In your opinion which makes worse pest, ants, flies, roaches, rats, or wasp/yellow jackets?

Are these four the only choices, or can another option be thrown into the hat?

Bed Bugs

Roaches. The scare the bejeezus out of me.

@Pied_Pfeffer Whaddaya got? Spiders, bats, something else? :-)

@Hypocrisy_Central Thank you for the response. I won’t say that these trump what you’ve offered up, but some other examples come to mind, like introducing other elements into an environment. It could be something like animals…grey squirrels have virtually wiped out the red squirrel population in England and rabbits have created havoc in Australia. The overtaking of kudzu in the southern US is of concern. The spread of disease, such as swine and aviation flu and HIV/AIDs are others.

Wasps sing to you? I’d pay for that! Well, maybe only once. Perhaps they are terrible singers, using an inappropriate key. Do they sing in Bee Sharp!?

For me its wasp. As for ants, roaches or flies you can at least contol them some what. But wasps are really nasty and to approach one with a spray takes a lot of courage. There is always a good chance they will sting you before you have a chance to kill them.
I found if you use a roach bait and put it in the path of where ants travel they will fall for it and take the food back to the nest and kill the whole nest. I did this several times with success and managed to get rid of all the ants around my home. Then clean the trail and you won’t see any more ants till the next season. It actually only takes a week.
As for roaches the baits work the same.
As for fly’s the best way to decrease the amount is don’t let your garbage pile up outside and clean out your trash can. You can also use citronella candles to keep them out of the area you are out.
None of these things work for wasps.
@talljasperman I agree bed bugs are horrible. However there are some excellent covers one could purchase to protect your mattress from collecting bed bugs. And you can sanitize these covers. Especially if they are plastic. Hospitals have plastics on their matresses and they sanitize them all the time. They to are controlable.

Roaches are I would guess the hardest to eradicate from the home, I hear they hide everywhere. Wasps are a piece of cake to get rid of so are ants. Flies? Just remove the food source same for rats.

Wood boring insects like termites and powderpost beetles are the worst to try and eliminate from your home. The only thing that gets rid of powder posts is a bulldozer.

Cockroaches are very invasive. They give off (on their body parts) an allergen that can cause asthma in humans.

Also, they fly during mating season. Shudder!

Rats

I’ve been living in this house for 37 years now, and I’ve never had a problem with rats.

I’ve seen one or two roaches in my house in that time, with the last sighting being about a decade ago.

I once had to remove a wasp mud hut from my door frame and another one from the outside of the door. The only other time I had a wasp nuisance was when they were swirling over a saturated area of my front yard that was above a leaky water supply pipe. I think that was in 1998.

The one time I had a problem involving more than an occasional fly was in 1992, and I dealt with that using just a vacuum cleaner- no mess and no poison.

I’ve had several ant invasions and I’ve usually had to use poison to deal with them, so they’ve been the worst pests. However, it’s been several years since I’ve had to deal with anything more than an occasional trespasser.

Yellow jackets are the absolute worst around here. They build their nests in sneaky places (like under the gate latch), they hover near your mouth and food when you are eating, they burrow into every apple on the tree and surprise attack when you pick one… and the sting hurts like crazy. I could totally live the rest of my life without ever seeing another one of those summer-ruiners.

Uhh… rats. I would flip. the. fuck. out.

Roaches are gross. Definitely second on the list, but I consider them and rats to be in two completely different categories.

Wasps and bees are the worst pests. They turn the all the people in your house into mager pests! The bees don’t even come close to guests yet they have a flip spaz attacks!

My worst pest of the moment is my two year old grandson. He went out an pulled all the flowers off the plants I bought for my patio, threw them on the ground and stomped on them. I have no idea what he has against flowers.

The rest don’t bother me as long as they stay where they belong. Sometimes ants come into the house, but I just spray them will Lysol Disinfectant, and that gets rid of them.

Roaches are the only pest that really bothers me, and it bothers me even more that it’s such an irrational fear. In Florida, especially during the rainy periods, they invade. Not large scale invasions, usually just one at a time, but they are big and they are fast and they fly and they have creepy antennas and I just lose my head when I see one. If it’s a baby, I can scoot it out myself without going into minor conniptions. Any bigger and I either pack the room with every cat I own or call someone else in the house to deal with it. I’ve researched them thinking that educating myself would make me less apprehensive, but no deal. I think I’m even more freaked out by them now, actually. The wikipedia on palmetto bugs is of little use to me.

The other pets listed I don’t really consider pests. I’ve never seen a rat that was not someone’s pet. Wasps don’t tend to bother me. Ants come in rather large invasions but disappear within hours without a trace and very rarely appear at all, so I really don’t bother with them. We have the air running 24/7 here so the windows/doors are not left open, thus preventing any fly problems. Cats are good for the occasional stray fly though.

@martianspringtime LOL at “pack the room with every cat I own”