The Cockroach, It's Time to Take Your Medicine (Thanks to Little Angel Ayanami for the generous donation!!!)
Considering the possibility of experimental anomalies, Xu Yun and the others used a full six culture containers for their first experiment, with more than five hundred cockroaches in total—a dense, sprawling mass of black.
Looking at the cockroaches covering the inner walls of the culture containers, a scene he'd once imagined suddenly came to Xu Yun's mind:
An unseen pit, home to tens of thousands of cockroaches. Someone lost their footing at the edge and fell in, then was swallowed up by the roaches.
Ugh.
Xu Yun quickly banished the image and refocused on the workbench.
As a biological insecticide that acts on nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, imidacloprid mainly works by disrupting the pests' motor nervous systems and interfering with chemical signal transmission, thereby killing them physiologically.
It spreads in two ways.
The first is by attracting cockroaches with bait made by physically mixing ingredients together. Cockroaches can detect chemicals from as far as two hundred meters away, so many of them will follow the smell and come nibble on the poison.
But this method can only attract a small number of cockroaches. Imidacloprid's real killing power lies in the second method.
That is—
Cannibalism.
That's right. Cockroaches will eat the corpses of their own kind.
Live cockroaches like eating dead cockroaches and their droppings. That's why, when walking along the road, you'll occasionally see cockroach corpses with their rear ends or heads hollowed out. Those are the remains left behind by cannibalism.
Imidacloprid spreads by taking advantage of this habit, but it generally works for no more than three generations. Also, dead cockroaches don't carry pheromones, so their ability to attract others is limited.
The best household imidacloprid gel bait currently available in China is Bayer Maxforce, made by Bayer. It's expensive, but remarkably effective: a grain-of-rice-sized drop of bait