Tag: box elders

In Michigan, the changing of the seasons brings with it an abundance of boxelder bugs. The boxelder is a type of beetle, easily identifiable by the reddish-orange markings on their backs. They take their name from the boxelder tree, where they feed and lay eggs during the warmer months. Boxelders are a huge nuisance in the spring and fall. In the fall, they tend to congregate en masse on the sunny side of homes where they search for cracks and crevices in which to overwinter to keep warm. The sheer quantity of boxelders that can congregate can be staggering, leading home owners to panic. The autumn swarming of box elders is temporary, however, and goes away as soon as the weather gets cold. However, if your home has not had some sort of perimeter or barrier treatment, its likely a lot of these boxelders will wind up in your home…

“Help,” a frantic woman told me one day recently on the phone, “my house is overrun by cockroaches!” “Cockroaches?” I said. “That sound serious. Can you describe what you are seeing?” “They are all over the walls of my house, especially around the windows!” she said. This gave me pause, because typically cockroaches do not hang out on walls, and certainly not around windows. They are nocturnal insects that prefer the darkness. “What do they look like?” I asked. “They are little black beetles with red lines on their backs!” As soon as she said that, I knew that the problem was certainly not roaches, but in fact box elder bugs. The woman was mildly relieved; she still wasn’t happy about the swarms of bugs all over her home, but she was consoled to know that they were not cockroaches – and that the treatment for them was relatively simple….