Cockroaches live wherever they find warmth, food, moisture and shelter. Houses, apartments, restaurants, shops, warehouses, bakeries, slaughterhouses, canning factories, dairies, food product manufacturing facilities, public buildings, hospitals, ships and rubbish tips they like all sorts of environments.

Their unpleasant odour, along with their habit of walking on food and soiling it, make them undesirable. Moreover, they can carry disease.

Reproduction

The cockroach is born in an egg case called an "ootheca". The female cockroach does not sit on the eggs until they hatch. She drags her ootheca behind her, attached to the abdomen. Each egg case contains 30 to 40 nymphs that do not hatch out until 10 weeks after being laid.

Between the laying and hatching stages, the nymphs are protected by the ootheca shell, so they are protected from any insecticide that might be sprayed.

Where are the eggs laid? Never in areas where cockroaches congregate. Always in places that are quiet, inaccessible if possible and ideally dark and damp. Human beings often create inaccessible laying sites without being aware of it.

Feeding habits

Cockroaches avoid bright light and go out to hunt after nightfall. They run very quickly, and some species can even fly. They are particularly attracted to meat, dairy products and sweet and starchy foods, but they will settle for vegetables, fruits, leather, fabric, cardboard, living or dead insects, hair and paper, particularly if coated with glue or paste. Not only do they eat our food, they soil it with their excrement and a foul-smelling dark liquid they secrete from their mouths. Cockroach-soiled dishes can alter the taste of hot foods. Cockroaches enter buidings either by flying or crawling through very small openings. A single female or even an egg case hidden in packaging is enough to infest an entire building.

Multiplication

A period of eight months elapses between the time a cockroach is born until it reaches adulthood. A period of eight months elapses between the time a cockroach reaches adulthood and dies a natural death. During the adult stage, the female lays an ootheca every month, that is, a total of eight eggs. She gives birth to 240 direct descendants (30 larvae x eight months).

So all it takes for a residence to suffer from an infestation is for a pregnant cockroach or a couple of cockroaches to enter a home inadvertently.

Small in number and size to start with, the direct descendants of ten remain invisible. Yet it is precisely at this moment that steps have to be taken to stop the cockroaches from reproducing !

By the eighth month, the 30 new-borns (15 couples) have become adults and in turn start to lay eggs, once a month. By the ninth month, the 15 second-born couples follow the same pattern and so it goes on.

The reproduction process becomes exponential and if nothing is done to stop it, the infested site will be home to 1,250,000 cockroaches at the end of 24 months...