Are There Bugs In High Rise Apartments? Here’s Our Experience So Far

Many people move into high rise apartments for the conveniences they offer. There’s no yard to maintain, no garbage cans to drag curbside, no driveways to shovel. There are certainly advantages to living in a high rise. You’d think that dealing with bugs in high rise apartments is the last thing you’d have to worry about. Insects live in nature, right? Surely there won’t be any on the 25th floor of a high rise building! Well, we have some interesting news based on our experience. In this article, we’re discussing the five types of insects we deal with in our high rise apartment!

Do Higher Floor Apartments Have Fewer Bugs?

In our experience, the answer is yes, higher floor apartments have fewer bugs in a general sense. It logically adds up – the higher up your apartment is off the ground, the further an insect will need to travel to get up there.

However, the answer is more nuanced than that. Asking the question of “do higher floor apartments have fewer bugs?” subtly implies that one will not need to deal with any bugs on a high enough floor. Unfortunately, that’s not true.

Locations & Seasons Matter

As we know, insects primarily reside in nature. It makes sense that the closer your building is to greenery, the more likely you’ll encounter bugs in your apartment, even on high floors.

“Nature” doesn’t need to be a forest or open meadow, either. A sufficiently large enough park in an otherwise urban area can house insects, most of whom will do what insects do best – search for food, build homes and grow their families.

If your building is close by, some bugs will certainly make their way over.

Another factor (well, two) is the weather, which varies by season and geography.

In climates that are warm all year ’round, you’ll likely encounter the same types of insects regardless of the season. In areas that experience four seasons, most of the insects you’ll see will be in the late spring and summer, with a potential influx during the fall when cold weather moves in – insects of many types will be looking to get out of the cold.

For the sake of this article, we’ll assume that the majority of high rise apartment buildings will be in proximity to nature for a meaningful part of the year.

How Do Insects Get Into Apartments?

In the interest of simplicity, there are only two ways insects can get into a high rise apartment – from inside the building or outside.

On the outside of the building, insects scale the building from the ground and can climb all the way up to the upper floors – even in a 40-story building. They can find their way in through gaps in window system, cracks in the brick, ventilation louvers, air conditioner openings, etc. Of course, it’s likely that they’ll do so on a lower floor before they reach the upper floors.

If your high rise apartment has windows that open, insects can always fly in – even hundreds of feet off the ground.

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There are many opportunities on the ground floor of a high rise that allow insects to enter. This includes vents, gaps under/around doors, loading docks and any openings as described earlier.

One of the biggest attractors of insects in a large building is the garbage room. Old food and other household waste serve as a magnet of many types of insects – the garbage room is like heaven for them, especially in hot months.

From the main floor, insects can climb up garbage chutes, through stairwells, up elevator shafts and through the structure itself.

As stated earlier, lower floors are still more likely to experience insects based on distance they must travel, but they can reach upper floors too.

Bugs In High Rise Apartments: Which Types We See

Now that we’ve covered some basic information, let’s talk about the types of insects we find in our greater NYC-area high rise apartment.

I grew up in New England, constantly around nature. To me, the amount of insects we encounter is a mere fraction of what I’d see where I grew up. If you’re used to seeing bugs inside, the amount you’ll find in an apartment is miniscule.

That said, I’ve been surprised at the number we see, given that we live well over 200 feet off the ground! Here’s what we typically see.

1. Cockroaches

According to Hollywood, cockroaches are #1 on the list of bugs in high rise apartments. That is true in some cases, but has gotten much better in more recent years. It typically boils down to the cleanliness of the tenants and building maintenance staff.

Thankfully, we don’t see many cockroaches in our current building. When we do, it’s an occasional roach scurrying along the garbage room floor or down in the lobby (usually near the main garbage collection area). If your building frequently exterminates, roaches should be seen rarely, but they always seem to show up somehow.

We used to live in an older, not-so-great building in Brooklyn where we saw roaches all the time – even in our 8th floor apartment. We had to spray for them every month or two to keep them out of our apartment, but we’d still see them in the hallway and whatnot.

>>Top-Rated Solutions For Getting Rid Of Cockroaches Indoors

2. Sugar Ants

Almost imperceptible to the naked eye, sugar ants are our most common insect roommates. In fact, we usually don’t notice how many there are until we spot one on the tile. Sure enough, there’s typically a small group of them present once we look close enough.

The amount of sugar ants we see is nowhere close to infestation level, but lately (summer) we’ve seen at least a couple every day.

We believe they’re coming in from the hallway, but they’re so small that they could be getting in anywhere. We almost wish there were more of them so we could trace them back to a specific entry, but it’s always been a rogue handful at a time.

In any case, they’re harmless and not too noticeable.

>>Top-Rated Solutions For Getting Rid Of Ants Indoors

3. Common House Spiders

Somehow spiders always succeed. As master climbers, they seem to scale the outside of our building like they’re walking in the park.

Although we don’t see too many – maybe one per month – they’re still up here. Just about every time we find one, it’s near a window. We do occasionally keep our sliding windows ajar to get some fresh air.

I imagine they crawl up the exterior of the building and duck into open windows. Why a particular one decides to crawl 20-something stories up to our apartment is beyond me.

While we don’t want spiders in our apartment per se, we’re willing to take the chance in exchange for some actual air. If anything, they help with the next type of bug…

>>Top-Rated Solutions For Getting Rid Of Spiders Indoors

4. Tiny Black Flies

They’re not quite houseflies. They’re not fruit flies, either. During the spring and summer, we find lots of tiny black flies around our place. In terms of quantity, we see these flies the most out of all the commonly found bugs in high rise apartments.

Weirdly, they aren’t ever in the kitchen. They’re almost always on the outside of our balcony windows or just inside them, depending on whether we have a window open. They even show up sometimes in the winter!

Spiders seem to know this. They make webs just inside the window and catch a lot of them. We’ve found some pretty plump spiders hiding just out of sight that seem to solely feed off these flies.

Our theory is that they live underneath the paver stones on our balcony and feed off of moss and other organic material under there. They don’t come out during the day, but at dawn and dusk – usually when moisture is in the air. I’m not an entomologist, so I have no real idea! We spray underneath the pavers and put traps out but we can’t find a correlation.

If we didn’t have a balcony, it’d be less of an issue. In general, we just deal with them when they show up.

>>Top-Rated Solutions For Getting Rid Of Flies Indoors

5. Bumble & Carpenter Bees

This one comes as a surprise. In the summer, we see a lot of carpenter (or maybe bumble) bees on and around our balcony.

They don’t have any nest nearby as far as we can tell. They fly around the balcony – sometimes just hovering in place and staring at us – and land on our table and railings. We’ve seen them basking in the sun or mating more than a few times out there, too. They aren’t a nuisance at all, but we were initially surprised to see them so high up!

Beg Bugs…

In urban areas, bed bugs are fairly common. It’s hard to not see a bed bugs extermination truck or advertisement in any given day in NYC. Bed bugs don’t require a mess, but if your neighbor is messy, they can breed at an exponential rate without being seen right away. One tenant’s bed bug problem can quickly become their neighbor’s problem in a densely populated building.

>>Top-Rated Solutions For Getting Rid Of Bedbugs

Preventing Insects From Getting Into An Apartment

We aren’t expert exterminators or entomologists, so we can only share our experiences. Here are some ways to minimize bugs in high rise apartments, based on our experience:

• Clean Kitchen: Wipe down counters and clean/vacuum regularly.
• Take Out The Trash: Bring garbage to the chute as often as possible.
• Block The Door: We put a door draft stopper in front of our main door to keep hallway insects out. This keeps larger insects out.
• Spray Around Windows, Doors & Room Perimeters: We spray for insects in these locations a couple times per year.
• Close The Windows: When we aren’t home, we mostly keep the windows closed – especially in warmer months. It’s tempting to cycle the air when we’re gone all day, but we typically only keep windows open when it’s either cold or when we’re home.

That’s Everything We Know About Bugs In High Rise Apartments!

I hope this article has been helpful and informative. I never expected to write so much about bugs, but I guess enough experience over time can bring about a lot of information. Thanks for reading and we hope you stay as bug-free as possible!