Strange little bugs have been taking up residence in East Texas homes lately and they’re not even paying rent. 

An entomologist tells us millipedes like rain and moist environments and multiply in it, but even they have had enough of all the rain we’ve had.

“Sometimes when it gets too wet they start looking for a place that’s a little bit dryer so they look for high ground and it could be your house,” said Joe Pase, an entomologist. “They have to have moisture, they want moisture but too much is too much of a good thing.”

Some people are spending their mornings and evenings getting rid of them, but it’s proven to be an impossible task.

“I’d say we kill thousands in the evenings and mornings there,” said Brent Stewart, Nacogdoches County resident. “We sweep up dust pan-fulls every morning, every evening.”

Thankfully they are harmless, they do not bite or sting.

Millipedes are decomposers, they eat compost and decaying matter.

Mostly they’re just a nuisance to people.

“The only probably negative thing about them, in my experience, is if you pick one up they’ll give off a real foul smelling odor that can be irritating to your skin or if you rub your eye it can be irritating to your eye,” said Pase.

Which brings us to the million dollar question, how do we get rid of them?

“On most homes if they’re in the house as well as outside you spray the inside, just kind of like a roach treatment,” said Lynn Hill, A-1 Pest & Termite. “But on the outside spray up the side of the house as well as out in the yard.”

Hill says most store-bought sprays will do the trick.

“You don’t want to put a lot, only spray like the baseboards in your house because you don’t want a bunch of chemicals on the floor,” said Hill. “Just the baseboards around the doors and some place they could get in.”

As for the ones already in your house, your old dust buster will do the trick.

Or you can just wait them out.

“With summer kind of here now and the temperatures warm up and dry out some we’ll see the end of them pretty quickly,” said Pase.

For those living with them, summer can’t get here soon enough.