How to stop crickets from chirping. For some, the sound of chirping crickets is the song of summer, bringing back fond memories of late summer nights.
You may sing a different tune, however, if a cricket gets into your house, or takes up residence right under your bedroom window where their chirping keeps you up all night.
The best way to convince them to keep quiet is by altering their environment. One can change the temperature inside and outside one’s home to make crickets lethargic and likely to leave.
If keeping them intentionally doesn’t seem ideal take preventative measures.
How to stop crickets from chirping
The easiest way to secure your cricket to his water bottle is to use a lighted bowl.
Place an LED light bulb above the bowl and change it in approximately six months.
Putting the light source near the base of the cage will give your cricket everything he needs without taking up too much room and leaving you with problems like high energy bills caused by excess heat.
Light him up
It is well known that crickets chirp in response to lighting conditions.
In many cases, simply putting your cricket in a dark room during the hours you want him quiet will do the trick. Get creative with illumination.
LED bulbs are a good choice for signaling to crickets they don’t emit a lot of heat, and they cost next to nothing.
Another option would be installing blackout curtains and turning off all other lights in the room.
But what if those methods don’t work? Some species of cricket are said to chirp simply based on an internal circadian rhythm, so this issue might require other solutions.
Get him to chill out
Raising crickets should be done at about 82 to 86 degrees, making that the ideal temperature for chirping. When temperatures fall below 74 degrees chirping slows and diminishes in intensity.
A good way to keep conditions cool is to take advantage of the coolest parts of your home by putting your cricket’s habitat in a cool corner of the basement or on the floor in the coolest part of the house.
This will make it less ideal for them to start up a chorus. Also, a screen cover will let heat and humidity escape from the habitat, keeping things too warm.
Capture them
Crickets are curious about new things that enter their territory and male crickets have an interesting way to find out which sounds new to them.
They’ll rub one wing against the other to create a sound similar to the one emitted by a female cricket when calling for a mate.
Male crickets will come running whenever they hear these sounds because it means there are females nearby.
If you want to draw crickets towards your cricket trap, try putting something they like on or into it as bait. The first thing many insects like is food.
Fruit, mushrooms, and rotting plants can easily be used as bait because they’re also what crickets normally enjoy eating on their own time.
Some people may suggest using honey instead of actual food but this can attract bees too and not just crickets!
Use vinegar and salt
Mix one part vinegar with 3 parts water in a spray bottle. Spray the area where insects are chirping to kill them. This method works well for most crickets.
If you don’t have any vinegar available, use salt water instead. Mix 1oz of salt per quart of water (roughly 30ml per liter) and repeat the process above. You can also use lemon juice at a ratio of 2oz per quart (roughly 60ml per liter).
Apply Scents
Like many insects, crickets have a strong distaste for certain chemicals. One of the most successful natural pesticides is the oil of Thymus Aromaticus – better known as thyme oil.
Mix it with other fragrant oils like rosemary or sage to widen the effectiveness of your organic pesticide spray that you can then spread around your yard.
Other smells like cinnamon, peppermint, and lemons are equally unnerving for those little critters so drenching everything you own in these scents will help keep them from setting up camp in your garden.
How to stop crickets from chirping
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