Across a year of residential call-outs, five species account for the large majority of what we see. They are not the most dramatic pests, and none of them makes the news, but between them they are why most people call a pest control company at all.

What is useful about knowing which five is that each has a specific vulnerability. Generic advice — “keep it clean” — is true and almost useless. Specific advice works.

1. Odorous house ants

The small dark ants that trail along a countertop and smell faintly of rotten coconut when crushed. A mature colony can hold several queens and tens of thousands of workers, spread across multiple nest sites.

What they want: sugar in spring and summer, protein when the brood is developing.

What ends it: a slow-acting gel bait that workers carry back to the nest.

What makes it worse: repellent spray. It kills the trail and causes the colony to bud into satellite nests, turning one problem into four.

2. German cockroaches

Small, tan, two dark stripes behind the head. Unlike most cockroaches these do not come in from outside — they breed indoors, year-round, and arrive in grocery boxes, second-hand appliances and shared laundry.

What they want: water, more urgently than food.

What ends it: gel bait plus an insect growth regulator, placed in hinge voids and under appliance panels.

What makes it worse: treating the floor. They travel through voids and crevices, not across open ground.

3. House mice

What they want: shelter first, food second. A mouse will move into a spotless house if the house is warm and has a gap.

What ends it: exclusion. Snap traps clear the current population; sealing every gap over a quarter inch is what stops the next one.

What makes it worse: rodenticide indoors, which reliably produces a dead mouse inside a wall cavity and a smell that lasts three weeks.

4. Subterranean termites

What they want: cellulose in contact with moisture.

What ends it: a continuous soil barrier, or a monitored bait system where ground conditions make a barrier unreliable.

What makes it worse: waiting. This is the only pest on the list where the cost of delay is structural.

5. Bed bugs

What they want: you, and a seam within a few feet of where you sleep.

What ends it: whole-room heat, applied to every room that the inspection shows is involved, verified at fourteen days.

What makes it worse: throwing out the mattress, moving to the sofa, or treating one room in a shared building. All three spread it.

The pattern

Look down that list and the same three levers appear each time:

1. Water. Fix the leak, dry the sink, empty the bowl.
2. Gaps. A quarter inch is a door.
3. Identification. The right treatment for the wrong species is the wrong treatment.

Everything else is detail. A household that gets those three right rarely needs us for anything but the annual inspection.