Good night. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed bugs bite. It’s the old saying that people have used for decades, and it seems simple enough. Friends might offer you this as a friendly goodbye, but no one ever seems to offer you an actual solution to the issue. How, exactly, does one “not let the bed bugs bite”? Those are the kinds of questions that need answers.
Bed Bugs: Where Are They?
This question seems pretty self-explanatory. Bed bugs live in beds…right? If that were true, it would probably be a lot easier to prevent their infestations. Unfortunately, though, bed bugs are more likely to infest commercial locations such as hospitals, nursing homes, hotels, and even places without beds at all like office buildings and schools.
Hotels are a hotspot for bed bugs, so you have to watch out for bed bugs jumping into your suitcase as you’re unpacking. Along with hotels, travel and transportation hubs, like (airport terminals and train/bus stations), are an easy way to pick up bed bugs. They’ll crawl from suitcase to suitcase, stowing away in your luggage and clothes until you get home. That’s when they’ll set up shop in your mattresses, couch cushions, and chairs.
4 Signs of Bed Bugs
Since bed bugs can get into your home undetected, spotting an infestation is the best way to prevent a long-term problem. And preventing a long-term problem needs to be a priority. While bed bugs are typically regarded as simply a nuisance pest, rather than a severe health threat, you do not want to let them get a foothold in your furniture. Repeated bed bug attacks can result in skin damage, along with severe insomnia even after eradication.
So how do you spot bed bug activity in your home?
- Spotting the actual pest: bed bugs are typically a dark, rusty color and about the size of an apple seed (5 mm in length). They’ll swell up a little more after they have filled up on their primary food source: blood.
- Spotting on mattresses/sheets/furniture: bed bug feeding habits will typically leave dark marks on surfaces.
- Musty odor: bed bugs will infest furniture deep down in the upholstery, so you rarely see the extent of their infestation. However, they will lay eggs deep within the furniture, leaving a musty odor in the surrounding areas.
- Straight-lined or zig-zagged bite marks: when bed bugs attack at night, they will leave a trail of small red bumps on your skin in a straight line or zig-zag pattern.
If you notice any or all of these signs, you most likely have an infestation far worse than you realized. So what do you do next?
Prevention Methods
Since bed bugs easily travel into your home on a variety of vehicles, you must take the best approach when it comes to your response. Stopping bed bugs from getting into your home is hard. You have to constantly check your clothes, bags, and furniture you’re bringing in, so you might miss them at some point. And just one miss is, unfortunately, enough to create a long-term infestation.
You see, once you’ve incurred an infestation, it’s very difficult to get rid of the problem completely. Since bed bugs will lay eggs deep within your furniture, typical home remedies only get the bed bugs who come up to the surface, leaving you with more a few days later. Once they are in your Fort Meyers home, the best way to handle bed bugs is with help from the pest experts at Biotherm Green Solutions. Their expert pest professionals can get to the root of the problem and save you from sleepless nights for good.