Group cockroaches concerts. How long do domestic cockroaches live without food and water

Of course, let's start with the simple truths "Cleanliness is the key to health" and "Clean not where they clean, but where they don't litter."

Neatly tidied dwellings, where crumbs do not lie on the floor, and a mountain does not grow in the sink dirty dishes, for cockroaches are not of interest.

However, their hordes can attack the homes of even the cleanest people.

There are many reasons for this - garbage chutes in high-rise buildings, unsanitary conditions in the entrances, sloppy neighbors.

A couple of insects are easier than ever to bring along with a cardboard package from the hardware store.

And with what speed they will begin to multiply in an ideal habitat, everyone knows.

We figure out how to deal with cockroaches at home and prevent them from reappearing.

How to deal with cockroaches in an apartment at home on your own

They say that cockroaches came to earth before dinosaurs.

Their ability to adapt and develop immunity to poison is amazing.

Once in our apartments, they become carriers of infection, their numbers are growing at a catastrophic rate, however, like all living things, cockroaches need water and food to live.

It is from the overlapping of the sources of both that and the other that the fight against uninvited guests should begin.

Therefore, before running to the store for traps, do at home general cleaning, close up all holes and cracks in the floor and walls, clean the baseboards, then seal them.

Get in the habit of washing dishes immediately after eating and avoid leaving food and open containers of water on the table overnight.

Start the fight against insects with wet cleaning

Then proceed to use heavy artillery - chemical, physical and folk ways defeat the mustachioed army.

Let's consider everything in order.

Chemical insecticides

These include:

Gels- funds are recognized as the most popular in the fight against insects. This is due not only to their affordable price, but also safety - the drugs are applied in the form of drops in places where cockroaches accumulate, after which they die within a few weeks.

Gels are harmless to the inhabitants of the apartment, including pets. One drop of the substance, according to the manufacturers, can destroy up to five hundred cockroaches.

Aerosols- allow you to quickly apply the product on a large surface and get rid of insects within a few hours.

Aerosols have a prolonged action, thanks to which they effectively prevent the emergence of a new army long time after her disappearance.

The most effective methods of control are chemical

Powder products- effective, but delay the onset of the result.

The pencils- crayons with the unjustified name "Mashenka" have been guarding the fight against cockroaches for decades.

Their plus is low cost, minus is the need to scrupulously process habitats.

Traps and special housesare boxes with sticky walls or a special poison inside.

Crawling inside, cockroaches either stick or carry on themselves and infect their relatives. Sticky traps - effective physical means pest control.

If cockroaches visit your home regularly, it is important to periodically change the gels and powders to others, as insects gradually develop immunity to them.

Tip: applying chemicals pest control, it is worth remembering the observance of safety measures. Carefully read the instructions on the package, carefully apply on surfaces in case pets live in the apartment.

Folk remedies

There is a mass folk recipes getting rid of hordes of insects.

Boric acid from cockroaches

The most popular are the following:

1. Turpentine
2. Boric acid
3. Bura
4. Vinegar
5. ammonium chloride
6. Alcohol
7. Kerosene

Their action, as a rule, is less extensive in comparison with chemical methods fight.

Boric acid- for cockroaches, a real nerve agent that causes intoxication and paralysis.

In order for the case to end in death, the cockroach must eat poison, which is why it has no color and smell boric acid mixed with food and laid out in insect habitats.

It is combined in equal proportions with flour, water and sugar, bait balls are rolled from the “dough”. The product is safe for children and animals.

How to make your own insect trap

Tip: You can use the yolk of a hard-boiled egg to make boron bait.

Bura- This mineral substance similarly to boric acid, it will not harm households, but it will be poisonous to insects.

200 grams of borax is mixed with starch and powdered sugar (60 g each) and 30 grams of vanilla sugar, after which water is gradually poured in until the consistency of a paste.

Tip: sprinkle dry boric acid in places where insects accumulate. Running along it, insects will clean their paws with their jaws, eat poison and die. It is unlikely that it will be completely possible to get rid of them in this way, but in combination with other methods, the measure is effective.

Vinegar, ammonia and other liquids with bright bad smell will also help you in the fight against the invasion.

In horror, cockroaches scatter from the "aroma"turpentine.

But if you just wash the floor with it, your loved ones will experience similar sensations.

That is why it is better not to experiment with outdated products that can harm the health of your family members and pets.

Liquids with an active odor are effective against cockroaches

Purified kerosene- one of the most effective folk remedies against insects.

With a brush dipped in liquid, their habitats, sinks, baseboards, corners, etc. are carefully smeared.

After a couple of days, the pungent smell drives away cockroaches for a long time, but using such drastic measures, all households must be moved out of the apartment.

After processing, you need to arrange a long ventilation of the room and wet cleaning.

Plaster and alabaster- getting into the stomach of a cockroach, the substances freeze, which leads to the death of the insect.

However, to get him to eat the bait, you will need a lot of cunning. Gypsum and alabaster are mixed with water, boiled eggs, sugar, flour and potatoes.

Some will help resist the invasion , whose active smell repels insects.

Dried bouquets are hung around the perimeter of the kitchen, near ventilation and in places where pests can crawl.

Kerosene is considered one of the most radical methods of dealing with cockroaches.

These plants include:

1. Eucalyptus
2. wild rosemary
3. Elder
4. Melissa
5. Mint
6. Chamomile

Tip: chamomile is used as a crushed powder from dried flowers; they are a potent poison for insects.

As an alternative to plants, you can use similar ones.

A few drops are applied in places where pests accumulate. If processing of a large room is necessary, add to the water.

There are ultrasonic insect repellers on the market, but their effectiveness is controversial.

Freezing the premises

Another working, according to reviews, is a way to deal with cockroaches in an apartment at home.

And if the methods described above kill insects partially and gradually, then low temperatures lead to the death of all and immediately, including the larvae.

Temperatures below minus eight degrees are deadly for cockroaches, but it can only be organized in winter.

To do this, it is enough to open windows and doors for a long time and leave the room.

Do not forget that the cunning tenants of your kitchen can hide in the cracks to wait out the cold season - take care of the tightness of skirting boards, floors, sinks, etc. in advance.

To consolidate the result, repeat the procedure a couple more times with an interval of five days.

Be sure to take care of additional insulation of heating and water supply systems to avoid damage to pipes.

The easiest way is to call a special service and let it do its job.

Professional processing of the premises

It is customary to call the sanitary and epidemiological service when one's own patience and strength are running out, while this method can be safely called the fastest, most reliable and effective.

In the arsenal of employees of specialized enterprises there are a lot of means that are safe for people and animals, allowing you to quickly rid your home of baleen with a guarantee of their long-term non-return.

The main limiting factor is the relatively high cost of processing. For pest control small apartment you have to pay about fifty dollars, but the result, of course, is worth it.

Find out one more effective method you can fight cockroaches from the video below:

Almost all of us have seen a cockroach at least once in our lives. These creepy baleen insects have been able to survive for almost 300 million years, no matter how dire the conditions were. Maybe people are not as perfect as these creatures?

Quite a funny but true fact: American cockroaches are very fond of booze.

As strange as it may sound, they seem to have taken a liking to alcohol. Despite the fact that they like to live in places where complete unsanitary conditions reign, a glass of booze is smelled everywhere.

They can live for weeks without a head

Cockroaches have segmented bodies with small holes that allow them to take in oxygen. In other words, they don't need a head to breathe. But after a while they die of dehydration. Other vital organs are located in their abdomen, and this does not prevent them from living without a head for some time.

A cockroach can hold its breath for 40 minutes

They can live without food for about a month, their metabolism just slows down. But water is the main ingredient for them to survive. Therefore, they know how to hold their breath in order to be able to control fluid loss.

Insects can live in tighter spaces than their own bodies

Cockroaches are thixotropic. This means that they feel hard surfaces bodies. This allows them to crawl into narrow places and live there.

In many countries, cockroaches are consumed as a delicacy and there are even farms to grow them.

The growing demand for cockroaches in China has attracted investors to create special farms. In addition, the granular form of insects is used by the cosmetics industry.

cockroach eating contests

In the US, winner Edward Archibold died immediately after the contest in 2012. Some say he suffocated, others believe he was allergic to insects.

They can also eat your food!

Cockroaches are omnivores. They can digest paper, cloth, soap, wood, meat, and starchy desserts in their stomachs. They also love beer.

Insects can tolerate high levels of radiation

One of the reasons cockroaches have managed to survive for 300 million years is because they have incredible self-preservation skills. Scientists believe that this power is due to the slow cell cycle.

They live in groups

If you meet a cockroach, you should know that he is not alone in the house. They communicate with each other using pheromones that they release from their bodies. This chemical bond activated, especially when they approach food.

For some females, one intercourse is enough to reproduce on their own for the rest of their lives.

females can long time store a sufficient amount of sperm after one intercourse. Moreover, it is believed that some of them can reproduce on their own even in very difficult conditions.

Some people keep them as pets.

Since they are unpretentious and silent creatures, cockroaches are ideal pets. In addition, they eat almost everything, so there is no need to worry about what to feed them. But nevertheless, before breeding them, it is worth thinking about the fact that they can be carriers of various infections.

There are bacteria inside their bodies

These bacteria are passed from mother to larvae. Bacteria inhabit the adipose tissue of cockroaches and provide them with vital amino acids and vitamins.

They can travel at over 4.82 km per hour

Cockroaches sense changes in airflow thanks to tiny hairs on their bodies and flee instantly. Their legs move at a speed of 27 steps per second.

They are older than dinosaurs

Modern cockroaches first appeared 200 billion years ago, and primitive creatures are thought to have appeared 300 billion years ago. That is, they lived before the dinosaurs appeared in the Jurassic period, and they still exist!

A cockroach ... The word itself evokes not the most pleasant associations for most people, not to mention the sight of a Prusak crawling on a wall or table, when it appears, as a rule, the first thing you want to do is immediately take off your slippers and slam a nasty insect. However, it must be admitted that cockroaches are very interesting creatures having ancient history and distinguished at the same time by almost incredible abilities that help them survive in almost any extreme conditions. What are these abilities? This is what we will talk about today.

Description of the insect

It is perhaps difficult to find a person who does not know what an ordinary domestic cockroach looks like. Even if fate saved someone from personal acquaintance with these insects, then, probably, everyone in childhood read the fairy tale "Cockroach" or watched a cartoon based on it.

So, what does an ordinary domestic cockroach look like and what is it? First of all, a cockroach is an insect belonging to the order of cockroaches. In addition to it, termites also belong to the same detachment, and in total there are more than 7570 species in it. Moreover, there are more than 4640 species of real cockroaches in it.


The largest cockroaches in the world live in Colombia and reach a length of 97 mm and a width of 45 mm. These giants crawl faster than all insects - at a speed of over 4 km / h.

Three hundred million years ago, cockroaches already lived on our planet. They crawled among the giant horsetails and club mosses of the Carboniferous, and now some of these unimaginably ancient creatures live next to people.


During the day they hide in crevices, and at night they crawl out for their prey - bread crumbs, kitchen waste, not necessarily fresh. They can gnaw for lack of a better dry rag, shoe cream, drink ink. Like their relatives, the termites, they have protozoa in their intestines that help them digest this non-nutritious food.

Types of cockroaches

The most common “lodgers” in human housing are the red cockroach (Prussian) and the black cockroach, whose population had greatly thinned by the beginning of the 21st century.

red cockroach

Also known as Prussian. This insect got its middle name because in Russia it was considered a native of Prussia, which is not at all true. In fact, the homeland of red cockroaches is not Germany or even Europe, but ... south Asia. It was from there that this insect came to European countries in the 18th century and, having chosen human dwellings as its habitat, began to actively multiply, so much so that it soon pushed its main “competitor” - the black cockroach.

The body length of an adult is from 1 to 1.6 cm. Both males and females of this species have very well developed wings, thanks to which cockroaches can plan, although they cannot really fly.


The body of males is narrower than that of females, and the wings of males do not cover the last segments of the abdomen. The color of the red cockroach, strictly speaking, is not quite red, but rather the most brownish. different shades sometimes they can even be almost black.

The Prussians are omnivorous: in addition to the “traditional” cockroach food - the remains of human food, they can eat paper, leather, textiles, wood glue, they will not even refuse ordinary soap if they don’t come across any other food. But their most favorite delicacies are bread, pastries, as well as sugar and various sweets. The cockroach does not disdain meat or porridge, but he does not like fruits too much, although he eats them if there is nothing else from the products, while the freshness and quality of the fruit do not worry him too much.

Black beetle

Now it is not such a frequent guest in our homes, but in the past it was very common. Noticeably larger than a red cockroach: the length of an adult insect can be from 2 to 8 cm. The color is either black-brown or tar-brown with a pronounced metallic sheen. The wings of males of this species are longer than those of females, but black cockroaches cannot fly or even plan. But they run very fast. So fast that before you have time to look back, he’s already gone.

IT IS INTERESTING! In Germany and the Czech Republic, black cockroaches are called "Swabians", as they believe that these insects were brought from Swabia, a region in southern Germany.

Life stages of a cockroach

Cockroaches are characterized by an incomplete development cycle, which includes the following phases of insect maturation:

• larva or otherwise nymph
• adult or adult

The life of a young cockroach begins, as they would say in Ancient Rome, "ab ovo", that is, from an egg. It is from it that the larva hatches, differing from its parents only in size and color, or rather in its absence, since newborn cockroaches are born white due to the fact that they do not yet have a chitinous cover.


In total, the female cockroach lays 20-30, and sometimes up to 50 eggs and bears them in a special ootheca capsule located at the end of the abdomen, while she herself can regulate the number of offspring, so sometimes the number of eggs laid differs sharply from the number of hatched cockroaches. By the way, they, albeit rarely, but there are cases of the appearance of twins, when two larvae develop in one egg. The "pregnancy" of the cockroach lasts from 2 to 4 weeks, after which it leaves the ootheca somewhere in a secluded, damp place. And then for 2 weeks she looks after her offspring, who have not yet had time to acquire chitinous “fur coats” and are therefore very vulnerable.

IT IS INTERESTING! It happens that when adverse conditions the female cockroach has a "miscarriage": she sheds the oocyst ahead of schedule. In this case, her offspring either die or hatch underdeveloped.

Newborn larvae have White color, but after a few days they darken noticeably, and the cover of their body becomes hard. Now, in order to grow, the insect is often forced to shed its chitinous “skin”, this process is called molting, and on average, a cockroach molts 6 to 10 times in its life. In the warm season, cockroaches become adults in 2 months, but with a noticeable decrease in temperature, this process can take up to 6 months.

After the last, no matter what the molt, the insect stops growing and turns from a larva into an adult. Which, having given birth to numerous offspring, will either leave this world in due time, or in the wrong time - having ended its days under the sole of a slipper or having swallowed some kind of poison.

How long can they exist

If we do not consider the unfavorable course of events, when the untimely end of a cockroach's life comes for reasons completely independent of the insect - whether it be the notorious slipper, poison, or some predator, such as a toad, a bird, or even an ordinary cat who decided to dine with our barbel , then these insects live for quite a long time - at least 7-9 months after reaching sexual maturity.

IT IS INTERESTING! The lifespan of each subsequent generation of cockroaches in a single house or apartment is longer than the lifespan of their predecessors and can be a maximum of 4 years.

How long can a cockroach live without food and water?

Like any living creature, a cockroach cannot do without water and food. And, if you find that he is almost always able to “chew”, then, being far from water sources, the insect is probably doomed to death.


But why is water so important to a cockroach? It turns out she has importance for its thermoregulation. If the cockroach overheats, then the surface of its chitinous cover will be covered with moisture evaporated by the body. If there is nowhere to replenish water supplies, then the insect will die in 7 days literally drying up. High humidity air and coolness will somewhat slow down this process, but not for long.

IMPORTANT! When fighting cockroaches, the main thing is to deprive them of access to water and to those products from which they could receive moisture, then they will not have a single chance of survival.

As for food, it is not so important for cockroaches, since they are cold-blooded creatures and not very active. Even if they are completely deprived of food, they will simply hide somewhere in a secluded place and wait there until the conditions become more favorable for their existence. However, sooner or later, without food, they will die. Only this will not happen very soon - about 50 days after the start of a total hunger strike.

How fast does a headless cockroach die?

A cockroach that has lost its head does not die immediately, but after 9 days. At first glance, it seems incredible that a headless creature can live so long. However, such an incredible vitality of cockroaches is explained by the fact that they have an open circulation cycle, and therefore death from blood loss is clearly not threatened even in this case. The fact that nerve endings are literally everywhere in their body contributes to the preservation of motor reflexes and, as a result, the continuation of life.

In the end, the cockroach, left without a head, will die, but this will only happen due to the lack of water and food, since it simply cannot eat or drink.

IT IS INTERESTING! Not only a cockroach that has lost its head can live for a few more days after that, but a head that has been left without a cockroach can also survive for quite a long time. To do this, it is enough to place it in a cool place and feed it with a special solution.

The life of cockroaches in other extreme conditions

Radiation

The assertion that cockroaches can live in places with any level of radiation without harm to themselves can be considered controversial. Yes, of course, these insects are incredibly tenacious and adapted to any, it would seem, the most unfavorable conditions.

However, with very strong radiation, cockroaches will certainly die. Another thing is that the safe dose of radiation that they can endure without harm to themselves is quite large. It exceeds 15 times the maximum allowable dose for humans.

Low temperatures

It is they who are " Achilles heel» of these nearly indestructible creatures. It would seem that they should not care about frost, but no! Already at a temperature of -5 °, cockroaches die. This is due to their cold-bloodedness, which, being incredibly useful in the absence or lack of food, in this case plays a bad joke on them, lowering the resistance of cockroaches to temperature extremes.

IT IS INTERESTING! All insects of the Cockroach order can live either in a heated dwelling or in a tropical climate.

As you can see, cockroaches are incredibly tenacious creatures, but still they are not immortal. These insects can easily endure a long hunger strike and a lethal dose of radiation for humans, and even, left without a head, they will live for several more days. But at the same time, they do not tolerate low temperatures at all, and even without water they die quite quickly. These two unbearable conditions should be of help in the fight against cockroaches. Well, in combination with pesticides or mechanical traps, they will not leave them a single chance of survival at all.