Worst Bug Infested Houses

As the old saying goes, there’s no place like home! But while you may love your home for its warmth, comfort, and security, so can a whole host of creepy crawlies. Left unchecked, swarms of stink bugs, tons of termites, and even barrels of bees can move in and – worse – take over.

Although the scale of some infestations is way more gross and scary than others. Take a deep breath and try not to barf, as we take a look at some of the worst bug infested houses ever.

COCKROACH CALAMITY

On a May morning in 2017, service man Philip Todd answered a call to a house in Atlanta, Georgia. Philip didn’t think he’d have to deal with anything more than a faulty boiler or a broken faucet.

But when he arrived, he found himself face-to-antennae with a much more nauseating problem. The house was overrun with cockroaches! They were in the trash, on the walls, the ceiling, the floor- nowhere was safe!

Also, it was clear whoever lived there was happily living alongside this insane infestation! Naturally, you might be judging that homeowner for not cleaning their home and getting rid of the roaches, but cockroaches are hard to catch! They’re fast, with American cockroaches able to move at speeds of up to 50 body lengths per second. That’s the equivalent of a human running at speeds of up to 210 miles an hour!

And roaches have no problem living in large numbers either. There’s no way of telling how many Philip had to deal with but, in 2019, thousands of roaches were discovered in a single sewer manhole over in Australia!

Able to use even the smallest openings, they can infest almost anywhere, as Anastasios Theoharis discovered. The construction worker was working on a house in Sydney, Australia, when he noticed the property’s telephone was out of use.

Spotting what looked like dirt beneath the casing, Anastasios pried it open and was met with one nasty surprise. We can safely say that that phone has been bugged!

BED BUGS BITE

Considering New York City is the 12th most bed bug infested city in the whole of America, the terminators of Nyack’s Global Pest Solutions must have thought they’d seen it all! But even these seasoned professionals admitted that one case from 2014 counted as, unquestionably, the worst thing they’d ever seen!

With bugs and blood splattered throughout the entire house, these terminators were stunned at the sheer scale of the untreated infestation. The bed bugs hadn’t just swarmed the mattress, they were also peppered all over the pillowcases, splattered up the walls, and had even infested the bathroom!

Bed bugs usually feed by sucking our blood while we sleep, so where better for them to nest than our mattresses? And the longer the problem is left untreated, the more they reproduce.

Makes you wonder how long this person hadn’t cleaned their house for, considering the huge number of bugs gathered here! I’d be surprised if they had any blood left in their bodies!

However, even if you try and starve bed bugs to death, they can survive for almost 5 months before that happens. And all that time they’ll be waiting, laying egg after egg after egg, growing in both number and hunger!

Thank God that’s not your house, but it could be. It’s estimated bed bugs are present in 19% of public transportation systems, 35% of hospitals, 45% of college dorms, 46% of offices, 47% of schools and day-care centers and a whopping 59% of homes! Therefore, chances are, you’re dealing with a bed bug infestation right now!

While they may not grow to the monumental numbers they’ve achieved in the house mentioned above, 1 in 5 Americans will have to deal with a bed bug infestation at some stage in their lives! Time to burn absolutely everything you own.

THE HOUSE OF 100% NOPE

If you suffer from arachnophobia, you might not want to check the footage below, you were warned. That’s not clumps of furry mold growing on the ceiling of this outdoor hut, it’s spiders.

Opiliones, to be precise, also known as harvestmen, harvesters, or daddy longlegs, and it looks like they’ve been up in the rafters of this hut breeding for quite some time.

But while the sheer amount of these harvestmen looks terrifying, they’re not the worst pests to have infest your home. Harvestmen don’t cause damage, discounting aesthetic damage, and, while they might frighten a homeowner, they can’t bite humans or produce venom.

Most of the time, harvestmen will simply head straight for your basements, crawlspaces, and garages. The spiders prefer to live in damp, shaded areas, like on trees or beneath rocks, preying on any smaller insects they come across. But, if you’re not an insect lover, you still don’t want them creating a furry carpet on your ceiling.

ANT ATTACK

It was the holiday of a lifetime for biker Tim Dzaman when he made a road trip to Latin America. He loved everything about the trip. Well, almost everything.

While he’d surely seen some crazy things out on the road, nothing was quite so extraordinary as the morning in Mexico he sat down for breakfast, and saw this:

It was thousands upon thousands of ants, moving like a waterfall in reverse up the side of the house he was staying in! As much as that makes you itch, it’s also kinda mesmerizing compared to other infestations. How come ants all know how to move in the same direction?

Well, almost all ant colonies constantly communicate with each other when traveling. No, that doesn’t mean they’re asking each other for directions. They do this by using pheromones: chemical substances released by insects to influence the behavior of other members of their species.

When traveling, ants secrete a chemical trail of pheromones for the other ants to follow, guiding the colony in a straight line along the quickest route possible. And, if the quickest route possible is through your house, then there’s nothing you can do to stop them!

In America, there are more than 700 ant species, although only 25 of them will invade your home. You could invest in a few bottles of Raid to try and keep them at bay, but against a colony this size, it’d probably be easier to just move house!

TERMITE TERROR

Chris “The Man” Taylor has really earned his nickname. A terminator for Forensic Pest Management, based in Sydney, Australia, Chris is the guy you call if you wind up with some unwanted roomies.

He specializes in bird control and, in a true sign of The Man’s courage, termites! The footage below shows one of the largest termite nests he’s ever had to remove, which was inside the wall of someone’s house!

The more Chris peeled away, the more evident it became that this termite nest was so huge it had enveloped every single wall of the room! Termites build these giant nests, which are more like mud tubes, to reach food sources and protect themselves from open air. When out on the prowl, termites eat wood constantly.

24/7, the critters use their saw-toothed jaws to break off fragments of wood one teeny-weeny piece at a time, but it all adds up! Each year it’s estimated they cause more than $5 billion in property damage!

In an average year, you can expect a single termite queen to lay between 5,000 and 10,000 eggs! 60,000 termites is considered a mature colony, with typical colony sizes ranging anywhere between 60,000 and 2 million.

In those numbers, termites can cause extensive structural damage to buildings, just like this one! Thank God The Man with a plan was there.

STINK BUG SCOURGE

The day, October 7th, 2021, would live long in the memory of an unsuspecting woman in Hanson, Kentucky. Like 84% of American houses, the woman’s home was kitted out with an indoor air conditioner.

While essential for the sweltering Kentucky summers, the air conditioners also offered an open door to a few unwelcome guests. When she peeled back the security tape, the woman was assaulted by a mass of hair-raising, foul-smelling stink bugs!

Panicking, the woman began attacking the stink bugs with a vacuum cleaner. She hoped that would be the end of the gruesome invasion, but the stink bugs weren’t going to leave her alone that easily.

When she returned to her bedroom, she discovered the stinkbugs had already started making her house their new home. Could you imagine waking up to see these creepy crawlies right next to your head? Most of us would be flailing around like her too! Watch the footage below:

However, when you’re face to face with a stink bug, you shouldn’t get too aggressive. When threatened, stink bugs release a putrid, noxious chemical from a gland on their abdomen which they spray everywhere! So, they’re creepy and stinky.

These bugs aren’t just found in Kentucky, as Jeff from Morgantown, West Virginia discovered in his home. When Jeff came home from work in 2012, he found his home overrun by stink bugs! It was completely covered in them, and he estimated there were at least a few thousand around the property.

But how could so many have appeared so quickly? Well, stink bugs lay between roughly 30 to 100 eggs, meaning they can multiply at an extraordinarily fast rate! To make matters worse, stink bugs have very few natural predators in the US, so their numbers just keep growing and growing and growing.

LADYBUG LUNACY

It was a November day like any other back in 2015, when Roger Stephenson noticed something different about his home in Stone County, Arkansas.

By Roger’s own count, millions of ladybugs had swarmed his house. Now, maybe I just don’t go outside enough, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen more than 2 ladybugs together, let alone a swarm!

Well, in Arkansas, the presence of ladybugs means winter is coming. From the middle of October to early November, as the temperature cools, lady bugs can be found swarming on the sunny side of houses, trying to find somewhere warm and dry to spend the winter.

The same stunt is done by ladybugs’ cousins, Asian lady beetles, which reddit user boilermaker105 found out when thousands swarmed his work in Ohio back in 2014! Not only do these beetles release a putrid defensive fluid that stains whatever it touches, it also smells vile, making them absolute stinkers to remove!

Ladybugs were introduced to the United States by the Department of Agriculture as a biological control agent. So, while they can be a nuisance, they are adept at consuming crop-eating bugs like aphids and mites. So, in a way, we have a lot to thank lady bugs for! Even if they do leave one heck of a mess.

NEST NIGHTMARE

With 20 years’ experience in beekeeping under his belt, professional exterminator Jude Verret must have thought he’d seen it all. But no amount of beekeeping could have prepared Jude for the site he discovered in Louisiana back in 2017.

Those ain’t bees, those are wasps! And not just any wasps: yellowjackets! These notoriously aggressive predatory pests are famous for their defensive behaviors, as they swarm and sting repeatedly if they sense danger.

They also tend to build their nests on the ground in naturally defended spots, like burrows and crevices. But this swarm had discovered an old shed and decided to colonize the floor of the entire thing.

Luckily, Jude was more than up to the task of removing them. Over the course of 45 minutes, he stripped the entire nest from old storage boxes and garden tools without getting stung even once! Forget your queen bees, this guy is a yellowjacket-clearing king!

But this wasn’t the last time Jude had to tackle a yellowjacket nest! He was called out to a house in Dulac, Louisiana back in 2021 where he had to do battle with this colossal hive! The yellowjackets had attached their nest to the underside of a house, which was up so high Jude had no choice but to clear it out with his hands!

He wasted no time getting right into the heart of the nest, ripping out everything he could get his hands on! And the yellowjackets were not happy. Jude estimated that there were more than a million wasps in the colony, which sounds like an exaggeration!

But nests containing millions of yellow jackets have been recorded before! And even though he was being pelted by a million angry wasps from all sides, he still finished the job. Now that is what you call a professional!

MOSQUITO MADNESS

There are insects we hate, there are insects we despise, and then… then there are mosquitos. Just hearing one of the little bloodsuckers buzzing around your room is enough to drive you mad! But what if your house was infested with an entire swarm of them, like this one from 2014.

It looks like there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands there! If I were him, I’d have set fire to the entire city. But what were so many of them doing here? Well, warm and wet weather that evening had provided the perfect breeding conditions for a massive swarm of these particular pests!

Female mosquitoes lay their pupa in “rafts” of up to 300 in stagnant water. The pupa then emerges from the water when it becomes an adult which, depending on the conditions, can happen all at the same time!

So, if you live in a warm, wet area next to a source of standing water, be sure to invest in some heavy-duty mosquito nets, you’re gonna need them!

LOCO LOCUSTS

Making her way through St Clair Shores in Michigan, Katie Williams was gazing out at the routine all-American streets. But all of a sudden, she drove past a house that looked like it had been struck by one of the biblical plagues.

She couldn’t believe her eyes when she saw this condo was completely covered in locusts! They’re on the walls, on the intercom, and on the road crunching under her tires. Were the homeowners waiting inside, oblivious to this? Or had they concluded the locust pile-on was a curse from God and fled the scene?

Well, whatever they did, it might have comforted them to know that locusts are just a species of grasshopper. While introverted grasshopper species live solitarily, locusts are forced together at food sources during dry spells, causing them to reproduce at a rapid rate!

And, even worse, thanks to climate change warming up the world, swarms of locusts will only get more frequent. Prolonged bouts of wet weather will create environments where locusts will start to thrive! And, as a final cherry on top, nothing can stop them from swarming. All we can do, ironically, is pray!

FLEE THE FLEAS

You might think all fleas are those tiny, blood-sucking insects that latch onto your pets and make them itch. But snow fleas, despite the name, are not actually fleas, even though they do jump around like the blood-sucking kind. You might have heard them called springtails but, despite that name, these insects thrive in winter in moist, damp areas.

Back in 2012, a man in Alabama heard his cat making some strange noises down in the basement. He went to investigate, only to be greeted by this freakishly festering pile of snow fleas.

By his estimates, there were roughly 50,000 of the insidious critters scattered around his basement. Snow fleas usually make their homes outdoors but, on occasion, they’ll hop their way into your house. And if they find a perfectly moist patch, they’ll start to multiply like crazy!

Luckily, unlike the other fleas, snow fleas don’t bite, so the biggest nuisance they’ll cause you is their large numbers. Just as our Alabaman friend discovered! But where does the “snow” in snow fleas come from? Well, maybe the footage below will answer your question.

Somehow, they looked less sinister all piled up! Snowmelt attracts swarms of snow fleas in droves, and because of their dark color, they show up prominently against it. That’s enough to put a real blemish on your white Christmas!