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.

Termites are the bane of any wooden structure. In a matter of years crucial structural supports can be honeycombed by these pests and if they go undetected for a long time, they can destroy the structural integrity of a home or other structure. To get rid of termites generally requires the application of strong chemicals that are highly toxic.

To help develop more environmentally friendly ways to rid houses, structures, and even trees of these pests, researchers in Illinois and Louisiana are developing a new strategy to eliminate them. What they have done is create a fungus filled foam that can be injected into hard to reach places. The foam contains spores of a fungus that kills termites by feeding and growing inside their bodies.

This fungus Paecilomyces fumosoroseus targets the Formosan subterranean termite which is now prolific in the southern and southwestern United States. This termite is spreading and is unrivaled in the size of the colonies that it develops and in its tunneling and voracious appetite for wood, both in houses and living trees. The fungus, however, poses no danger to humans or non-host insects.

In the not too distant future, this new discovery might move out of the university laboratory and into the commercial sector, helping to eliminate one of the most destructive of the wood boring insects. Losses in New Orleans alone due to these termites, before Hurricane Katrina, had reached $300 million dollars a year.

How it works is that foam with the fungus is injected into places there the termites are boring. The foam then fills up any cavities and tunnels. As the foam dries and collapses, it disperses spores onto the termites or leaves them in the places where the termites travel. The spores then enter into the termite and begin their life cycle as a fungus which destroys the termite from the inside out.