Garden cockroaches, are they a pest?
Posted on 18th November 2024 at 15:09
Garden cockroaches in the UK
You come down to the kitchen in the night to get a drink, you put your hand out and flick the light switch on and you see a cockroach scuttle across the floor and hide itself away beneath the fridge, oh no! Your first thought is oh no, we’ve got cockroaches, your second thought is to grab the phone and call out pest control.
That’s a common enough scenario but what if you discover a cockroach clinging to the lounge curtains or sat on the wall in the hallway? It’ll be exactly the same chain of events, oh God, where’s the phone. That reflex is not really a problem and almost certainly you’ll need professional help but what if I were to tell you that some cockroaches don’t need the same level of response and are not the pest you’re expecting?
There is a world of information at our fingertips, if you were to find a cockroach its likely that you’ll research this, so you have an idea of what do to, now if you’re like me, the go to place is Google. Type into any search engine, cockroaches in the UK and bingo, loads of information, a few horror stories sprinkled in for some added flavour but plenty of information with which to equip yourself.
If you’re the type to go on Facebook then its another level, loads of stories and everyone’s an expert, no matter where you look you’ll be overloaded with information and a lot of it will be wrong.
A good example of this is as follows, I typed in “are there garden cockroaches in the UK?” and Gardening Know How tells us that outdoor roaches will soon become indoor roaches, other sites go on about the different pest control species and another shows us a picture of a tawny cockroach (one of the common garden ones) and calls it a German cockroach which certainly is a pest species.
I’m not having a go at the pest control industry or individual companies, but you can see the discrepancies; we talk exclusively about those cockroaches that are pests whilst ignoring the fact that there are cockroaches out there that are no more sinister than a ladybird or an earwig. I doubt many people would be overjoyed with the thought of their home being overrun by earwigs but we’re not talking about that, what this blog is about is the one or two insects that you may see and the fact that alarm bells shouldn’t immediately ring.
Garden cockroaches - are they friend or foe?
Encountering those garden cockroach species is becoming a more common occurrence, this maybe due in part to our having warmer winters which could be encouraging population growth, inward migration from Europe of species that thrive in warmer climates and are now able to hang on here during the winter and changes to how we manage our outside spaces.
The London Natural History Society have a webpage looking into the spread of garden cockroaches and their thinking is that there maybe between six or seven different kinds of cockroach living exclusively outdoors, whereas our industry talks only about the four pest species of pest cockroach, which in fact, maybe outnumbered by those non-pest species.
Are garden cockroaches common?
Leaving aside the London Natural History Society’s research what we do know is that there are three common species of garden cockroach here in the UK: these are called the tawny cockroach, the dusky cockroach and the lesser cockroach. These three insects are completely ignored by the pest control industry and probably responsible for hundreds of incorrectly administered treatments, and that’s something quite wrong in my opinion.
What’s in a name? As you’d expect from their name, the garden cockroach lives outside in gardens, parks and open land and like many other types of beetles, they eat dead plant material and scavenge on other dead or dying insects. Their favourite habitat is living on grassy scrub land, and this is increasing as our Councils change mowing patterns to save money and have increased the tendency to leave roadside verges and parks as ‘wild’ areas, the consequence for the garden cockroach is that their habitat is rapidly expanding.
From my experience with these insects, it’s the tawny cockroach that causes the problem, what you find with this cockroach is that it likes to fly at night and during those warmer months when windows are left open to catch the breeze, they’ll find themselves getting inside our homes. I have dealt with these cockroaches in Lower Earley, Ascot and found them to be fairly widespread across the Maidenhead area.
If there’s a pattern to a garden cockroach infestation it goes something like this: you find one cockroach hanging on the curtains, then a couple of days later you’ll find another on a wall, all of these sightings will be near an open window.
The Wild Gardening Forum contains more information on these insects.
. You’ll find them in places that don’t make sense when looking for the cockroach pests, they’ll be sat on walls, in places like the lounge, and in the hall but not the kitchen where you’d expect to see the ‘pest’ cockroaches. Our pest species will just about always be found where there’s food and that’s in the kitchen.
You’ll see these cockroaches running and hiding under things like microwaves, food caddies that are sat on work surfaces and under toasters, you’ll find them hiding inside kitchen cupboards and not just sat randomly on the curtains in the lounge.
A proper cockroach treatment for a pest species can be expensive because of the cost of pesticides used in their control and the fact that most companies will want to do multiple visits at the premises to assess and control the infestation. In the pest control industry we only learn and talk about those pest species, so anyone getting called out to a “cockroach job” will assume that it’s a pest and act accordingly, garden cockroaches are on the increase and becoming more common.
If you discover a random light brown cockroach that’s sat somewhere in your home, use the information from this blog and follow the links posted to see if all you’ve got is a harmless garden cockroach and it may save you hundreds of pounds and a lot of anxiety.
Tagged as: Cockroaches
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