Bed bugs are difficult to eradicate because they have a complex life cycle and are resistant to many home remedies. A professional exterminator can identify and treat all stages of the insects.
To help prevent and control a bed bug infestation, use mattress and box spring encasements that can be left in place for a year, and traps or monitors under the feet of sofas and recliners to help keep the pests from crawling up onto them.
1. Vacuum Daily
Vacuuming is an essential part of maintaining a clean home and removing airborne pollutants like dust, dirt and pet hair. Regular vacuuming also helps to reduce the likelihood of allergic reactions to these particles.
While the most obvious places to vacuum are floors, don’t forget about other surfaces in your home. For example, carpets, mattresses, and upholstered furniture should be vacuumed weekly or more frequently to keep them looking and smelling fresh. If you have pets, then it’s important to add a daily vacuuming routine to deal with their shed fur and dander. Make sure to use a vacuum cleaner that is specifically designed for pet hair, such as the Hoover HF9 Pets Edition, to ensure all of the pet hairs are fully removed from your floors and furnishings.
The frequency with which you vacuum will depend on the number and types of people living in your home and how much traffic certain areas get. For instance, high-traffic spaces like hallways, kitchens, and children’s playrooms need to be vacuumed weekly. Bedrooms, home offices, and rarely used spaces can usually be cleaned on a biweekly basis.
Other factors to consider are the type and age of your vacuum cleaner, and how much noise you can tolerate while vacuuming. Vacuuming everyday can put a lot of strain on your machine and cause it to wear out more quickly, so it might not be a good idea for older or less powerful machines. In addition, vacuuming too often can stir up and redistribute the particles you’re trying to remove, leading to a more dirtier home. Regardless of these concerns, a thorough and consistent vacuuming routine will help to improve indoor air quality, prevent dust mites from breeding in your carpets, and tips to avoid a bed bug infestation.
2. Inspect Your Mattress
Bed bugs are tiny insects that feed on blood and can be very difficult to spot. They hide in seams, folds, cracks and crevices and are most active at night. Although they don’t transmit diseases, they can be very stressful to deal with. Regularly inspecting your mattress is one of the best ways to keep bed bugs away from your home.
Look for live bed bugs in your mattress and bedding by using a flashlight. Also look for translucent egg shells or shed skin (bed bug nymphs and first-stage nymphs are often pale).
Wear gloves when inspecting your mattress. Then strip back the sheets and examine the seams, folds and handles. If your mattress is a pillow-top, carefully check the extra seams and corners. Also examine the bottom of your mattress and the box spring if you have one. Bed bugs are very good at hiding and can fit inside the tiny cracks of a wooden bed frame.
If you see signs of bed bugs in your mattress, carefully vacuum it with your hose attachment, making sure to get into all the cracks and crevices. Then vacuum the box spring and foundation, and flip it over to inspect the other side as well. Finally, inspect the bed frame and headboard, particularly the joints and cracks, and remove the wood slats from the bed if you have a platform bed.
3. Inspect Your Bed Linens
Bed bugs are notoriously difficult to eliminate. They are active at night and hide during the day, squeezing into cracks as narrow as the width of a credit card. Even if you vacuum regularly and use a bug-zapping heat treatment, it may take weeks to get rid of them completely.
To make your bed bug treatment more effective, inspect your linens before you start removing them. This can help you catch the bug infestation early so that it is easier to treat.
Examine all bedding and sheets, including decorative throw pillows, stuffed animals and blankets. Look for blood stains or fecal marks, the insects themselves and their hard, leftover shells. Check the piping and seams of mattresses and box springs, as well as under tags and in the cracks of beds and headboards. If you find anything suspicious, discard it immediately.
You can also try using a natural solution, such as crushed mint leaves or lemon peels. This will repel the pests, as well as eat away at their exoskeletons, rendering them infertile and unable to feed. You can also hang a pot of Beauveria bassiana, a parasitic fungus that ruthlessly attacks and kills bed bugs.
If you have a mattress and box spring infested with bed bugs, you can protect it by buying a bug-proof cover. This will create a seal around the mattress and box spring, preventing them from escaping and infesting other parts of your home. You can also use a protective covers on pillows and other fabrics. These preventive measures will help keep your home free from bed bugs and protect you from the itchy bites they cause. If you are not comfortable with these treatments, consult a professional.
4. Inspect Your Furniture
The cryptic lifestyle of bed bugs makes them difficult to get rid of, even with comprehensive treatment. This is one reason it’s so important to be vigilant when staying in hotels or vacation rentals, or when bringing in used furniture. A night’s stay in an infested room is often enough to introduce bed bugs, which then spread quickly in homes. Their resistance to chemical treatments, cryptic lifestyles, and quick rate of reproduction combine to make them very hard to eliminate.
In order to prevent a severe infestation, it is important to regularly inspect all of your furniture, especially couches and recliners where they are most likely to be found. You should also regularly clean and declutter your home. This will reduce the number of hiding spots for bed bugs and will help to keep them from spreading to other rooms in your house.
During your inspections, carefully check all of the tufts and folds of your mattresses and box springs, as well as the nooks and crannies in your headboards, side tables, and dressers. Look closely for dark spots of fecal matter, live bed bugs, and shed skins from molting nymphs. Make sure to check behind your baseboards as well.
A good rule of thumb is to always keep a flashlight and a paint scraper handy when inspecting furniture, and to use the crack and crevice straw that comes with most ready-to-use aerosol bed bug treatments. These straws are essential for getting the chemicals into all of the deep folds and creases in your furniture. If the design of your furniture allows, place bed bug traps or monitors under the legs to help you track how effective your treatment is.
5. Inspect Your Floors
Inspecting your floors will allow you to detect the presence of bed bugs, as they tend to hide in cracks and crevices. As you do so, pay particular attention to the seams of your mattress and box spring and the crevices in your headboard and nightstands. Look for fecal spotting, which shows up as dark brown to black spots on surfaces and in crevices. If you find them, clean the area thoroughly and wash any affected items in hot water (at least once a week) or put them in the dryer on the highest setting for 30 minutes or more.
Be sure to inspect nooks and crannies, especially in furniture pieces such as dressers and desks and the frames of pictures or wall hangings. You should also check the cracks around light sockets, baseboards, and furniture. Eliminate hiding places by caulking them, and consider placing a duct tape or double-sided carpet tape over them to trap any bed bug attempting to escape.
Because they can survive up to a year without feeding, adult bed bugs can be introduced to a home or business by hitching rides in luggage and clothing and in secondhand furniture that isn’t adequately inspected before it is brought into a building. In multi-unit buildings, they are often spread when an infested piece of furniture is rented and then moved from unit to unit unnoticed.
Preventing a bed bug infestation requires diligence and ongoing prevention measures. In addition to vacuuming and washing regularly, use a mattress encasement that seals the entire surface of your mattress and box spring. Caulking cracks and sealing door frames and molding are other good preventive measures. And finally, if you do end up with bed bugs, high heat or extreme cold will destroy them.