Job Discussion Forums

[Samantha]

Right on. The sweet smell of coca attracts annoying big fat black flies AND bees!. Some people believe that if you hang bags of water around the perimeter of your patio it will keep away the flies, but that doesn't work either. One small discovery I have made in my area is that tiny ants that enter kitchen areas seem to hate vinegar, so I use a spray a mixture of that with water, on the kitchen surfaces. The best thing is to scare the critters off way before they get into your house. Follow the trail of ants. Cockroaches are trickier to head off. They do make great playthings for the household cats in the meantime.

People find it hard to believe but even the ticks that attack pets are more sturdy here, and don't respond well to the formulas we got up north. Living here is an adventure in so many ways!

[jfurgers]

Good points guys. Go buy some Raid.

[MELEE]

That bag of water thing has worked for me. I used to live near some cows and we had MAJOR fly problems. The bag of water hanging on the edge of the porch cut the fly population by at least 50%.

[dixie]

[Jetgirly]

I should draw one of those pictures thanking the virgin for performing a miracle- we've been here since Feb 1st and only seen one cockroach inside (thought it did take us two days to catch it... however we are 100% positive it was the same one on Day Two).

[lozwich]

[hlamb]

I don't like the sprays either. They are a last resort only. I figure if they're strong enough to kill roaches and other nasty insects, what are they doing to me and the rest of the environment?

Before living down here, I had no idea about any of these things. Most are unheard of in my part of Canada.

[corporatehuman]

In Chiapas I gave up against the insects. Did anyone else get to this point? Every night I would sleep with five mosquitoes and two cockroaches. And eventually even though I would be bitten every night I would wake up without mosquito bites.

When I did fight back I used shoes. Mostly to kill scorpions and cockroaches, while I prefer hands to kill mosquitoes. I found the mosquitoes in Chiapas very fast, while here in the D.F. they are fat and slow. In Chiapas when I killed one mosquito another one would quickly take its place and so I gave up. Here in the D.F. when I kill a mosquito none follow.

For rats I prefer small dogs and a broom. Did you know rats can scale walls like spiders? It's pretty frightening.

One way I unintentionally killed cockroaches was to drink coffee with sugar and leave it out for a night. Every morning I would wake up to find a dead cockroach floating in the coffee cup.

I do not kill bats.

[dixie]

[lozwich]

Dixie,

Something that also works if you can't have nets is putting light net curtains on the windows. I used a sarong in Mexico, and slept with my window open most nights. It doesn't keep them all out, but add that to the wind created by your fans, and you will have less.

Someone mentioned about not waking up with bites.. maybe you had male mosquitoes? Only the females bite, contrary to the wisdom in The Bee Movie.. Something I found is that if you don't scratch them when you're bitten, they tend not to make big lumps. I have this lovely allergy, where if a mosquito bites me on a joint I feel like I've been injected with acid. In mosquito-y places I always sleep with some tea tree cream by my bed, and when I wake up in the night with the acidic burning of a bite, I put the cream on right away, and usually in the morning the lump is a lot smaller, if there at all.

[MELEE]

Non-allergicy people can and do get "immune" to mosquito bites which is what I think c.h. was referring too. I've gotten to the point where they don't really bother me, if I don't scratch that is. If I can go the first 5 minutes without scratching, it simply doesn't swell up and itch. Which is how most Mexicans are.
We have screens on our windows. You can have someone makes these fairly easily and I doubt any landlord would object to you installing them. There are some drawbacks--I can no longer throw rocks out the window at the neighbor's barking dog at night.

[dixie]

I actually rarely wake up with bites, and I never wake up with anything that is still itchy.

The buggers only do their job to bother me enough while I�m trying to sleep!

[thelmadatter]

One of the very few advantages of living in Toluca is that we dont have any creepy crawly problem. Not even cucarachas.

Just the wonderful smell of the Lerma River, but fortunately Im on the opposite side of town. Just have to remember to hold my breath when I pass it on my way to DF

[dixie]

[Phil_K]

I was just wondering where all these DFers live, painting a picture of an insect infested environment. Expect for the occasional fly, which is normal even in cold and rainy Blighty, we have no visitors, neither here in Narvarte nor in Escand�n where we used to live.