An Insect Story

If you have a facebook account and you log on to it regularly enough, you will know that I have ants and cockroach issues.

Ants

I wonder if ants will die when sucked up by a vacuum cleaner.

I searched the good old internet for answers but couldn't find any! This is almost shocking because the internet should have answers for everything, yes? While I found questions posed by a number of people on this, the answers are mere suppositions.

I'm inclined to believe that they can be sucked up whole all the way into the dustbag. Insects are after all, extremely hardy and cockroaches can survive even the worst nuclear explosions (or so I thought I read somewhere). I feel like doing a research on this when I next change my vacuum cleaner's dustbag. But, the thought of having to rip apart a dustbag that costs $3.25 stopped me. Besides, I'm not sure if SPCA/PETA/Acres etc will approve of what I'm doing.

Cockroaches

There was that one day when I lost my sanity and caught a tiny little cockroach cavorting among my kitchen things with my bare hands. Now, that is a story which I'll tell my grandchildren over and over again because that's as close to a heroic act that I'll ever get to do. But, no, the story doesn't stop there. As I held it over the kitchen sink and was weighing my options as to how to end its life ~ I ruled out crushing it to death because my hands will smell of cockroach juice for at least 326 days ~ it bit me. Bit. The little thing bit me.

Of course I didn't know that it just bit me. My first thought was, I've been stung by a cockroach! But, I remember sketching out rough pictures of cockroaches for science lessons and it has feelers on the top of its hands and six legs. To the best of my limited scientific knowledge, it does not have a stinging device. So after using a piece of kitchen towel to crush it to death and washing my hands repeatedly with antiseptic soap, I trawled the net while frantically calling TheHusband to tell him what happened.

In that frantic state, I misread some of the stuff online. I thought I read that a species of cockroach stings its victim with its eggs and the victim would give birth to little cockroaches. TheHusband immediately said, "Chop off your hands now." A few minutes later, I realised that the creature that does that is another type of something-cockroach-larvae and it uses cockroaches as its victims.

After that, I went through some serious cleaning of the drawers in the kitchen. I cleaned out each drawer, pulled them all the way out, cleaned the insides of the cabinet walls, wiped them with antiseptic solution, bought Combat bait for roaches and now, I'm monitoring the drawers for cockroach droppings. It involves more emptying and cleaning of drawers but it has to be done.