Will Lemon Juice Kill Cockroaches?

If you see a cockroach crawling around your home, your first instinct is probably to get rid of it as quickly as possible! Unfortunately, where there’s one roach, there are almost always more. Finding a repellent that not only keeps more cockroaches from coming in, but kills the ones you already have, should be a top priority.

Some people don’t want to spray chemicals all over their home, so it’s tempting to look up natural cockroach repellents online.

Unfortunately, not all of them work as well as you might think—including lemon juice.

A quick Google search will show you dozens of ways to “naturally” get rid of cockroaches. These DIY solutions can sound great on the surface, especially since most of them can be created using things you already have on hand.

One of the popular suggestions for getting rid of cockroaches is to use lemon juice. It’s true that lemon juice and other citrus-based liquids can do a decent job of keeping roaches away, but it won’t kill any cockroaches already in your home.

There’s no evidence that suggests cockroaches don’t like the smell of lemon juice, and it certainly isn’t poisonous to them. However, you can use it as a sanitization liquid to keep your floors and counters clean. Clean spaces are less likely to see roach infestations.

The best way to kill cockroaches is to use poisonous bait.

Again, if you see one cockroach, you probably have more lurking around your house. When a cockroach eats some of the poison, they’ll take the residue back to the nest with them, and effectively start killing every other roach there.

You can also set adhesive cockroach traps around your home. When roaches walk in, they’ll get stuck and won’t be able to escape, so they will eventually die. However, this method might not completely get rid of your roach problem since it doesn’t get to the root of the problem—the nest.

Of course, if you don’t want to use commercial bait and you don’t like the idea of cockroaches dying a slow death in a trap, you can make your own repellent.

There are other DIY ways to kill roaches, including mixing Borax and sugar or sprinkling diatomaceous earth around your home. But, when it comes. tousing lemon juice as a roach killer, you’re not going to get very far.

Save your citrus for cleaning, and keep cockroaches at bay with traps, bait, and more effective DIY solutions.