This is what the marmorated stinkbug menace looks like up here at Solitude:



Now, imagine this on the entire surface of the house, and every last one of them seeking to find a crack or crevasse they can squirm through to get inside. And at least a hundred of them manage to do so...every day.

Just out of curiosity what measures are you taking against them? Are they susceptible to bug zappers and do you have the juice to run same?

I have a bug zapper. They ignore it both with white light and with UV. I have a pheremone-based trap (Rescue brand). Has proven to be utterly useless. I've laid out flypaper. They avoid it. I have a 3 meter exentsion tube for my vacuum cleaner. That's how I deal with the hundred or so that cling to the high ceilings each day. About three sessions of thirty bugs each, noon, afternoon and evening.

The little bastards come with built-in environment suits that make them insecticide-resistant. They treat citronella like salsa. They gargle with organic remedies like lemongrass oil. There is apparently nothing that repels them, and insecticides with residual action do not do much because they are sealed so well that they do not pick the stuff up by walking through it.

I believe we shall simply have to endure until the outside temps drop to where the remaining ones hole up for the winter, and then slowly eradicate the ones that show themselves in the house. Until then, we keep the house sealed, spray the portals where they might enter, and pray for frost.

Damn. And I guess due to their unappetizing nature they have no predators you could try attracting, like setting out something to attract birds to eat them.

The only thing I can think of is leaving their dead bodies after you stomp on the ones in your vacuum cleaner outside hoping the smell of their massed, crushed dead repels them. If not try burning a pile of their little corpses and hope that smell drives them away. After that, I got nothing...

Hopefully the seasons will change soon and leave you with a stinkbug free lair to plot and scheme within.

It just occurred to me how perverse nature was in making something as useless and odious as the stinkbug practically invulnerable while useful insects like bees seem to be heading for extinction, unless the media is overblowing this whole "Disappearing bees" thing which I hope they are as I tend to like having food and bees are an important part of the food chain.

They do have natural predators, but they did not get accidentally imported with the stinkbugs.

Well, sorry I couldn't help with your bug problem, but at least by replying to your IP I seemed to have given you a chance to vent a little, which it sounds like you needed.

This year my house has suffered a severe fly infestation like nothing we've seen, BTW, we wondered if it was due to the heatwave. A friend of mine used to have problems with japanese beetles in his old house.