Keep Scorpions Away With A Powerful Ingredient From Your Kitchen

The thought of a scorpion crawling through your house can be frightening, and once they're present, it can seem like an impossible process to get rid of them. In some areas of the United States — specifically, Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, and Nevada – that's more challenging than others, per a survey done by the American Journal of Public Health. However, you may have a powerful ingredient to repel scorpions already in your kitchen: white vinegar. The acidic liquid is an effective tool for deterring scorpions from various spaces due to its strong, sour smell.

The scorpion's strong sense of smell allows it to smell predators, which, in nature, gives the arachnid extra time to hide. Scorpions also use this particular sense to help them find food sources and are likely to move in the direction where there's an appealing food-related scent. Their ability to smell well is one of the factors that allow them to survive in difficult conditions. Yet, with the aid of vinegar, you can use the scorpion's smelling power to your advantage.

Vinegar works in two ways against scorpions. If you see them in your yard or running along the floor in your home, you can spritz the vinegar onto the pests directly. Doing this will overwhelm their senses and make them disoriented, unable to respond to threats. This said, vinegar is not ideal for the treatment of large infestations since no scientific evidence shows it works well like this.

The second option is to use vinegar on the surfaces where you want to keep the pests away, like your kitchen counters and bathroom surfaces. Not only does vinegar work well as a way to clean and disinfect these areas, but it also works double as a type of pest control. The scent lingers on these surfaces long after the vinegar dries. Because vinegar is so pungent, covering up any trace of a food source, scorpions should turn the other way until they find what they're looking for.

Vinegar's scent, along with its acid-like composition, makes it a good option for repelling numerous pests, which, in a chain reaction, can impact your scorpion problem. Not only does the smell encourage scorpions to move on, but it also gets rid of other bugs that the predatory arachnids feast on, like spiders and flies. More so, by keeping surfaces routinely cleaned, there are fewer particles that ants, spiders, and other insects are looking for as their own food source.

The process of using vinegar to repel scorpions is rather straightforward. Use a clean spray bottle that has a mixture of 1 part white vinegar (this is the best type for the job) along with 1 part water. Then, spray onto the areas you wish to clean up and wipe them down with a clean cloth. You can also pour some vinegar onto a paper towel and wipe down the surface; this way, you don't have to dry it off and can let it air dry instead, maintaining more of the impactful scent.

Try to aim your vinegar repellent for areas where scorpions are entering the space, such as along baseboards leading into the kitchen, as well as along the perimeter of the home. You can also treat the exterior of your home in the same way, though you don't typically need to wipe the vinegar off clean. Avoid using vinegar on surfaces that are untested. Some textiles, like wood, may discolor with a high concentration of the acidic liquid.