In the annals of domestic products and home remedies to pest problems, there is a chemical that stands well above the rest. It is a powerful chemical used by commercial exterminators, domestic companies and people who want to get rid of bugs on their own. Now it is not a complete treatment. This chemical is only used by professionals for crack and crevice treatments of houses and buildings. The rest of the treatments they use are exclusively commercial and extremely illegal to even own if you are not licensed. So what is Diatomaceous earth? Diatomaceous earth is silica sand. It’s so fine that it looks like baking flour. This material can be sprinkled around and will kill any insect or arachnid it touches. It comes from the fossilized remains of marine phytoplankton so it is not a naturally forming stone but instead a reservoir of fossilized organisms, however, being from a natural source most people agree that it formed naturally.
Diatomaceous earth is a mineral, it is very soft and is a “siliceous sedimentary rock” which means it’s a rock that contains silica. The stone crumbles on its own into a very light white powder that resembles flour or icing sugar. It is very light and can be blasted with air to fill large areas through voids. This is how it is used as a pesticide for crack and crevice treatment. The powder has a particular size of around 3μm which is a measurement in micrometres, not visible to the human eye. Depending on how the powder is milled it can have a gritty granular texture which makes it good for abrasive thick liquids like toothpaste and metal polish. Obviously, there is very little and very fine Diatomaceous earth in toothpaste and far larger grittier particles in metal polish. It has found its way into hundreds of products and was only patented for pest control in 1960. Before then it was used in products for explosives when Alfred Nobel himself discovered that it could make nitroglycerin stable enough to transport in large quantities or that it was used as a filtration medium during the Cholera Epidemic in Hamburg, Germany in 1892. It can be used as a barrier material that can make other materials fire-resistant because silica can take temperatures up to thousands of degrees. It is used to coat wax forms so they can be baked in a kiln and filled with boiling bronze to make statues and is used in grain storage to prevent caking. The uses are limitless and yet it took humanity a surprisingly long time to, as it did to turn peanuts into peanut butter, realize it can kill more than slugs in your garden. When it was first patented and used in the 1960s as a pest control product people were stunned at the effectiveness. Though today it is a minor part of the process it is still one of few chemicals that can be used to control and exterminate pests that is also sold in grocery stores. In fact, you can purchase food-safe Diatomaceous earth that is fully edible and still very effective against all kinds of bugs including arachnids.
The process that Diatomaceous earth goes through to kill pests is on a microscopic level. The chemical is harmless to mammals but on a microscopic level, the particles are incredibly sharp shards of silica, almost like glass, and can get caught in the joints and sections of the carapace of insects and damage them by slicing open a waxy layer that keeps moisture inside them. Without this layer, they bleed out their intracellular fluid and desiccate. It is a very effective and powerful tool but it is not a solution on its own.
