Everyone loves the fall. The temperatures start to cool off a little, the leaves change and all those pesky bugs disappear. After months of swarming, crawling insects biting you and wandering in your home, all of them have died off until next spring. Right? Well, actually, while many species of insects do die off, others may still pose a nuisance for you, even during the beautiful North Carolina fall.

The specific invaders we’ll look at are called “overwintering” bugs. As the name suggests, basically they are bugs that stay over for winter. Thankfully, most of these will not cause you any real problems but it’s never fun to have to see insects in your living space. Insects that overwinter in houses tend to do so not in your living space, though. Instead they live between the walls and you won’t likely be aware of their presence.

Some bugs try to attach themselves to your home all year round, like termites and cockroaches, but the overwintering bugs are just there to diapause, which is the insect version of hibernation during the winter. The main culprits living inside the walls are likely to be boxelder bugs, multicolored Asian lady beetles (a type of invasive lady bug), and brown marmorated stink bugs. None of these want to invade your kitchen or weaken your framing (like termites), so they should not be a major problem.

If they do come into the living space, they will be sluggish because of their winter habits, and will be easy to vacuum up or put outside. Insect experts actually believe that they really can’t differentiate between the siding of your home and the bark of a tree, so they likely think they are just crawling under bark like they’d do if your home wasn’t there. For that reason, just like they crawl between pieces of bark on the south and west facing sides of trees, you will find them sleeping (sometimes by the hundreds) under the siding of the south and west facing sides of your home where the most sunlight hits.

They appear in such large numbers because once a particularly good spot to spend the colder months is located (such as Raleigh, NC), they emit pheromones to tell surrounding relatives about their good fortune. The remnants of these chemical messages are actually left behind too so their descendants can also get the tip. There isn’t anything to be alarmed about since they do not generally enter or damage your home, but if they become a nuisance and are finding their way in, you may have to have an insect removal expert take control of the situation.