House crickets are annoying. More annoying than roaches.
They jump around, make noises late at night that robs you of your sleep.
Crickets’ chirping is only lovely to hear in the woods. But if they chirp inside your home, it’s like someone torturing you by the most annoying sound that you can listen to.
Crickets even hop onto your bed if there are too many in your home.
In this post, you’ll not only get to know what do house crickets eat. But also, you’ll get the answers to all the critical questions about house crickets.
And that includes how to get rid of house crickets.
Let’s check them out.
What Are The Common Types Of Crickets?
There are 900 species of crickets across the planet. But there are only three types of crickets common across the US – House crickets, Field Crickets, and Spider Crickets.
House crickets, brownish in color, are the ones that enter your home from underneath the door and open windows.
That’s why it’s always good to have a good weather spring below the door to ward off cricket, and many other bugs, from entering your home.
House crickets are attracted to light. A glowing light bulb can easily lure them to your home.
Field crickets are outdoor crickets. They’re black, and they enter your home as accidental invaders.
Spider crickets have long spider-like legs with a big hump on their back. Because of this visible hump, spider crickets are also known as Camel crickets.
Why Do House Crickets Get Inside Your Home?
The primary reason for house crickets getting inside your home is when the weather outside gets too hot and dry.
House crickets like damp and dark places to live.
That’s why when they are inside your home, they gravitate towards areas like the laundry room, bathroom, kitchen, basement, attic, and garage.
If the house cricket’s population increases, you’ll also find them infesting places like drawers, wardrobes, closets, kitchen cabinets, and even your bookshelf.
Crickets also hide in your bedroom. That’s when the unstoppable chirping sound makes the nights sleepless and miserable.
How Long Do House Crickets Live Inside Your Home?
A life span of a house cricket is 8-10 weeks.
If not eliminated, they can spend their entire life inside your home.
But if you think that after 8-10 weeks, house crickets will be gone, then you’re wrong. In this span of 8-10 weeks, house crickets will spawn enough eggs to keep your home infested for a year.
A female house cricket can lay at least 100 eggs in her entire lifespan.
What Do House Crickets Eat?
House crickets can eat almost anything. That’s why we always recommend getting rid of them because they can damage stuff inside your home.
Here are the eight things that house crickets eat in your house–
1. Raw vegetables like potatoes, carrots, lettuce, and peas.
2. Non-citrus fruits like apples, bananas.
3. Chicken, fish, meat, both raw and cooked.
4. Your clothing, curtains, socks, and linen. Crickets love to munch on unwashed, filthy, and stained clothes.Â
5. Pet food.
6. Other insects and bugs inside your home like silverfish and earwigs.
7. Wallpaper, carpets, rugs, and drapes.
8. And if they find nothing, they eat each other. Yes, crickets are cannibalistic.
House crickets are a real threat to your home décor. They chew on and eat even furniture.
Though crickets don’t destroy furniture like termites do, but they can quickly leave rough edges and visible dents on them.
House crickets have strong jaws. They can quickly drill through Tupperware, airtight jars, and cardboard boxes to eat cereals and grains.
House crickets can also eat food droppings on the floor and food waste from trash bins in your kitchen and yard.
They can also eat organic waste like your hair and nails lying around on the bathroom floor or near the bathroom drains.
Do Crickets Drink Water?
Yes, all species of crickets, including house crickets, drink water. That’s why they prefer to live near wet places.
In your home, crickets dwell in places where there’s both dampness and water supply. That’s why it’s easy to find them in your bathroom and kitchen.
Do Crickets Eat Plants And Grass?
Yes, cricket can eat both plants and grass.
Crickets don’t eat grass and plants as fast as caterpillars or cabbage worms do. So, they don’t pose any urgent threat to your garden like other garden pests.
But they don’t have any preference for what kind of plants they’ll eat. Crickets can eat plants except for cactuses.
Crickets, including house crickets, can also eat rotting vegetation.
Are House Crickets Nocturnal Insects?
Yes, house crickets, and all other types of crickets, are nocturnal insects.
Can House Crickets Climb?
Yes, house crickets can climb on walls on your bed. They’re adept climbers, and you can also spot them on your home’s ceiling.
Do House Crickets Jump or Fly?
Yes, house crickets can jump. They’ve wings too, but they are more of jumpers.
They can’t fly. It’s the case with all three types of common crickets – house crickets, field crickets, and spider crickets.
The primary purpose of the crickets’ wings is to chirp.
Why Do Male Crickets Chirp?
The male cricket of the cricket species produces the chirping sound, especially in darkness.
The chirping is sound is for two reasons – mating and to keep other male crickets away.
There are different calls on both occasions. The mating chirping sound is the most disturbing. It’s continuous and sounds like a shrill siren.
Whereas the chirping sound to ward off the other males is more intermittent. Crickets make the chirping sound with their wings and from one of their glands.
Do Crickets Bite?
Yes, crickets, including house crickets, can bite humans. But they’re not inclined to.
The reason is that crickets don’t have strong jaws that can penetrate the human skin.
It’s only in rare cases crickets bite humans. If they bite you, you’ll sense a pinching feeling that might hurt a little.
Crickets are dirty, you should never attempt to touch them.
The feces of house crickets, which is sticking with their bodies often, is harmful to humans. It can cause rashes, sores on your skin, and even flu-like conditions if you’re allergic to bugs.
How To Get Rid Of House Crickets – An Easy 5 Step DIY Guide For You
Now that you know the nuisance house crickets are and the damage they can do, it’s time to find out how to get rid of house crickets.
But before that, let’s check out the signs of house cricket infestation in your home.
Here are the top three signs of house cricket infestation in your home –
- The obvious and the most irritating sign of house cricket infestation is their chirping sound at night.
- The second sign of house cricket infestation is holes in your fabrics, carpets, rugs, and curtains. As we mentioned earlier, crickets eat them.
- The third and final sign is their sightings. If you spot house crickets in your bathroom corners, kitchen corners (near the kitchen sink and trash bin), and in other hard-to-reach places, then be sure that there are a bunch of house crickets in your home.
But thankfully, getting rid of house crickets is easy. And unless you’ve got a big garden with many field crickets, then we don’t think you’d need any professional pest control help.
Here’s how to get rid of house crickets on your own –
- Vacuum Cleaning: Vacuum cleaning helps a lot when removing crickets and all other kinds of bugs like fleas. Vacuum your carpet, rugs, and places like underneath the upholstery will remove many adult and baby house crickets.
- Cricket Traps: Use cricket traps in the corners of your home, especially in the places where the house crickets hide. The cricket traps have a gluey surface. When the crickets step on it at night, they’ll get stuck onto it.
- Diatomaceous Earth: Sprinkle food grade diatomaceous earth in your home, especially in the cracks, gaps, and crammed places like the attic, basement, and garage. Diatomaceous earth punctures into the exoskeleton of the crickets, causing immediate death. Always use food-grade diatomaceous earth. It’s safe for humans and pets.
- Bug Spray: Spray a quality bug spray across the corners of your home and in moist places like the bathroom, kitchen, and laundry room. Don’t forget to use the spray on the drains of the kitchen and bathroom. Crickets hide in those places too.
- Essential Oils: Research done by the University of Southern California have shown that crickets hate the pungent smell of peppermint, lemon, and cinnamon. You can make a mix of any one of these essential oils with water. Spray the mixture across your home to evict crickets from your home.
Please read the instructions for using a bug spray on the label carefully before using it. Bug sprays contain poison. Use it in the absence of children and pets and keep it away from them.
Pro Tip: NEVER use a bug bomb for eliminating crickets. Bug bombs don’t work against crickets.
How To Keep Crickets Away From Your Home?
It’s always a smart idea to make your home and its surroundings inhabitable for crickets.
To protect your home from cricket re-infestation, here are the steps that you should follow –
- Always keep your home, especially the kitchen and bathroom, clean.
- Make sure there’s no piled-up trash in your home’s trash bins, including the containers in the yard.
- Seal all the cracks and gaps in and around your home’s exterior walls to prevent cricket entry.
- Use weather springs to cover the gap between the door’s lower edges and the floor. Crickets and all kinds of bugs use that gap for entering your home.
- Keep your garden clean. Cut off any long grasses and vegetation that can harbor crickets. Also, remove foliage, rotting pieces of wood, and garbage from your garden.
- If you live in a buggy area, then use window screens on your windows to prevent crickets and other bugs from entering your home from windows.
- Fill up potholes in your yard or garden. These potholes hold water after rains, which increases the dampness around your home. And crickets love moisture.
- Clean up your French drains if you’ve any. French drains harbor not only bugs like crickets but also mosquitoes.
- Remove dampness from your home. Check if there’s any water leakage around your home’s foundation or in the plumbing areas of your kitchen, bathroom, and laundry room.
- Use a humidifier to keep humidity inside your home under control. It’ll deter not only crickets but also many other bugs.
- Reduce lighting at the exterior of your home during the cricket seasons, from July to September. Lights attract crickets.
Conclusion
House crickets are common house bugs. They can eat anything from human food to carpets.
In this post, you got to know what do house crickets eat and a lot of other information, including how to get rid of them.
If you’ve got a yard or garden, then crickets usually enter from there during the night.
But your yard can be a host to many more invasive pests. These pests become active when darkness falls.
Check out our post on another disgusting pest that creeps into your home from your yard during the night.
Nang Chen is an Entomologist and Arachnologist who is associated with Vienna’s museum of natural history. He’s also a consultant with real estate groups, insecticide conglomerates and law enforcement groups as a forensic entomologist. Nang Chen holds an M.S. from South China University and he’s a regular contributor to our site.