**1. Introduction**

Baits are a preferred type of formulation used in urban pest management, especially for the control of cockroaches, ants, and increasingly termites. With precise placement in areas away from contact with human population, especially children, and a reduced rate of active ingredient (AI) application in a given structure area, baits are more economical and pose less risk for consumers and the environment than other formulations. However, baits are very difficult to evaluate for efficacy. For baits, pest acceptance and horizontal transfer of bait are essential in order to control pest populations.

Baits are composed of one or more insecticide active ingredients incorporated into an attrac‐ tive food matrix, which varies according to the type of target pest, and even according to species within a certain pest type. Although commercial development of species-specific baits may represent a serious commercial problem due to limited market, this has been done in the past, for instance with imported fire ant baits in the USA. However, typically, baits are developed to target a group of similar insects, e.g., cockroaches, which may vary in their response to the bait formulation, resulting in varying degrees of control depending on the pest population composition.

In order to perform successfully, baits must attract the target insect and be ingested in suffi‐ cient amount that will cause the desirable level of control in the pest population. For nonsocial insects, such as cockroaches, transfer of the active ingredient among different segments of the pest population (e.g., adults and immature forms, reproductives, etc) is de‐ sirable but not necessarily an essential characteristic of the baits. However, in social insects (ants and termites) the transfer of the active ingredients between the foragers and the re‐ maining of the population, and specially the reproductive caste, is essential in providing ad‐ equate control of the pest population within reasonable time.

© 2013 Jordan et al.; licensee InTech. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2013 Jordan et al.; licensee InTech. This is a paper distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
