FEATURE: Low-life creepy-crawlies invade Bay

KATHY WEBB Cockroaches are nobody's favourite.The mere sight of their shudder-inducing, flat, hard backs with the creamy-coloured stripes down the sides is inexplicably unnerving, and nothing less than a full can of fly spray to cover the insect in a pile of white foam can bring reassurance.
But it gets worse. Pestbusters say the familiar Gisborne cockroach resident in Hawke's Bay for the past decade is being joined by increasing numbers of cousins originally from North East Africa, who bring with them an international reputation as highly undesirable citizens.
And as if that were not bad enough, scientists are now warning Hawke's Bay people to be alert for an aggressive and invasive species of ant intent on living the good life at the Bay's expense.
German cockroaches and Argentine ants. They have no charms, and nothing to recommend them for citizenship, but they're taking up residence anyway.
The German cockroach, Blatella Germanica, is dirty, smelly, invasive, fast-breeding, disease-spreading and hard to get rid of.
"It's the rabbit of the cockroach fraternity," says John Tomlinson, owner of Big John's Bugs Or Us pest-destruction company.
"It breeds copiously and tends to colonise inside a house, unlike the Gisborne cockroach. It likes to live in the airing cupboard, kitchen areas around the sink and in cupboards, and it likes the backs of fridges and freezers.
"It's very prolific. If you see them, it probably means you've got hundreds or thousands in your house. We usually see them in epidemic proportions.
"We recently moved a fridge and there must have been 2000 of them," he says.
The German cockroach, like other species of roaches, is a scavenger. It eats food scraps, leaves filth in its wake, pollutes water, contaminates food, and spreads diseases such as salmonella food poisoning, gastroenteritis, staphylococcus, diarrhoea and typhoid.
It is the number-one enemy of hospitals and anywhere food is prepared and stored, and once settled into a property takes some effort to get rid of. Normal treatments are not enough, Mr Tomlinson says.
"A bomb or spray doesn't work. You have to use a special gel bait. It's pyrethrum-based and very effective. We put hundreds of blobs of it around the place."
The bait is slow-acting, so when a cockroach eats it, it can go back to the nest and die, where its cannibal mates gobble it up, poison and all, and die, too. And so the process goes on.
The same principle used to kill German cockroaches is applied to Argentine ants, aggressive little beasties that swarm over and bite anything that might be a source of food, including baby birds in nests, which they have been known to strip to the bone. Their behaviour could put an end to the picnics, barbecues, camping and other outdoor pursuits that are the hallmark of life in Hawke's Bay.
They also have the potential to cost horticulturalists considerable sums of cash. Argentine ants enslave other insects to have them produce food for them. They place young aphids and scale on the growing tips of trees and plants, and protect them from natural predators while they suck up the juicy sap and turn it into honeydew for the ants to eat. That doesn't do much for the growth, health or productivity of the trees, and can cause sooty mould to grow on excess honeydew, which, in turn, requires growers to spray to kill the slave aphids and scale.
The ants particularly enjoy citrus, sometimes directly attacking the fruit. They also go for avocado, feijoa, tamarillo, pipfruit and stonefruit trees, plus passionfruit, grapes and tomatoes.
Inside the house, they eat anything they come in contact with, even invading fridges, microwaves and screwtop jars. Argentine ants are amazingly well-organised, living in large underground colonies with multiple queens to produce new generations. The colonies spread further around their territory each year.
Spraying them with ordinary flyspray only encourages them to disperse and form new nests, so they need to be fed bait to take back to the nest to poison its occupants, including the queens and their replacements. Until the queens are all dead, the colony continues to grow.
Meanwhile, Alan Cammock, of A&A; Pest Arresters, says he's been getting a lot of calls this summer from people arriving home from holiday to find their houses over-run by fleas.
"We've been doing one to two flea jobs a day." He says it's a good idea to get a house sprayed before moving in, to kill anything already there or hiding in furniture and appliances taken in. It's also worth thinking about having a home sprayed before or during a holiday, so insects don't get a hold while the human residents are away.