However, these pests do not only live in businesses. They also infest homes, so it is important to take precautions against them. That is when your house becomes their object of desire.
What are Bed Bugs
Bed bugs have flat and rusty-red colored bodies. You can see them reach up to 4 to 5 mm in length or about ¼ inch when these bugs are adults. Their size is what makes them difficult to see because of their flat body type. They also hide well within beds and other furniture during the daytime. These creatures pose danger to your health because they bite while the hosts are asleep.
Some people have itchy or swollen areas on their skin because of them. These red areas turn into mosquito bites as the day goes by.
However, what does it mean when you do not see bed bugs? That is a sign that they are hiding well within the cracks and crevices of your home. It means that they are all over your room and biting you as you read this.
Their habitats include mattress seams, box springs, bed frames, couches, and any other place. This is where a small cavity can fit in. They also tend to spread out even more on walls and ceilings. These points are their passage from one place to another.
How can Bed Bugs Get into Your Property?
The risk of infesting your property with bed bugs is what makes them worrisome. Anyone can carry these tiny insects even when people are not aware of what they have inside their belongings.
One thing you should know about them is that they can survive for months without any food supply. They only use what they ingest to produce blood. This means that their victims are already sleeping. Their lifespan ranges from six months to a year under what becomes ideal living conditions.
The most common bed bug includes Cimex lectularius and it prefers your blood. Other varieties do not mind feeding on animals as well. All about them will give you nightmares regarding what they do when they are in your room.
You have to deal with Cimex lectularius or bed bugs. This is when you want to control what is inside your property. They are reddish-brown so spotting what is on them is possible.
How Can You Avoid Getting Bed Bugs on Your Property
There are several things you can do to avoid the presence of bed bugs within your property. One is making sure that the products you purchase are safe for use.
You should also consider what it means when people say that these bugs can infest any home. They live where they find their prey especially when their hosts do not notice their presence. You can become their victim when you do not watch out for these pests.
What does it mean when there are no signs of bed bugs? This means that they have abandoned your place after seeing what you have done against them. But what happens when there is evidence of their existence? That includes feces and molted shells among other things. These are what you should see when it is your first time to see them.
You should do what it takes to search for them in your room. Deal with bed bugs when you find them at your place. These bugs feed on the blood of hosts.
How Do You Know If You Have Bed Bugs at Home
Some situations exist where your guests might notice little creatures on them when they come over for a visit. This will allow them to tell you what you should do about them staying inside your property.
Bed bugs are tiny, but they can appear on what you use at home. They prefer things such as wallpapers and behind picture frames. These are annoying pests that can enter your home unnoticed. They are flat so they have a lot of space to move around in and use as hiding places. Their favorite spots are near where you sleep at night. Look at your mattresses, box springs, bed frames, or headboards for easy access.
Inspect all furniture used within the bedroom carefully before bringing anything new into this area as bed bugs may already reside there.
Over time, these bugs may scatter through your bedroom and move into any crevice or protected location. They can also spread to nearby rooms in your home as well as other apartments around you. This means that even when one room does not have any signs of an infestation yet, it could still pose a problem for others.
How to Exterminate Bed Bugs
Extermination comes into mind when you want to remove these bed bugs inside your room. You can get rid of these pests on your own or call for professional assistance.
The first step to solving any pest problem is knowing the type of insect with which you are dealing. In this case, bed bugs give you bites and feed at nighttime. These make them difficult for you to get rid of easily during the daytime hours when most people are awake.
There is good news! Solutions vary depending upon the severity of your house or business infestation. Consult professional assistance for eliminating an established variety of these bed bugs in your home.
The treatment of bed bugs is a difficult and delicate process. They can get tricky to do yourself. There are many different DIY methods out there on the market. But it is not always the best. According to the National Pest Management Association (NPMA) studies, 84% of requests from homeowners need guidance from professionals.
Should You Try Pesticides?
When you want to control what is happening in your home, the first thing to do is ensure what you plan to use to kill bed bugs. Some people think they can get what it takes from the closest grocery store or hardware store. However, this involves a lot of trouble and risk. All you need to do is buy the best products that suit you to eliminate them.
One way you can use, which will kill the bed bugs while not posing any risks or hazards for you involves an EPA-registered insecticidal soap compound along with one spray. But only with the right application. It is important to remember never to spray anything directly onto your mattress. This could cause damage and hygiene issues down below.
The correct application process includes applying crease or crevice treatments where needed. These include granual pesticides such as those delivered via a scrub brush with wet coverage.
Treat indoor surfaces with residual insecticide to discourage crawling bed bugs from dining or living there. Apply this treatment as a spray or dusting powder that clings onto the surface. Bed frames should have ample coverage when applying this method on drawers and dressers.
Make sure you treat all three dimensions: top-bottom, side-back. Wood furniture such as panels needs 24 inches’ distance between sprayings. It does not affect its finish.
What Causes Bed Bug Infestation?
Familiarize with two causes that you have a bed bug infestation at home or in your business. Below is a guide:
Travel Bugs
Recent travel may let you bring home these bugs. Likewise, you might encourage them to enter your house. You can get them from stores or marketplaces that offer hand-carried items. Examples are pillows, purses, clothes, used furniture, and bedding materials. Once inside your home, you need to get rid of the bugs.
Bed bugs are everywhere! But they prefer cleaner environments and will go anywhere to find one. You can also find them in accommodations that range from budget hotels to luxury properties. The price point or where you stay on vacation will not limit their presence.
Office buildings, movie theaters, and other people’s homes are also inclusive. Not much is safe when these sneaky pests come out at night seeking blood meals!
The common misconception about bed bug infestations only happening within crude hostels is far from reality. Bed bugs infest small ones and big international chains such as Motel 6.
Think of these blood-thirsty bugs as vampires that feed on your emotion and energy. They usually do this at night, while you sleep. But you can also see them in different things. Some of them are mattresses, walls near your headboard or bedding fabrics like carpets, and furniture such as a couch or dresser.
Infested Furniture
Bed bugs are what you call “hitchhikers.” These pests will go anywhere they can lay their eggs. Some of the most common ways to get them to include using borrowed or secondhand furniture. It may also come from your moving company or other properties.
Another popular method involves secondhand stores, thrift shops, or yard sales. Some people like to get what they need for free! But what happens when you get more than for which you bargained.
You can get bed bug bites after bringing home the things you got on sale. Your pet or children must not reach what you bought. A safe bet is to check for infestations first. Do not hesitate to call pest control professionals right away!
Remove the drawers from your dresser and carefully inspect what you see inside. Pay close attention to spaces or cracks where bed bugs can hide. You may also want to remove the fabric. An example is the dust ruffle underneath before checking what you can find at the top.
Signs of Infestation
Know about four signs of bed bug infestation in your home or business. Here they are:
Fecal Stains
Take out your flashlight to check whether you can find fecal bed bug stains underneath your mattress. Make sure not to use a thing that emits light. This might let bed bugs escape! It should also have a battery to avoid exposing other people in your household or business who are asleep.
You must look for dark black spots on top of your mattress right after turning off your room light. Look also on your sheets and pillows. Check the mattress and box spring for more bed bug feces at least once.
An eggshell’s white color is what you can expect from a fecal stain that bed bugs create. They resemble mouse droppings, but they are smaller and more oval-shaped. See them as a quarter or a millimeter in length. You can also look for bed bugs themselves and other signs such as castings, molts, and blood smears.
Bed bug feces stains are also called bed bug poop. You cannot easily wash them away! The blood dripped out from their anus after they have just finished eating or a few moments later. This stinky brownish-red stain will appear on your sheets and pillowcase clothing items. It can take months before you notice any sign that these exist.
Presence of Bed Bugs
Bed bugs leave a bloody smear, either from crawling or during egg laying. Note that they favor rough surfaces for them to move easier around. These bugs can get tough to spot at night. This is when looking for them in a dimly-lit room with the use of your flashlight.
They also leave a random scatter pattern. This means you will find bed bugs anywhere even without food or a human host nearby. They can feel or sense that their transmitter is on their back. No eating or breeding for them once removed from you.
Expect them to show up only when the lights are turned off! This is when hiding inside your mattress or bedding. You might notice restless legs just before reaching sleep. This could mean that there are bed bugs just waiting to feed on you.
You can find these bugs in every corner of the world, from Australia to Africa. They thrive on your blood and can hide anywhere. This is from your bedroom to a homeless shelter for just one example.
Cast Skin
Do what you can to get rid of cast skins. These are what bed bugs leave behind when they molt. This is what happens after molting or shedding their old skin for a new one.
You can expect it to occur while the bed bug feeds on your blood or while laying an egg. Cast skins are white once the bed bug is finished. You can notice an instar between what resembles a black spot to the appearance under your fingernails.
Nymphs are also what you can expect from cast skins. They are smaller than an adult and lighter than other stages of molting. You can see exuviae that they leave upon shedding. These look like skins when the molting period did not take place for long enough.
You can tell that you see cast skins by touching your gray moth-eaten sweater or your white shirt with ink on it. When you are seeing is white instead of looking similar to black, cast skins are in your midst!
Eggs
You will find eggs in your bedding, towels, furniture, and clutter. Expect to see beige eggs. They show the size of a pinhead when laying underneath scaly skin.
This happens when male and female bed bugs mate. A single maturing egg will create commonly 200 other eggs at a time. You can find eggshells that resemble small and white translucent shells among cast skins and feces.
You can count eggs as the size of a salt grain. Look for these inside your headboard, alarm clock, and under the wallpaper with a different color from the paper itself.
The female bed bug lays one to five eggs per week. It is equivalent to an average of 200 to 500 over her lifetime. See white and slightly pear-shaped eggs about the size of a pinhead or speck on dust. It takes 10 days for these creatures to hatch into adults. They can live up to two to four months in most cases. This is before they start mating again.
How do you get a bed bug infestation early?
You can do an inspection. Do this to know the presence of any crawling bed bugs around your home. Inspect your furniture, mattress seams, bedsheets, baseboards, and nearby cracks for at least 30 minutes or more.
Check for the sight of bloodstains on these. Bed bugs leave them behind when cleaning themselves after feeding on your blood. Inspect for common signs of infestation. This includes fecal spotting, blood smears, molts, and eggshells.
Bed bugs possess a special scent gland that secretes aromatic chemicals. At least two have USDA identification as alarm pheromones. These warn another bed bug to stay away from danger. Unfortunately, for those living in an apartment building, these same scents can also appeal to more human senses than just one’s nose.
This means you can experience an unrelated and unpleasant odor. Strange smells coming out of your neighbor’s cooking? No. The reason is much simpler. It turns out he also has some bed bugs.
Are bed bugs caused by poor hygiene?
Bed bugs and poor hygiene do not match. Dirty conditions make the lives of bed bugs more convenient. They can find their meal easier to access. This does not mean that bed bugs come from poor hygiene. People living in filthy conditions still have to deal with infestations every day of the week at times.
These bugs do not discriminate based on how clean people keep their homes. They have an uncanny ability to find the source of what smells like a reliable food supply. They do not need poor hygiene to survive. Going after people who consider themselves as perfect is their desire.
People who clean their homes and still suffer from a bed bug infestation should check what they own more than once. The sight of silverfish, ants, or termites near your home attracts these bugs! They will go for tinfoil, paper products, cardboard boxes, wood products, fabric, and cotton.
How to Get Rid of Bed Bugs
Monitor bed bugs with yellow sticky traps. You can set these next to your bed. These bugs find yellow more attractive than any other color in the spectrum! They will walk or jump onto this trap and get stuck on it. Inside is the glue that acts like sticky tape.
It is best to put these traps around the baseboards of your bed or anywhere else that you can see their infestation headed towards. You will only need one trap per room for this. Remove them after one to two months pass by. What makes them so sticky is clear by the time you place them on your walls.
Give bed bugs medicine. You can kill them with pesticides with the wrong use of medicine. Look for diatomaceous earth powder near pet supplies inside a grocery store. They sell this at major retailers like Wal-Mart. You must apply it to kill bed bugs!
Call a Professional Bed Bug Exterminator
Find a reliable and professional bed bug exterminator service. They have the experience to know how to remove your bugs. It is best to use tips from an exterminator!
Control and prevent the bed bug infestation as soon as possible. They only grow in numbers when nothing stops them! Even the best pest control services cannot get rid of them without detection. These bugs can get tough to get rid of!
They do not only hide in cracks and crevices during the day. Crawling around to find a new hiding spot while you sleep is also their ability. Do what it takes to make your home free of them!
Get rid of what attracts them! This includes your floor cover, wall hanging, things near your bed, and sitting on top of it.
Bed bug infestations can quickly grow from a few bugs to overwhelming and exhausting! The best way to deal with them is through prevention! Between short breeding cycles and massive litter, you must detect warning signs to eradicate an issue. This is before it becomes too big of a problem for your home.