Common Garage Bugs 

Approximately 55% of homeowners claim that they use their garage as their home’s primary entrance, which opens the door to serious pest infestations. Since garage doors are often the largest entrance to a building, it’s common to regularly discover bugs in this space. Watching out for these common garage bugs can help you stop infestations faster.

 

Common Bugs Found In Garages

If an insect can be found outside, you can bet that you could run into it in your garage. However, a few types of bugs enjoy living in garages.

Insects invade garages to escape harsh weather and to find steady food and water sources that sustain their lives and colonies. Spotting one or more of these common garage bugs signifies that you must rev up your pest control strategies.

Ants

You can find several types of ants in a garage, including carpenter, pavement, and odorous house species. Carpenter ants love garages with large amounts of open wood surfaces that give them an easy spot to build tunnels for their colonies.

Other types of ants will visit garages to feed on stored food and garbage. While you might detest ants for their stings, you must be aware that they can cause even bigger problems. Ants can cause damage to electrical wires that can lead to shorts and raise the risk of a house fire.

 

Cockroaches

Roaches love living in garages where they can easily slip in and out through cracks around the door and other small holes. They’ll happily find food in your garbage can and may even find their way inside to the rest of your house.

 

Spiders

You can find everything from the common house spider to dangerous brown recluses in a garage. Spiders come to your garage for the same pests that you want to get rid of. You’ll often spot their webs hanging in the corners near the door, where they are more likely to catch those pesky flies.

 

Flying Insects

Gnats, wasps, and other nuisance-winged insects are also common garage pests. Fruit flies and other types love garages that house trash cans since they provide daily opportunities to find new food sources.

 

Silverfish

Finding silverfish in your garage depends on how much moisture exists inside. Silverfish inhabit garages with leaky water-filled appliances such as water heaters and washing machines.

 

Beetles

You can find over 30,000 types of beetles in the United States, making identifying them challenging. However, you’ll often discover beetles in your garage after bringing home items that harbored them or their eggs, such as food boxes or bags of soil.

 

Termites

Termites tend to strike fear in homeowners’ hearts for a good reason. Termites can lead to thousands of dollars of property damage in just a short period, and garage spaces are an area where they might begin their invasion without being detected until it’s too late.

 

Rodents

Mice and rats are also common to find in garages. They often enter garages to seek warmth from the elements and to search for any food that might be stored in your garage. Learn more about how to get rid of mice in your garage. 

 

Types of Damage Garage Bugs Cause

Naturally, termites and carpenter ants can lead to serious damage to wooden building materials that could eventually destroy the structural integrity of your house.

If you use your garage for hobbies, such as woodworking, having wood-boring insects inside could destroy the materials you store for your projects.

If you use your garage for food storage, having bugs inside the space is just as unacceptable as finding roaches or beetles in your kitchen pantry.

Cockroaches and other insects might also choose to invade your car if you park it inside your garage. Car infestations add extra steps to your pest control strategies, and few things are worse than finding a roach crawling across the dashboard while navigating through rush hour traffic.

Bugs also leave droppings and nests behind, requiring costly cleanup to restore your garage to hygienic conditions.

 

How to Get Rid of Garage Bugs

The CDC recommends a four-step method for controlling cockroaches: prevention, sanitation, trapping, and chemical control. This method also works well for eliminating and repelling other pests.

Ideally, you would start with preventing pests from invading your garage, but it is common to already be past this point. If your garage already has bugs inside, you’ll need to remove them first.

Traps and chemical control strategies work well for eliminating pest infestations, but different types of bugs require using ones that target their vulnerabilities.

For instance, some garage owners find success using insect traps that lure bugs into them with bait where they come into contact with the poison. Insects, such as termites, might require more invasive treatments.

Professional pest technicians know how to kill termites and carpenter ants living inside walls where you can’t easily place bait or use over-the-counter sprays.

Once you’ve killed the majority of the bugs, you’ll then be able to move on to cleaning up the messes they left behind and removing any attractants that could cause them to come back.

 

How Do You Keep Bugs Out of Garage Boxes?

Garages work great for storage, and people store everything from seasonal clothing and equipment to food. The only problem with using a garage for storage is that bugs tend to find their way into boxes where they can make nests and hide from predators.

The easiest way to keep bugs out of your storage boxes is to choose containers made from plastic that insects can’t easily chew their way through. The boxes should also have an airtight lid with latches or other methods to secure them on top. This is especially important if the boxes contain food that could entice insects to go inside.

While airtight boxes work wonders for preventing pests from getting to the contents, you’ll still want to use professional spraying to secure the spaces around the boxes. If pests don’t survive even entering your garage, then you can bet that they’ll never make it to a box.

You should also seal all possible entry points that bugs can use to enter your garage. Here is a quick video on how to seal a common pest entry point.

 

Ways to Maintain a Bug-Free Garage

The feeling of being able to work in your garage or store your belongings there is too good to let a few bugs destroy. Now that you’ve got a bug-free space, you’ll want to plan for regular spraying services to keep it that way.

Then, take the time to check around the garage door for signs of damage that could let a bug inside. Replacing the seal as needed eliminates entry points, and removing clutter and food debris in your garage makes it more likely that a bug will flee the garage when you open the door rather than trying to stay inside where they don’t have what they need to survive.