist must understand how these insects congregate inside and between buildings. For starters, once roaches enter an apartment building, they will usually disperse within, but not traverse to a different building. They also tend to nest in kitchen areas, and if pesticides are applied in one apartment, but not in another, the roaches will simply move their nests to locations that do not have pesticides in them.
Infestation patterns in large apartment buildings
Roaches have an infestation pattern where they nest in apartments that share at least one wall. So if you have an infestation in an apartment building, odds are that so do some of your neighbors. This makes pest control a much more intensive process and it gives it a much larger scope. Think of this infestation pattern as radiating from a central point, where you have a heavy infestation in a number of core apartments, and as the distance grows from these apartments, the intensity of the infestation is lowered.
As such, in order to properly implement IPM for a large apartment building, pest control methods have to target all the apartments that have been infected. On top of that, measures should be set in place in order to prevent large scale infestations from recurring. These measures can take the form of programs that help spread instructions on how to keep the apartment clean, how to store food and how to keep clutter to a minimum in order to avoid infestations.
How effective is IPM long term?
Large apartment buildings are hard to keep pest free because of frequent resident turnover and the tolerance that some residents may have for cockroaches. Reinfestation is likely to occur. However, the frequency and intensity of infestations can be minimized using IPM and implementing regular building-wide pest control measures. For a smaller apartment building, the frequency of reinfestation can be even lower. If you are a building administrator and you have a cockroach problem, contact us today and we can help you set up a plan that will get the infestation under control.
Tags: Cockroach Control, Cockroach Extemrinator, Get rid of cockroaches
