Our story in the house overrun by long-tailed silverfish part 1
I know that long-tailed silverfish are a bit of an unknown thing and I only had personal experience with them a few months ago. I was puzzled by these tenacious silverfish-like creatures. I immersed myself quite hard in looking for information about them, because I wanted to find a way to get rid of them as quickly as possible.
I noticed that there was very little information on available websites and nowhere did anyone say whether or not you can get rid of them completely. I found that it was quite frustrating, at least for me. I looked for information from abroad and tried to find the latest studies and techniques to eradicate them.
You may have read somewhere that getting rid of long-tailed silverfish is more difficult than silverfish, and this is the case. Here I will share my own experience with long-tailed silverfish and how we got rid of them.
Here are some good traps and poisons to get from Amazon:
It all started in October 2021 on a stormy, rainy Friday before moving weekend. We had just bought a lovely newish detached house. Before the purchase, we had carried out a proper condition check and we ourselves inspected the house a couple of times before making the purchase decision. I am quite particular and pay attention especially to everything related to the world of bugs indoors. I also focus on indoor air and smells. The apartment seemed good in every way.
In the last few years, we had moved several times with our children and completely renovated our previous apartment. We were tired continuous moving and now we were going to relax in our new home. The idea is to stay and live for a longer period of time in this dream house.
We got the keys on Thursday and in the evening we went to throw a few carpets to protect the floor in the hall for the movers. We went early on Friday morning to continue the protections. I turned on the lights and immediately noticed some of silverfish-looking creatures on the floor of the hall under the corner of the carpet. We didn’t have time to worry about it because the move was about to start.
The move began and continued until the evening hours. In the evening we decided to clean carefully and chlorite was used a lot. Saturday morning I was scared when I came into the kitchen because there were so many long-tailed silverfish on the floor. I was upset because the sellers hadn’t mentioned anything about this to us. As the day progressed, long-tailed silverfish were spotted here and there and we cleaned hard and put chlorite in the drains. However, we were in a good and happy mood about our new home, and even at this stage, a few long-tailed silverfish could not shake that at all.
The night between Saturday and Sunday passed me completely awake. It was storming outside and I was frantically searching for information on exterminating the long-tailed silverfish.
On Sunday morning, there was a new situation, when a rather large furry individual ran next to the toaster almost into my lap. I told my husband that this much I also know, that these are not silverfish anymore.
We decided to do the poisoning right away. We took the children out of the house for grandma to take care of and sprayed a part of the downstairs with insecticide according to the instructions on the jar.
Note! we dealt with the kitchen and a little bit of the hallway. There was quite a bit of aerosol in the apartment, the substance was floating in the air as an aerosol everywhere. We were totally unaware of what was going to happen next. The next few hours were quite unpleasant to say the least!
I literally stood on the armchair with my mouth open because I couldn’t believe my eyes. In the living room, where we didn’t even put poison that time, slow, as if drugged, long-tailed silverfish started coming out from under the molding on the end wall. There were a LOT of them!!! Dozens of long-tailed silverfish (which we didn’t know at the time were actually long-tailed silverfish) wandered around and my husband heroically splashed the long-tailed silverfish to their final fate. The silverfishs looked pretty small compared to these long-tailed silverfish, in hindsight.
Here are some good traps and poisons to get from Amazon:
Fortunately, I figured out during the day to collect them for the pest control. I had already understood at that stage that our own measures would not be sufficient for such a huge population of long-tailed silverfish. As soon as Monday, I called a pest control firm and that started a different story.