You see a small roach on your bedroom ceiling at two in the morning, or one drops off a closet shelf onto your folded shirts.

There is a stubborn belief that roaches are a verdict on your housekeeping, that a clean home is a roach-proof one.

There are two moves almost everyone tries before calling anyone: a puff of boric acid dust under the sink, and a fogger set off in a closed-up house for the afternoon.

You closed on the house eight months ago. The paint in the hallway is still that flat, unlived-in white, the sod out back hasn't fully knit together yet, and you're still finding the builder's blue painter's tape stuck to a window latch somewhere new every few weeks.

For every American cockroach that turns up inside a South Florida home, the population it came from is sitting outdoors, usually within about fifteen feet of your exterior wall, in one of a small number of predictable pockets.

You booked a roach treatment, and now there is a date on the calendar with no real idea what happens when the technician shows up.

You spot it at dusk: a large, dark roach clinging to the soffit near your gutter, or dropping out of a palm frond onto the lanai screen.

If you live in a duplex, a garden-style apartment building, or an attached townhome, the roaches in your kitchen are not necessarily a verdict on your own housekeeping.

You find a large roach on the second floor, in a guest bathroom or hallway, nowhere near the kitchen, and the usual advice doesn't apply.

A German roach spends almost its entire life pressed into a crack you never look at: behind the toe-kick under the cabinets, in the hinge recess of the dishwasher door, inside the warm motor housing of the refrigerator. It comes out to feed in the dark and ducks back in before the light finds it. That single habit is the reason a treatment aimed at open surfaces rarely holds.

Open the cabinet under your kitchen sink, and the first instinct is to blame the plumbing.

You open the louvered door to the AC closet to change a filter or check the breaker, and roaches scatter across the floor, up the side of the air handler, or behind the water heater.

You open a cabinet door to grab a box of pasta, and something skitters back into the dark corner behind the mixing bowls.

Is there a roach season in South Florida, or is that an idea that just doesn't apply down here?

Most homeowners assume the first sign of a roach problem is a roach. It rarely is.

Before you reach for a spray can or call anyone, look at the dropping itself.

"Palmetto bug" sounds like it should mean one thing: a specific bug, with a specific look and a specific reason it's in your garage.

South Florida's climate makes roach control a year-round job. Learn proven prevention tips for German cockroaches and palmetto bugs, why store-bought sprays fall short, and how Boca Raton homeowners keep roaches out for good.

You didn't leave food out overnight. You keep the counters wiped down and the trash on schedule, and you still walked into the pantry, flipped on the light, and watched a light brown roach with two dark racing stripes behind its head disappear behind the cereal boxes.

You just found a roach on the kitchen counter, under the bathroom sink, or skittering across the patio at night, and you need an answer before you decide what to do next.