It's disturbing to think about bugs crawling on your food and kitchen countertops while you sleep. However, your kitchen is a perfect habitat for a variety of house pests. Your kitchen provides dark hiding places in cabinets, food from crumbs and food in loose packaging, and even water from under the refrigerator or the sink. Here's a look at some common kitchen pests and how to prevent and eliminate them.
Pantry Pests
Moths, beetles, and weevils come home in food packaging and food you buy in bulk bins. These pests can ruin grains, flour, cereal, and other boxed and sacked foods. Pantry pests can be eliminated and kept at bay with regular pest control treatments.
It can be difficult to keep them away entirely since you pack them home from the grocery store, but one thing you can do is keep your food sealed and your cabinets free from crumbs so the pests can't get easy meals and multiply.
Roaches
Unlike pantry pests that usually stay out of sight while they eat your food, roaches scurry across your counters, sink, and floor. The sight of roaches in your kitchen is unnerving since the insects are unsanitary and spread germs.
Roaches are attracted to food like many other kitchen pests, but they're also attracted to dampness. If you have a drip under your kitchen sink, you might be attracting roaches.
You can carry roaches home from the store too, but roaches often come in from outside. You can prevent roaches by keeping your kitchen clean and dry, and by sealing around your kitchen door and windows so roaches can't get inside. By having regular pest control services, you can kill off roaches that get indoors so they don't multiply.
Ants
Ants may not be as disgusting as roaches, but they can certainly be annoying. When you kill ants you see marching across your kitchen floor, it seems like more and more take their place. Ants usually come in from outside, so the best way to deal with them is to block them by sealing up gaps around the walls and door.
You may also need to remove pet food from the floor that sends out enticing odors. Ants can be difficult to eradicate since they live in large colonies. A pest control service may use bait that foraging ants carry back to the colony to kill them all off.
While these are some of the common pests you might encounter when you flip on the light in your kitchen or open a cabinet door, there could be others that invade if the environment is just right. When you're having trouble with kitchen bugs, call a pest control service for treatments that get rid of the insects and that helps keep them from coming back.