One of These Roaches Walked In. The Other One Lives Here.

Left to right: German roach, American roach, Oriental roach. The two on the right are both palmetto bugs.

Seeing roaches outside or wandering into your garage doesn't mean you've got an infestation living inside your walls. But it also doesn't mean you should just put up with them. Here's how to tell which one you're actually dealing with, and what stops both.

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Tell me what you saw and where you saw it. Most of the time I can sort out which one you've got over the phone, and I'll tell you what it actually takes to keep them out, whichever kind it is.

The stripe is the whole answer

Look right behind the head, at the shield-shaped plate. That's where the answer is.

A German roach has two dark parallel stripes running down that plate. It's tan to light brown, half an inch to five eighths, and the stripes show up on the babies too, which matters more than you'd think. If you're looking at something small with two stripes, you don't have a stray. You have a colony.

Palmetto bug isn't one species. Down here that's what we call any of the big roaches, and there are several of them. American, smokybrown, Oriental, Florida woods. Different bugs, different markings, and honestly it doesn't matter much which one you've got, because they all behave the same way. What matters is that they're big and they're not striped.

Size tells you almost as much

The big ones run an inch and a quarter up to two inches. Nobody who sees one is unsure whether they saw something. A German roach is a fraction of that, and if you've never seen the two together, the difference doesn't register the way it should.

So use the stripes. They work in a phone photo, day or night, on a bug that's standing still or one that's already dead. Size only works if you've got something to compare against, and at eleven at night you don't.

One of them can fly and one of them won't

Some of the big ones have long wings that run past the body, and in warm weather they use them. Not gracefully, but they use them. That's where the story about the roach that flew at somebody's face comes from, and yes, it really happens.

German roaches have wings and essentially never fly. They run, and they're fast, and they go into a crack the second a light comes on. You are not going to have a dramatic story about a German roach. You're going to flip on the kitchen light at midnight and see movement that's gone before your eyes adjust.

Why you're seeing them either way

Palmetto bugs, whichever kind you've got, live outside. Mulch, sewers, drains, under tree bark, in the leaf litter. They come in through a gap under a door or a crack around a pipe, and they don't set up shop inside the way German roaches do. But they don't stop coming, either. Florida's mulch, humidity, and year-round warmth means there's always a fresh supply working its way toward your foundation. One or two showing up isn't a sign of a colony inside your walls. It's a sign your perimeter isn't currently protected, and that's fixable.

German roaches are the opposite in every way. They live indoors and only indoors. They breed indoors, continuously, in a climate-controlled house that never gets cold enough to slow them down. They don't come in from your yard because they were never in your yard. They came in on something, a grocery bag, a used appliance, a box, a piece of furniture, and then they stayed and multiplied behind your dishwasher.

What the droppings tell you

Big roach droppings are good sized cylinders with ridges down the sides and blunt ends. People mistake them for mouse droppings all the time, and that's a reasonable mistake to make.

German roach droppings look like somebody ground black pepper along the edge of a shelf. Tiny specks, usually in the corners of drawers, along the inside edges of cabinets, or behind the refrigerator. If you're finding pepper specks in a kitchen cabinet, that's not a crumb.

What we actually do about each one

For palmetto bugs, the fix is outside, because that's where they're coming from. Regular service puts a treated band four to six feet wide around your foundation, wall and ground both, plus the eaves, the beds, and the shrubs. That band is what keeps them from ever reaching your door in the first place. This is most of what our general pest customers are actually calling about, and it works.

German roaches need a cleanout on your end and monthly visits on ours. That's not us padding the schedule. They breed indoors continuously and the ones walking around in the open are a small fraction of what's actually in the wall void, so one treatment and a handshake doesn't finish it. Monthly is what it takes to get ahead of the population instead of chasing it.

The guarantee

One hundred percent happy or you don't pay a penny. Thirty days in and you're still seeing bugs, call me and we keep treating.