The Bugs You’re Finding — and What They’re After
Each of these pests ends up inside for a slightly different reason. Where you find them can give you a good clue about how they got in and what conditions are attracting them.
Silverfish
Bathrooms, laundry rooms, attics, closets, and storage areas are common places to find silverfish. They like humidity and quiet spaces where paper, cardboard, books, photos, or fabric sit undisturbed.
Unlike some other pests homeowners notice in summer, silverfish can actually feed and survive indoors. They eat paper, glue, book bindings, cardboard, and natural fabrics, so stored boxes in attics, closets, or crawl spaces can become a food source.
Centipedes
Centipedes are fast, flat, and hard to miss when they sprint across a floor. Homeowners often find them in bathrooms, basements, crawl spaces, garages, and lower-level rooms where moisture collects.
Centipedes are predators, meaning they feed on spiders and other smaller insects. Seeing one now and then may not be a major concern, but seeing them regularly can mean they’re finding other bugs inside your home.
Earwigs
Earwigs look worse than they usually are. The pincers on the back end make them seem more threatening, but most homeowners are more bothered by where they show up — near kitchen sinks, bathroom floors, sliding doors, back doors, garages, and damp entry points.
Outside, earwigs hide in tight, damp areas under mulch, porch planters, landscape timbers, leaf piles, and stones. When those areas dry out or get too crowded, they may move toward the foundation and slip through small gaps around doors, siding, or utility openings.
Millipedes
Millipedes are slow-moving pests that curl up when disturbed. They often show up in large numbers after heavy rain, especially around garages, patios, porches, basement entries, and lower-level rooms.
They usually do not survive long indoors because they need moisture. If you keep finding dead millipedes on the garage floor, near a door, or along a basement wall, it usually means there are many living right outside the house.
Crickets
Crickets are often heard before they’re seen. Homeowners may hear chirping at night from behind a dryer, inside a closet, near the garage, or somewhere along a wall.
House crickets are attracted to lights around porches, garages, and entryways. Once they get close to the house, they can slip through gaps under doors, around garage seals, or near utility openings.
Why Summer Makes These Bugs Worse
Georgia and South Carolina summers create the perfect setup for these pests to move toward homes. They need moisture to survive, but they also try to escape the harshest outdoor conditions.
During long stretches of heat, shaded mulch beds, pine straw, leaf litter, and soil around the foundation can begin to dry out. After heavy rain or afternoon thunderstorms, those same areas can become damp again and hold moisture close to the house. That back-and-forth pattern sends pests moving.
Warm nights make the problem worse. When overnight temperatures stay high, these bugs stay active after dark and have more time to travel across patios, crawl space entries, garage thresholds, and foundation edges. The more activity there is around the outside of your home, the more likely some of them are to find a way inside.
Where Are They Getting In?
Silverfish, centipedes, earwigs, millipedes, and crickets usually do not chew their way into a house. They use gaps that are already there.
They may come in under exterior doors, especially garage doors with worn weatherstripping. They can slip through cracks where the foundation meets the siding, openings around pipes and utility lines, dryer vent gaps, damaged crawl space screens, loose sliding door tracks, basement window gaps, and expansion joints around concrete slabs or patios.
In older homes across Georgia’s Piedmont region — from Oxford and Covington to Monroe and Athens — vented crawl spaces can be a major source of summer pest activity. Warm, humid air moves through those spaces, and pests can travel from the soil into the crawl space and then up into the home.
In Upstate South Carolina, homes around Greenville, Anderson, and the Pickens County foothills often deal with afternoon thunderstorms through July and August. When rain soaks the soil next to the foundation, mulch beds and landscape fabric can hold that moisture close to the house. Earwigs, millipedes, and crickets may show up inside soon after.
Newer suburban homes can have the same issue. Around Alpharetta, Duluth, Acworth, and nearby communities, irrigation systems that spray along the foundation can create a damp strip that pests follow straight to the house.
How Bizzy Bee Handles Summer Bugs Around Your Home
Bizzy Bee’s residential pest control plans — Advantage, Essential, and Complete — cover silverfish, centipedes, earwigs, millipedes, and crickets as part of the 22+ pests included in our year-round service.
These plans include regularly scheduled exterior treatments targeting areas where pests are most likely to enter. We'll also provide interior treatments, if necessary.
Instead of just reacting to the bug you saw on the floor, our service focuses on your foundation, doors, garage, crawl space access, and other common entry areas to help prevent bugs from getting inside in the first place.
Frequently Asked Questions About Summer Bugs
Is it normal to see several different bugs inside during summer?
It can happen after heavy rain, high heat, or changes in moisture around the home. If you keep seeing different pests in different rooms, there may be more than one entry point or moisture issue involved.
Will these bugs go away on their own when summer ends?
Activity usually drops when temperatures cool, but the problem may not fully resolve. Silverfish can survive indoors, and other pests may hide in crawl spaces, garages, or wall voids until conditions change again.
Do I need to remove all the mulch around my house?
No. Just pull mulch or pine straw back from the foundation when possible. A small gap helps reduce the moisture these pests look for near your home.
Schedule Pest Control for Your Georgia or South Carolina Home
If bugs show up inside your home this summer, Bizzy Bee Exterminators can help. We’ll inspect inside and around your home, identify the pest pressures, and recommend the right residential pest control plan to eliminate existing activity and help prevent new infestations.
Request your free quote today.
