Bed bugs never come alone and bed bug treatment can be expensive. If you have one, you have hundreds. They breed, they spread, and they invade everything from curtains to carpets. So, how do you proceed if you notice signs of a bed bug infestation in your home?
When it comes to bed bug treatment, there are several crucial steps for you to take to ensure you don’t have to burn your assets and start all over again. This post delves into expert treatment tips for dealing with the pests that are bed bugs.
How Do You Know If You Have Bed Bugs?
Spotting whether or not you have bed bugs is fairly easy. Firstly, you can physically see the bugs. They are small, and you might think they look like fleas or mites or even ticks. The appearance traits to look for with regard to identifying a bed bug are as follows.
- Bed bugs are usually brown before feeding.
- Bed bugs will have a red tint after they have fed.
- They are about the size of an apple seed.
- Bed bugs have a distinct musty type odour.
- They have segmented bodies including heads with antennae, legs, and middle bodies.
- Young bed bugs are often see-through or white.
How to kill bed bugs step by step
After having identified the bugs, it is important to take action quickly. The second tell that you might need bed bug treatment is if you find yourself and your family are covered in bites. These bite marks are red, spot type marks that can itch and irritate the skin. It is rare for any harmful disease to be passed on, but they can cause allergic reactions and severe agitation if prolonged exposure happens.
Thirdly, you might notice brown or black clusters in and around the bed, bedframe, mattress, or other furniture. This might also be in sync with blood spots on the bed linen, left from where a bed bug has fed. Of course, this can feel disconcerting, and it is indeed a call to action on your part. If left ignored, the infestation can spread to epic proportions and the longer you leave it, the harder it is to find a resolution.
Why Do We Need to Control Bed Bugs?
For all the reasons we have listed above, and more. Did you know that a female bed bug, once having completed the mating ritual, can lay up to 500 eggs spread out over eight weeks? These eggs are fairly easy to notice since they are small and white and sticky. They stick to furniture, linen, carpets — anything that makes disturbances less easy. Bed bugs themselves can live up to ten months, possibly longer in more habitable environments.
So, the need to control and eradicate bed bugs comes from the fact that they are able to spread like wildfire and infiltrate every single thing in your home. They breed fast and they stick around when they’ve found a place that suits them. They can also live on your clothing and spread to other locations with ease.
The Treatment Advice
Now you have the facts, let’s take a look at the best professional treatment advice.
Use a Professional Company
The easiest option is perhaps to find and utilise a professional bed bug treatment company, such as a pest removal service. These companies are experts in all things pest removal, which is what bed bugs are – pests! You can find a reliable service through word of mouth or by looking online and scouring reviews. There are inevitably a dozen or so in your local area that you can explore.
The benefits of using a professional company are that you know the job will be done and that it will be done right. They are experts in that they know bed bugs inside out. Bon Accord understand how they operate, and they also understand how to completely remove them in order to protect the home. They also tend to use safe products that take into consideration pets and children. You will get a complete service including expert advice on how to prepare and how to maintain the process.
Declutter Your Home
One treatment method that can also be a preventative method is to declutter your home. A home that is filled with clutter is more likely to get a bed bug type infestation as there are more places for the bugs to settle and take root. Decluttering is not just about removing rubbish and debris; it is also about maintaining furniture, removing old possessions such as clothing that no longer fits, or old toys, and scaling down generally on anything unnecessary in your property. Not only will this help you detect any potential bed bug infestations, but it will also help you prevent them. A clean environment does not mean that you won’t ever see a bed bug, but it does mean that you will spot them rapidly and be able to deal with them equally as fast.
Bed Bug Treatment Using Heat
This is a controversial method and must be carried out with extreme caution. Bed bugs cannot survive in extreme heat conditions. They die when their bodies reach anything around 45 degrees Celsius. Therefore, removing infested linen, clothes, furniture pieces, etc., and placing them in direct sunlight can sometimes be an effective removal method. The items would need to be wrapped in black liners, or something similar in order to trap heat effectively and reach the optimum temperature. This is not a foolproof method and can often lead to ineffective results as it is hard to implement properly.
It is also quite hard to apply this sort of heat to whole rooms, as there is not a safe way to heat up a room to that temperature without a fire risk or causing harm to yourself. So, this is more of a last resort bed bug treatment that shouldn’t be taken without a proper and professional risk assessment opinion.
Remove Pets from the Home
When you have settled on your chosen bed bug treatment plan, removing pets from the home can really help the cause. Pets can be carriers of bed bugs in the same way that they can be carriers of fleas and ticks. Bed bugs can feed off pets in the same way that they feed off humans, blood is blood at the end of the day. If it is possible, take the pet completely away from the bed bug area to lessen the risk to them and to lessen the risk of bed bugs spreading all around the house and to other locations too.
Treat All Potential Infected Items with Care
The best thing that you can do if you notice a pest problem is to proceed with caution. If you think something is infected, isolate it wherever possible and treat it as contaminated. If you can block off rooms, then do so. This will help to stop the spread to the entire house and protect your other furniture and possessions. Don’t let pets or children near any noticeable signs of the bugs and never wear infected clothing or tread on infected carpets. As we’ve said, these things spread super-fast and with little effort at all on your part. All you have to do is wear one of out the house and that’s that, they will go wherever you take them and make a new life there.
Clean Your Home
Aside from decluttering, you must also clean your home environment. The most effective combatant to bed bugs is vacuuming and dusting. Vacuuming can remove eggs, which will stop potential hatching. It can also suck up bugs because the bugs are small enough. After each vacuuming session, take extra precaution and care to remove the bag or the canister into a sealed, unbreakable receptacle and remove it so that it is far away from the house. You might also consider replacing your vacuum once the infestation has cleared just to be extra vigilant in hindering any potential return invasion.
Aside from vacuuming, you can also discourage them by changing your bed linen on a regular, weekly basis. Clean bedding is harder to settle down on. The same can be said for washing curtains, rugs, and any clothes that might be lying around. It’s not always possible to do laundry constantly, and of course, curtains need less regular washing than bedding. However, wherever possible, try and keep the cycle moving. If you are recovering from an infestation, getting the linen professionally cleaned or replacing it entirely and starting again are your only realistic options.
Conclusion
Bed bug treatment does not have to be a daunting prospect. There are reliable methods that you can explore that can help you exterminate the problem at the source. It’s not like the olden days when you had to move out and start afresh; there are actual real and tangible solutions to take advantage of. Wherever possible, and of course, if money allows, try and use a professional bed bug treatment service, as that will ensure the complete removal, which is always the most desirable outcome.
Read more about: What are the early signs of bed bugs
