Travelling back to Canada with bugs?
March 5, 2016 7:29 AM   Subscribe

Leaving the Arenal region of Costa Rica to return to Toronto today. We're staying in a lush, insecty area and there's tiny ants and spiders all over everything. Pretty positive they'll be plenty in our packed bags.

What should I do when we get home to avoid having them all over our house? It will be around freezing in Toronto, so was thinking of leaving everything in the garage and putting clothes directly in the washer from there.
posted by dripdripdrop to Travel & Transportation around Costa Rica (3 answers total)
 
Freeze everything that isn't damaged by freezing.

If it works on woodboring beetles in lumber, then I'd think it would kill tropical insects on clothing.
posted by FallowKing at 7:44 AM on March 5, 2016


When I had bedbugs, I learned the technique of putting clothes in the dryer first, then doing the regular wash & dry. The idea was that wet clothes wouldn't get as hot in the dryer as dry clothes can. Apparently some bugs don't drown easily. It's a strategy I'd recommend.
posted by monkeymonkey at 8:13 AM on March 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


The freezing in the garage is probably the right thing to do. If they live through that, I've dealt with ants and spiders before with a couple of roommates I had way back in university. For the ants, we put sticky poison down. I'm pretty sure it was a Raid product. The ants were probably eating all the maple syrup that got all over the floor that one time because of...reasons. Anyways, put the stuff around the door frame from the garage to the house. Spiders? Well they're another story. Hopefully they'll eat the ants, but if it's cold out they're not gonna want to stay in the garage. I remember back in this apartment we had, it was probably October, just starting to get cold, and we got invaded this one night. Like our whole living room had these spiders dropping down at the same time in this coordinated attack on us, it was weird. Anyways. Do you have an Econ 101 textbook around somewhere? They are as effective on spiders as they are on house centipedes, or "speeding eyebrows" as I used to call them at the time. Hopefully they don't last in a Canadian winter and die before they get in your house.
posted by Hoopo at 7:54 PM on March 10, 2016


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