Termites, cockroaches and other pests like mosquitoes, ticks, rats and mice are very common in summer

In the near pitch-dark, you can hear them before you see them - millions of cockroaches scuttling and fluttering across stacks of wooden boards as they devour food scraps by the tonne in a novel form of urban waste disposal.

The sight of a cockroach crawling in her car gave a 61-year-old woman such a fright that she crashed into one end of an overhead bridge in Jurong East Central of Singapore last Friday.