Some species of crickets invade houses and as a result become pests. It is one thing to have some pest munching on the fabrics, food, and paper products in your basement or living room, but it is another when they start that monotonous chirping at night when you are trying to sleep.

An occasional cricket or two in the home might not be a problem if you can tolerate the infernal chirping, but they can become large populations if not gotten under control.

Crickets look a bit like black grasshoppers and make a chirping noise by rubbing their legs together. House crickets, believe it or not, normally live outside. They love garbage dumps for obvious reasons. They like warm weather, but as it gets cooler at the end of the summer, they can move indoors. Given that every female can lay an average of 728 eggs and these eggs can complete their life cycle indoors, you can see that allowing a cricket in the home is just asking for trouble.

Crickets are attracted to lights. The hide during the day, but come out at night to avoid predators. Because they can fly, they can get in your house even through second or third story windows or through skylights. They eat silk, wool, nylon, rayon, and wood so they can play havoc with scrapbooks, clothes, or other fabric or paper items. They like basements because many times that is where they can find moisture.

To keep crickets away from your home, keep all areas around your house free of moisture, dense vegetation, and weeds. Clean up any garbage and remove potential living sites, like stacks of brick, piles of stone, rotting wood, or other debris. Like preventing the entry of any other insect, caulk and seal all cracks especially around basement windows and doorways. Also use sodium vapor lights for outdoor lighting, as opposed to mercury vapor lights, because the bright mercury vapor bulbs will attract crickets from far away because the light is so bright.