creepy crawlies in my room..
 

Back in November my family moved into a new house, and wanting to be as far away from my parents as I could get, I got the basement, two whole floors away from them :D
The basement/my room has its own exit into the backyard where my mom has a little gardening project going on. Back in November before everything froze over, I saw a few bugs here and there, but nothing special..now that things are getting warm again, I'm a bit anxious that things might crawl into my room. Tonight I was watching TV and when I turned on the light I saw a 1-2 inches centipede/millipede-looking thing crawling through the middle of the floor..I obviously killed it immediately, and I know that they are not supposed to be dangerous to humans or anything, but I'm pretty reluctant to turn off the light right now..or ever; the thought of one of those crawling in bed with me while I'm sleeping is slightly disturbing..
Besides not leaving my door open so much, anyone have any suggestions for keeping them out/eradicating them? I could always spray some bug spray around the door, but is there any centipede/millipede specific advice I should follow? I'd appreciate any thoughts that would help me sleep better at night :o

< They're coming for you >

Check/replace the weatherstripping on the door for a start and make sure the foundation is sealed properly.

You should also rent:
Arachnophobia
Creepshow
Phenomena
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Jumanji (just for comic relief)
Them!
Slither
The Fly (1986 version)

Watch all the above in the basement with the lights out.

And read the classic Leiningen Versus the Ants

If that doesn't cure you, get some frogs.

Friend of mine in San Jose has an ant problem. As she said once, "For a brief but horrible moment the shower ran ants instead of water."

Did it look anything like this?




I'll admit they are big and freakishly fast but they are harmless (I think.. unless they crawl in your ear while you're sleeping and eat your brain :D)

Most bug are absolutely harmless. One of the best ways to keep too many from getting in your room is to leave certain of them alone.

As an example, when I lived in Missouri our house would routinely get 'bed bug' infestations. My siblings routinely would wake up with 3 or 4 bug bites, and the itchiness that was inherent in them. I never had a problem except on very rare occasions. My siblings would often ask how I did it, and I never really knew. I wasn't particularly resilient (as I found out the couple of times I did get bit), but I never woke up with bites all over me.

It took me a couple years to figure it out, but this takes a little back story. You see, I have a difficult time killing bugs. That's could be a whole side conversation but suffice it to say, I don't kill any bugs that I see in my room, ever. This included about 4 or 5 spiders that resided under my bed and in the corners of my room in Missouri. The spiders didn't bug me, and they weren't black widows (I put black widows outside) so I let them be.

Well, it turns out that the spiders were basically protecting my bedposts from bed bugs. I doubt they did it on purpose, but there you go. Perhaps it's Karma? I'm guessing it's mostly the food chain.

My main point is this: if you want to keep the bugs out that are going to make your life hard then learn to live with the spiders. So long as it's not poisonous, it's basically your best friend.

Indeed, leaving the spiders in your room is nature's way of solving a bug problem.

Aside from that, I have had pretty decent luck with some of those plug in pest control devices. Kind of like Glade plug-ins, but they don't make a smell. They just emit an ultra high frequency that apparently is quite annoying to bugs, and they generally stay away. Not 100% effective, but better than nothing. The frequency is higher than anything you will hear, but usually you will hear a little click as it turns on and off, which can be annoying until you get used to it.

http://www.gooddeals.com/category/23...epellents.aspx

Not sure about centipedes/millipedes but you can easily ward off ants with a row of copper coins.

I can disagree with spiders being in your room. I have got a few nasty spider bites while in my sleep in the past. One time by a brown recluse that left a necrosis scar on my right calf.

If you dig through the coat room I have a thread about the spider attacking me in my sleep.

Just for clarification, it has to be the right kind of spider. If it's likely to bit you, I'd probably just as soon put it outside.

considering my past epic battles with spiders while sleeping, I now keep spider repellent in my room at all times; and by spider repellent I mean one of these!

http://lionofjudah.squarespace.com/s...ide_saddle.jpg

good god... I wouldn't like to try and pick him up...

On that note... I did have a hornet in the house a few years back.... seriously... I was in the back room on the Mac and thought kids were riding up and down the street on a moped the sound was so loud....!
I hit it with a rolled up copy of MacWorld... and I swear I heard it say ouch!
It was so big you could see that it had knee caps and opposable thumbs!

I guess I've just been lucky not to have too bad of spiders. I lived in a similar situation as the OP, where I was the only person living in the basement. The screens didn't fit the windows, and bugs were easily getting in through the cracks and the mis-fit windows. I would kill every spider I saw, and two would replace it. But once I left the spiders alone, let them have their little corner behind the desk or whatever, they battled with the other bugs and spiders for their territory. I never really had a problem after that, once they established their little home, and I didn't have any more bug bites and didn't wake up with things crawling all over me.

Also, in my last apartment, I used to have things crawling all over me constantly. I know they weren't spiders, but various other creatures of the night... and I didn't have a single spider in my house. Kinda wish I did.

I am just glad I don't live in Australia, good god man, look at those bugs!

Although as far as I know none of our scorpions can kill you.

The giant brown and black thing pictured above is a house centipede - you want to keep them as they will do a great job eating anything else with 6 or more legs.

Is that some sort of weird irony since it seems like, you know, pretty much everything else can?

Your other arachnids can though, like the funnel spider...

I have to admit the first time I saw one shooting across the bedroom wall I felt like I'd been invaded by aliens or something. Seeing something as big as your hand with a buhjillion legs doesn't really warm the heart.

.
Aliens? I’m afraid we’re the intruders, my friend. Those little critters were here millions of years before we arrived -- and will be partying long after we are gone. :eek:
.

I liked this quote from David Attenborough in the BBC documentary about insects "Life in the Undergrowth":

"If we and the rest of the backboned animals were to disappear overnight, the rest of the world would get on pretty well. But if they were to disappear, the land's ecosystems would collapse."

wow haha, well my centipede wasn't quite that ugly, but I did get some bug spray around the door and over the past few days I've found several tiny shriveled up centipedes around the inside and outside of my door, so I guess its working :)

speaking of bug movies, slither is on right now, and im more grossed out then scared by it haha

You want bugs? Try South East Asia!

I had to sleep on the floor downstairs last June when I broke my ankle in 3 places trying to run UP the stairs. I was woken by a itchy feeling on my left shoulder. I turned and looked and it was an enormous roach. To say I hate roaches would be a gross understatement. Ever tried paincking with a busted ankle?

More recently, I had a nasty thing land on my head - looked like a cross between a roach (don't fly that well) and a praying mantis. Yuk! About 10 years ago (when I was my larger 138Kg self) I was stung on the head by an enormous hornet. I was only saved by my physical bulk. They can and do kill. Then there are very big centipedes that bite viciously - not as big as the Aussie one, I admit. Swarming red ants take your fancy? I was once on a golf course, just north of BKK and we came up to a tee-box, to be confronted by a quite bizarre sight. There was an expat, totally naked, about 200 yards down on the LHS of the fairway, being beaten with a towel by his caddy. Odd sexual pursuasions aside, it was difficult to comprehend what we were seeing. It turns out that he had hooked his ball left and it was under a tree. In his backswing, his club shattered a nest of large, angry red ants and they were all over him. Yuk!

For smaller bugs, get a few geckos in. They eat the lot.

Snakes? Nah, that needs a new thread.
Cheers!

You mean like these?




Or this one maybe?

Those scutigera centipedes that fazstp posted are common across most of the US. They're actually good to have around the house--they're predators and eat any other insect that can catch, including spiders and cockroaches, and they're fast. They are pretty scary looking with all those legs though.

Woke up the other night with something itching my shoulder. I flicked it off and heard something hit the wall. Turned on the light and there was a millipede. Damned things are everywhere.
To add to that I had to pay an exorbitant sum to have a wasps nest removed from the outside wall of my bedroom on Tuesday last. The insects are taking over (make that invertibrates; millipedes aren't insects). Let's hope this winter is cold enough to thin their numbers a bit.
Now, where in Melbourne do you live, Faz? That's an area I'll avoid. Never seen one of those before.
We don't get funnel webs in Melbourne yet, tlarkin, but global warming will probably fix that. Everything else seems to moving south. Next we'll have the cane toad here.

I live north in Glenroy but I saw that type of centipede on the wall of a flat I was renting in Fairfield. We do get heaps of the Portuguese Millipedes around here. Also heaps of Redbacks which seem to like Slaters as there are always plenty of Slater corpses littering the ground around their webs. Oh yeah, and the Mole Crickets that I posted a short recording of in another thread.

Ahhhh... Glenroy redbacks. Back in the early '60s I, as a technician-in-training, was installing phones in the new houses in the heartbreak streets off Pascoe Vale Rd. Had to go under the houses and I met lots of Glenroy redbacks. Killed a lot. Got bitten - not nice at all.
They called them heartbreak streets because there were no sewers, drains or made roads. In the winter the streets were black mud. In the summer it was dust. It could take 5 years or more before these services were in place.

I'm pleased to report these days we have bitumen and indoor plumbing :D. No Foxtel or Optus cable though. Maybe in another 5 years :rolleyes:.

Huh. I was going to ask "does anyone know how to remove a wasp's nest that's in a difficult place?". You see, we just bought a cottage, and there's a shed with a GIANT nest. Trouble is, it's kinda hard to get at. See my diagram (horrible!) from the side.
And the nest is in the corner of that "shelf" -- hard to get at.

Any ideas?

Can you simply ignore it?

Or wait for the cold season, assuming you have one?

Burn the shed down?

Ignore: We often change in that shed to go swimming -- it's a waterfront. Wasps are aggressive and it's really annoying to have to be slow. We also have a kayak and paddleboat in there, and a ton of equipment related. Ignoring is not an option.

Cold season: They'll come back. Ontario/Québec is cold in winter, but the queen will survive.

Burn: No. We don't have any other storage, other than two ancient trailers (an Airstream and some other one).

How about spray, is that a good idea.

I was thinking wait until the winter before doing anything about it - they should be semi-hibernating and much easier to deal with than in the summer.

The spray better take out the whole nest rather quickly, or you'll just make them angry. We don't want to make them angry.

One of my relatives told me this story:

On his boat (he lives on the Okanagan, in Lake Country, B.C.), he found a wasp's nest. He went on the boat at 6 AM with some spray, and began spraying. Soon they started falling out. When he was done, the pile of dead wasps was 2 1/2 FEET TALL. Enough wasps :D.

--

But really we use that shed a lot and we're planning another couple of months visiting the cottage, which is a 1/2 hour away from my place. We'll try spray and see.

+1 for keeping the spiders around.

I try to avoid disturbing the fishermen type (web makers) and the hunter type (rovers / hoppers). Let them do their thing because they ward off the ants, eat up the tiny flying things, and rarely, manage to net small roaches, I think. Unfortunately though, they sometimes kill each other. The hunter spiders will sometimes get stuck in a competing spider's web, and they don't have a chance once that happens.

I keep them away from my bed. That's it.. but they don't really show up a lot.

Yeah, but Bangkok is basically a giant dead-zone. The only bugs that hang out here are the hardcore scavengers, and a few parasites. (Okay, I guess you could argue that all bugs are either scavengers or parasites.) Compared to Virginia, the biodiversity here is quite minimal. Any insects that you can find here, you'll also find in VA, but there will be more variety over there, and they are generally bigger and stronger. The masses of albino geckos contribute to that, but mostly its due to eradication of anything organic within the city, and replacement of it with concrete.

Speaking of hornets / bees, there is a giant hive hanging from the Arc de Triomphe in the capital city of Vientiane, Laos.

The street vendors in BKK who sell fruit juices always have a permanent swarm of bees frolicking on the fruit, and swimming in the syrup, etc.

You can buy WaspKiller at Home Depot: Looks like the pic below, except the label says Wasp Killer rather than the Ant Killer shown. It's set up so you can shoot a stream from a distance. The clue is to hit the hole in the bottom of the nest first. They don't all die immediately, but if you then soak the paper nest, they'll all die soon and you can safely remove the nest. Been there, done that with a nest in a very awkward place under our deck.

I was waiting for a water bus at a dock in BK and there was a fruit stand right next to the place where you bought tickets (for like 2/3 of a cent, Cdn) and a roach skuttled over my shoe that was at least 3" long. Never saw anything like it.

Unbeknownst to me, we'd taken care of these wasps. Only a couple of living ones, ROFD (Rolling On Floor Dead). My dad emptied 400 mL (a full can) of spray on the nest. He'll come back with more to destroy the thing entirely, as well as the one under our porch.

No one mentioned wolf spiders.