Knowing Your Enemy: Earwigs

Have you had the pleasure of seeing an earwig? You know those creepy bugs with the long pincers on their butt (I would provide a picture but I wouldn’t even make it through this blog post). If you haven’t you are one lucky person and if you have, well I feel your pain. I mean those pincers hurt man!

For the past couple years, these things have decided to invade our home every summer for some reason unbenounced to me. Last year was the worst invasion and no matter what bug repellent we used they kept coming back. That is why this past winter I decided to do some research on how to get rid of these suckers.

Turns out earwigs are a pesky bug to kill. A lot of what I found recommended putting out wet, rolled up newspaper and then burning them (not very practical for me) or digging holes in your yard, putting in tuna cans full of oil (again something I didn’t want to do with my dogs around). I was beginning to get at my wits end, what’s a girl to do now?

It wasn’t until last month when I stumbled upon a show on diatomaceous earth and one thing that it is good at is killing bugs. I swear the television had a brighter glow and angelic music began to play (did I take that to far?). Diatomaceous earth is microscopic pieces of fossilized algae that scratches up the exoskeleton and dehydrates the bug. I spread some all around the perimeter of the house and all the plants and it helped. But turns out these things made there way into our basement and were living in our central air unit (who do they think they are?!?). So I also had to spread some D.E. around down there as well, but haven’t seen an earwig *knocks-on-wood* for a couple weeks now. The only down side to D.E. is you have to reapply it after it rains otherwise it doesn’t work. But I couldn’t be more happy with the results!