Can Fleas Live in Houseplants (+ How to Get Rid of Them)

As an experienced gardener, you learn to live with bugs and insects in your soil – sometimes even learn to love some of them. However, for those new to this space, discovering fleas in your soil can be quite jarring. It’s even enough to give you the heebie-jeebies. But are they even fleas? Can fleas live in houseplants?

Yes – Fleas can live in houseplants for short periods. However, they cannot solely survive in a houseplant without feeding on a live host – like humans or pets. Houseplants do not have the nutrients fleas require to survive. Rather, they primarily use houseplants as a temporary residence, until they detect a more permanent warm-blooded place to set up their home.

In order to combat fleas in the home, we first need to learn how to live and the natural instincts they are driven by. Only then can we begin tackling the problem by treating these areas and limiting the opportunities for them to reproduce.

However before we jump onto the flea extermination methods, let’s first clarify one critical point – do you actually have fleas in your houseplants?

Do You Really Have Fleas Living in Your Pot Plants?

Before you start googling for the closest exterminator near me, let’s first establish whether you do in fact have fleas living in your indoor plants.

What do fleas look like?

Fleas are tiny insect-looking bugs that have thin bodies (2.5 mm long) that have a brown or maroon hue to them (depending on if they have recently fed).

They have large spindly legs, with the hind (back) legs being the largest. They do not have any wings, rather using their hind legs to jump over large distances to find their hosts.

If you look closely, fleas have fine hairs on their legs to help them attach to the hair on their hosts. It also helps them to easily crawl from hair to hair without risk of detaching from their host.

Fleas move extremely quickly, and are hard to catch. Once they jump, it is hard to catch them because of their tiny size and th