Your House is Your Haven: Don't Neglect the Interior

Stopping The Stink Bug Invasion In Your Home

by Cherly King

You hear a weird buzz go past your ear, feel a sudden crunch under your foot, or pick up your coffee to find an insect looking back at you as you take a sip – stink bugs have invaded. Although they're pretty much harmless, you surely don't want to share your home with a bunch of stink bugs. Here, you'll learn a little about keeping those stink bugs out of your house for good.

Understand the Life Cycle

You'll be able to win the war against stink bugs if you take the time to learn about their life cycles. Knowing when to set out more traps and when to spray for them will help you plan for battle.

November and December: Hibernation – traps won't work.

January, February, and March: Hibernation ends and they begin wandering through your home.

April: Now's the time to set the traps. The bugs start mating and multiplying – kill those buggers now.

May, June and July: High reproduction time – every single female will produce 400 eggs each. Time to spray before the eggs hatch.

August: The babies are now grown and ready to eat your plants and prepare for hibernation – time to trap and keep them from coming in your home.

September and October: The bugs are looking for a place to hibernate. Traps won't work at this point, but you'll need to seal off cracks and openings that they'll use to find a way into your home to hibernate.

Stop the Invasion

You can find all kinds of ideas about how to make your own traps for stink bugs and many of them work just as they are designed to. But, if you'd like to keep those little pests from getting into your home, you'll need to take some preventative measures.

There are pesticides that will kill the stink bugs, or there are products and home remedies that will keep them away.

Some say that if you squish some stink bugs around the exterior of your home that the other stink bugs will head the other direction. That smell that they release is not only a self-defense mechanism, but it also alerts the rest of the bugs that there's a threat in the area and to find safety.

If you're losing your battle against the stink bugs, don't wait – contact your local home pest control specialist for help. The life cycle of the bugs will help them survive your rookie attempt of eliminating them, so let the pros eliminate them once and for all.

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