Some pest control advice gets repeated so often it starts to sound like fact. Most of it isn’t malicious, it’s just outdated or was never quite right to begin with. Here are the ones we hear most often, and what’s actually true.
“Cheese is the best mouse bait”
Mice are drawn more to high-calorie, high-fat foods and nesting material than dairy. Peanut butter, oats, and even cotton balls (which they’ll grab for nesting) tend to outperform cheese in traps by a wide margin. This one’s mostly harmless to believe, but it does mean people set traps with the wrong bait and conclude they don’t have mice when they actually just have unappealing traps. A pea-sized amount is enough; overloading a trap with bait actually makes it easier for a mouse to nibble the edges without triggering the mechanism.
“If I don’t see them, I don’t have them”
Most pests are nocturnal, light-averse, or simply good at staying hidden. Cockroaches, bed bugs, and rodents are all more active at night and specifically avoid open, well-lit areas. Not seeing activity during the day tells you very little. Droppings, grease marks along baseboards, gnaw marks, and shed skins are far more reliable indicators than visual sightings. A flashlight check of cabinet corners and behind large appliances late at night, when the house is quiet, will usually tell you more in five minutes than a week of daytime observation.
“A bug bomb will solve an infestation”
Foggers release pesticide into open air, which mostly settles on exposed surfaces. Pests that live inside walls, under appliances, or deep in cracks are largely unaffected, and some species scatter and spread to new areas in response to the disturbance. This is one of the more common reasons a DIY infestation gets worse instead of better, particularly with cockroaches and bed bugs, both of which are known to disperse into neighboring rooms or units when a fogger drives them out of a treated area rather than killing them.
“Cold winters kill off pests for good”
Many pests simply relocate indoors, into wall voids, attics, and crawlspaces, rather than dying off. Rodent activity in homes actually increases in colder months as they seek warmth. Insects like clothes moths and cockroaches thrive year-round indoors regardless of outdoor temperature. Even in climates with genuinely harsh winters, this mostly reduces outdoor pest pressure, not indoor pressure, since the pests that matter most to homeowners in winter are usually the ones already inside.
“A clean home never gets pests”
Cleanliness helps enormously by removing food sources and hiding spots, but it doesn’t seal cracks, fix moisture issues, or stop pests from entering through utility lines and foundation gaps. Immaculately kept homes get infestations too, usually through entry points rather than sanitation failures. This myth causes real embarrassment for people who assume a pest problem reflects poorly on their housekeeping, when in a lot of cases it has nothing to do with it.
“Natural treatments don’t work as well as synthetic ones”
This one depends entirely on the method and the pest. Natural approaches like heat treatment, steam, diatomaceous earth, and targeted botanical products are highly effective when matched correctly to the pest and applied thoroughly. The failures people remember usually trace back to under-application or a single treatment where the pest’s life cycle needed a follow-up, not the natural method itself.
“Ultrasonic plug-in devices keep pests away”
These are widely sold and widely disappointing. Independent testing has repeatedly found little to no measurable effect on rodent or insect populations in real homes, likely because sound doesn’t travel through walls and furniture the way marketing suggests, and pests habituate to a constant tone fairly quickly anyway. They’re not dangerous to have plugged in, but they shouldn’t be relied on as your actual pest strategy.
“One treatment fixes everything”
Life cycles matter. Eggs hatch on their own timeline, and a treatment that kills adults and larvae present on day one won’t touch eggs laid that same week. That’s exactly why we guarantee our work and come back at no charge if it’s not fully resolved, because the biology sometimes needs a second pass.
“DIY is always cheaper than calling a professional”
It often is, for small, early-stage problems. But repeated store-bought treatments that don’t fully resolve an infestation add up, and a problem left to spread, especially termites or bed bugs, generally costs far more to fix the longer it goes untreated. The real comparison isn’t DIY cost versus service cost, it’s the cost of solving it once versus the cost of solving it repeatedly.
“Pests only show up in old or dirty buildings”
New construction gets infestations too, sometimes from materials or soil disturbed during building, and high-end properties are no less appealing to a pest looking for food, water, and shelter than any other. Age and condition affect how many entry points a building has, but they don’t determine whether pests are interested in the first place; every structure offers something a pest wants, it’s just a matter of where.
“Mothballs are a safe way to repel pests around the house”
Mothballs contain naphthalene or paradichlorobenzene, both of which are registered pesticides, not a harmless deterrent. They work by slowly releasing fumes toxic enough to kill moth larvae in a sealed container, which is also why they’re only meant for airtight storage containers, never open closets, drawers you use daily, or anywhere with regular airflow into living space. Long-term exposure to those fumes in an occupied room is a real health concern, not just an unpleasant smell, and the label directions on legitimate mothball products are specific about sealed, unoccupied storage for a reason.
“Getting a cat or a dog solves a rodent problem”
A cat may catch the occasional mouse, and a dog’s presence can make some rodents more cautious about crossing open floor space, but neither one reliably clears an active infestation. Mice and rats are prolific breeders, a single pair can produce dozens of offspring in a year under the right conditions, and a household pet catching one mouse now and then doesn’t come close to keeping pace with that. Pets also don’t do anything about entry points, which is usually the actual root of a recurring rodent problem.
“Ants only come inside when it’s raining”
Rain does push some ant colonies to move to higher, drier ground, but it’s far from the only reason ants show up indoors. Ants come inside chasing food and water sources year-round, a spilled drink, an unsealed bag of sugar, a leaky pipe under a sink, condensation around a window unit. Treating every ant sighting as a temporary weather event means missing the food or moisture source that’s actually drawing them in, and that source will keep drawing ants back long after the rain has passed.
“Termites are only a problem for older or wood-frame homes”
Termites eat the wood structural elements inside a home, not the exterior material, so a house with brick, stucco, or vinyl siding has just as much wood framing, subflooring, and roof structure to lose as one with wood siding. New construction isn’t immune either, termites are drawn to the moisture and wood scraps often left in and around a foundation during building. Age affects how long deterioration has had to progress if termites are already present, but it doesn’t determine whether a structure is a target in the first place.
“Seeing a spider in the house is a bad sign”
Most spiders found indoors are harmless and are actually a sign that something else is going on: they showed up because there was prey to eat. A few spiders in a basement or garage corner usually just means a few insects are present, not an infestation of anything dangerous. That said, a sudden increase in spider activity, especially webs reappearing quickly after being cleared, is worth paying attention to as an indirect signal that another pest population is growing somewhere nearby.
Myths about specific treatments people trust too much
Beyond the classics above, a few more specific beliefs come up often enough to be worth addressing directly. Glue boards and sticky traps are sometimes assumed to be a full solution for a rodent problem, when in practice they’re most useful as a monitoring and light-population tool, not a fix for an established infestation working its way through wall voids. Diatomaceous earth gets an undeserved reputation as dangerous to have around pets, when food-grade DE actually works mechanically, damaging the exoskeletons of crawling insects, rather than through a chemical toxin, which is exactly why it’s a common choice in homes with kids and pets when applied correctly and kept dry. Similarly, people often assume that once they’ve sealed the obvious gaps around a home’s exterior, the problem is solved for good, but seals degrade, new gaps open up as a foundation settles or weatherstripping wears, and a home that was fully sealed two years ago isn’t necessarily sealed today. Periodic re-checks, especially after severe weather, catch new entry points before they become a new infestation.
Quick myth-vs-fact rundown
Myth: Bleach kills bed bug eggs on contact. Fact: bleach can kill bed bugs it directly contacts, but it doesn’t penetrate mattress seams, furniture joints, or wall voids where eggs are usually hidden, and it does nothing for eggs it never touches. Heat treatment and targeted insecticide application reach those hidden spots far more reliably.
Myth: If an exterminator sprays once, that’s a permanent fix. Fact: most effective pest programs include a follow-up visit built in specifically because of life cycle timing, not because the first visit failed. A pest management company that guarantees a single visit solves everything, with no follow-up offered, is setting an expectation that doesn’t match how most pest biology actually works.
Where these myths actually come from
Most of them started as advice that was true once, in a narrower context, and got generalized past where it actually applies. Cheese did work reasonably well as bait decades ago before commercial peanut butter-based baits became widely available and simply outperformed it. The pattern repeats across most of these: a kernel of old truth, stretched into a rule that doesn’t hold up against how pests actually behave today. If something you’ve heard about pest control doesn’t sound quite right, call 1-844-783-4821 and ask one of our pest professionals directly.
