Crickets are a peaceful and charming aspect of summer and early fall – until they get in the house. If you ever find yourself dealing with a cricket infestation, you’ll soon find their quaint chirping to be irritable and obnoxious. What’s worse, you’ll spend all night trying to find the chirper.
Nobody wants to let a cricket infestation ruin a good night’s sleep, but Aiken, SC property owners should know that a cricket infestation can do more damage than just that. Let’s identify these noisy critters and how to prevent them from getting into your property.
Aiken’s Cricket Identification Guide
Crickets are much easier to identify by sound than by sight, but the sound alone isn’t enough to catch these critters. A cricket’s chirps can carry a long distance, making it hard to locate them, and only male crickets chirp, so you need to identify the females as well based on their looks.
Crickets have stout, rounded bodies that camouflage well outside. A cricket’s head has a pair of black, body-length antennae that sit on top of the cricket’s head. They have six spiny legs, bent in the middle and flat at the end, giving them a squat appearance. Finally, a pair of body-colored wings sits on a cricket’s back; the males will vibrate these wings to chirp. Most crickets grow between ½ an inch and an inch in length.
There are many different cricket species in the greater Aiken area, but house crickets, as the name suggests, are the most likely to enter your home. These crickets are brown and black, live throughout the U.S., and can survive in many different habitats – including your Aiken household.
If all crickets did was chirp, they wouldn’t be as big of a threat to your health and safety. However, these chirping pests can spread serious diseases and parasites. Crickets often spread E. coli and salmonella through Aiken homes, and they can also transmit certain parasites to your pets.
Finally, crickets love to chew as much as they love to chirp, and if they get into your house, then they can cause severe damage to your furniture. Preventing these critters is essential to protecting your Aiken property.
7 Cricket Prevention Tips for Aiken Homeowners
Lucky for Aiken residents, cricket infestations are fairly easy to prevent. The following tips will help secure your household from these loud and disease-ridden insects:
- Mow the lawn. Crickets will hide in tall and undisturbed grasses, then eventually move indoors.
- Clear leaves and wood piles. Crickets will nest and feed near these kinds of sites. If you can’t clear wood piles from your property, keep them away from the exterior of your home.
- Reduce moisture in your home. Your bathroom and kitchen are cricket hotspots if they retain too much moisture.
- Dry out your crawl spaces. Crickets will often gravitate towards moist crawl spaces and then move indoors from there.
- Seal your windows and door frames. Crickets can enter unnoticed if there are cracks in your masonry.
- Change outdoor lights. Sodium bulbs and yellow lighting are less attractive to crickets, so they will be less likely to congregate on your property.
- Clear other infestations. Crickets eat other insects as part of their diet, so they may move indoors if there is a viable food source for them.
Lastly, if crickets do move inside or if they keep threatening your household, contact the pest experts at Aiken Pest Control. We’ll make sure that your cricket problem leaves before it can cause any problems, ensuring that these noisy pests won’t come back again.