Basic Preparations For Bed Bug Treatments
Here are some of the basic preparations needed prior to Bed Bug treatments with insecticides.
Preparing your home for bedbug treatments may vary from company to company. Some will ask you to turn your entire hosehold upside down and discard all bed bug infested items.
This is not always necessary. The amount of preparation should be determined by the pest control technician upon inspection of the premises and discussion of the present situation with the occupants.
Obviously the more severe the bed bug infestation is, will determine a more serious preparation procedure. Bed Bugs are serious invaders and need to be taken seriously. Half a bed bug preparation just will not do it for you.
Of all the jobs I have been out on, here is the minimum treatment preparations I would ask for. And most of my work takes place in Richmond, Delta and Surrey, BC. (Canada)
Treatment Preparations For The Bed Bug Program
1. Clean and vacuum your suite before treatment. Good housekeeping and sanitation is important to the success of this program. A report will be written up and deficiencies will be noted.
2. Pull furniture, beds, area rugs, appliances and wiring at least 6 inches from walls. Pick up clothes or toys, etc. from the 6-inch space along all walls.
3. Remove any items being stored under the beds, do not place items on beds.
4. Empty bedroom dressers, night tables, and closet bottoms. Bag the bed linen and clothes and launder properly on treatment day.
5. Remove coverings from furniture and beds. Wood bed or waterbed frames may need to be dismantled for treatment, and some mattresses or furniture may have to be discarded.
6. Disconnect filtration units on fish tanks, and cover them. Restart on return.
7. Health Regulations state that occupants and pets must be out before treatment starts. Please be prepared and ready to leave when our technician arrives, he will not wait for you to complete preparations for treatment.
8. Evacuation for 6 hours is fine for most people and pets.
9. Evacuation for 12 hours is required for pregnant women, infants under 1 year of age, and for people suffering from respiratory ailments. I would advise you check with your doctor if these conditions describe you.
10. Upon returning, open doors and windows and allow ventilation for fresh air. Put fresh linens over mattresses and covers on furniture before using them. Address any recommendations or concerns that the technician may have discussed with you prior to the bed bug treatment.
** Conflicting Programs — Do Not use store bought spray insecticides which may interfere with your program once the technician has completed the initial bed bug treatment, unless recommended by the technician.
Usually there will need to be two treatments or more to exterminate the bed bug infestation because of hidden eggs and/or inaccessible stages. Eggs usually hatch out within 5-12 days and inaccessible insects will need to feed during the two weeks in between treatments.
Yes, I know that bed bugs can survive without eating for months, some say 18 months, but as long as someone is staying in the home, they will still move around and contact the residual insecticide applied.
After two weeks, another treatment will be applied and a monitoring period will be discussed to determine if another treatment is necessary to complete the program.
** Laws And Legislation — Since legislation is different in every area, I suggest that you always seek out local guidelines and laws governing the area you live in before purchasing pest control services or using any pesticides.
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To Real Estate Companies and Property Managers: If you own or manage multi unit residential properties in Richmond, Delta, or Surrey, BC - feel free to call or email me for quotations on pest control services in your neighborhood.
Al Smith – 604-723-9722
alsmith@metro-pest-control.com or
(References Can Be Provided on request)
P.S. I do some Micro Blogging On Twitter. Look me up at: @pestcontrolpro
True Or False, Proliferation Of Bedbug Articles Are HittingThe Web
The Truth Behind Articles On Bed Bugs – Be Careful Of What Your Read
There are many written articles on bed bugs either in science journals or online. The growing interest in finding out what these creatures are, how they affect our lives and how we can stop them from spreading has lead to numerous articles on bed bugs. It seems that the internet is filled with information, some of it is very good, some of it is misinformation.
Articles on bed bugs may tackle many areas concerning bed bug biology, and just what a bed bug is and does. A physical description of the parasite can help give us differentiate it from other parasites.
Adult bed bugs are 1/4 inch long and are reddish brown in color, with oval and flat bodies. Often these articles on bed bugs provide photographs that make it easier for us to identify the insect. Actually all you have to do is to go to Google Images and use the search term “bedbug images” or pictures, and you will find all the pictures you will ever want to see.
There are a few different types of bed bugs. Aside from the common bed bug that preys on human blood, there are bed bugs that prefer animal blood like birds or bats. We are concerned only with the bedbugs that prefer human blood here.
Female bed bugs lay in hidden areas. They can give birth to 500 eggs during a lifetime that could be 10 -12 months. The eggs are very small, whitish, and may need magnification to be identified.
These eggs are sticky when first laid; making them stick to whatever surface or crack they are placed in. When they hatch, they are no bigger that a pinhead. As these bed bugs grow, they shed their skins. Some articles on bed bugs say that this shedding can happen five times before becoming adults. Five stages of bedbugs before they reach adult. Ouch!
Articles on bed bugs suggest that the speed of bed bug’s development rely on the right temperature, about 70 – 90° F. At that rate they can complete their transition from eggs to adult bugs in a month.
Cool temperatures and limited access to a prey can delay the full maturity of the bed bugs. Immature Bed bugs can survive months at a time, even though they are not feeding. They do need a blood meal to change from one stage to another. Adult bedbugs can even stay alive for a year or more without a blood meal. Some suggest up to 18 months but I haven’t seen any science on that.
Bed bugs are nocturnal creatures. As parasites, they move unnoticeably within our homes, furniture, carpets, bed, etc. mostly at night.
Bed bugs are very patient parasites. When the bed bugs feed, they pierce the human skin with their beaks and suck the blood through. They get engorged after three to ten minutes. Most people do not wake up from a bed bug bite. There is a numbing agent used by the bedbugs so we do not feel the initial piercing.
The most helpful articles on bed bugs are the ones that show us how to detect these pests in our homes. One sure sign that there are bed bugs under the sheets are dark brownish stains and spotting on the mattress. This is their excrement, droppings, or is otherwise known as their poop.
The physical manifestations of a bed bug bite can be mistaken for other types of insects, such as fleas, or mosquitoes. But if tiny drops of blood on the sheets, pillowcases or walls accompany the itchy, swelling welt on your exposed skin, then you just may be sleeping with this pest in your bed.
Once you have confirmed that bed bugs do exist in your mattress, many articles on bed bugs strongly suggest that you throw your bed away. This is not always necessary!
There are many options that are less expensive than discarding you mattress and box springs. We will get into these in more detail as some of these descriptions will take a whole article to discuss the alternatives.
Where one bed bug lives usually there are hundreds more. It always depends on the length of time you have had this issue. You may want to hire professional pest control to check your entire home for any infestation if you are not sure.
It pays to get the right information just like reading the right articles on bed bugs. Be careful where you get your information. We will investigate this pest further and in greater detail in future articles.
How Can I Tell If I Have Bed Bugs In My Home?
How To Know When You Have Bedbugs
You may say that you regularly clean your household and there is no way that bed bugs could possibly invade your home. Wrong. Having bed bugs at home does not mean that your home is filthy. Both clean and unclean house can be infested with bed bugs.
Many people do not know when they have bed bugs. They don’t even know what bed bugs look like. (Try Google Images and search them) Bed bugs are ’shy’ insects. They crawl out from their hiding only when you are asleep at night. Bed bugs will crawl back to their homes when finished feeding or when you move from your position.
Before you stress yourself out, get the proper information, try to answer the basic questions of “Do I Have Bed Bugs” and “How Can I Tell”. After that, it will be time to get rid of the bedbugs.
So, how would you know if you have bed bugs? I get this question a lot.
- Image via Wikipedia
How to know if you have bed bugs – Fact 1: Know Your Bed Bug.
Usually the first sign that you have bed bugs is that they will bite you and you will show red spots where the bites are. Your body reacts to the bed bug bites much like mosquito bites.
With bed bug bites however, usually there will be two or three bites in a fairly straight line, a couple of inches apart for each bed bug feeding. A good strategy is to make an appointment with your doctor to confirm they are bed bug bites.
Would you know a bed bug if you see one? Of course, the answer is usually no, unless you have had recent experience with them or have searched out their pictures for identification.
Few people these days have seen a crawling bed bug unless they are living in a bed bug infested home. We have been without them for the last 50 or so years, until they started coming back about 7-8 years ago. They are making a comeback and now are approaching pandemic proportions.
Even in hotels and motels, the bed bugs initial havens, you usually won’t see one crawling on your bed unless you wake up and turn the lights on to catch them out. As mentioned earlier, bed bugs are shy, they are nocturnal and photosensitive. And it normally won’t go after you to feed if you are moving. They wait until middle of the night when you are asleep or lying still.
Description of bed bugs – Bed bugs can be seen by the naked eye. They are described sometimes as shaped like big appleseeds, reddish brown in color, oval shaped, flat and wingless. The distinctive characteristic of bed bugs is its oval-flat shape.
Another way to tell if you have bed bugs, is to take the bedding off and inspect your bed mattress and box spring. Bed Bugs leave tell tale spotting where they are nesting.
I love Google for searching out bed bug pictures and bed bug infested beds. There is so much information on Bed Bugs now that a simple search will bring up lots of images and info.
– How to know if you have bed bugs – Fact 2: Know how Bed Bugs behave.
Bed bugs are nocturnal. They feed during the night, and are most active before dawn breaks.
When Bed bugs have been multplying for some time, they can have this offensive, sweet-like, musty scent. Some people can smell this odor in a room or area that has bed bugs infestation. Some pest control companies have specially trained dogs that can determine a bedbug infestation in it’s early stages. It is not perfect though, there may be as high as 25% false positives.
Bed bugs want to be near to their food supply. So, to know if you have bed bugs, check out the area where people sleep. The bedroom bed headboards and frame, mattress and box spring, night tables, dressers, living room sofas and chesterfields are the usual hiding places of bed bugs. In serious well established infestations though, they can be found just about everywhere in the home.
– How to know if you have bed bugs – Fact 3: Catch a Bed Bug and get it identified.
So, one of the the first things to do if you suspect that you have bed bugs, check the seams and undercover of your mattress and edge lining, box spring if applicable, anything around or under your bed, night tables and headboard. You know that you have bed bugs if you can see dark reddish brown stains on these area and some shed insect skins. The dark reddish brown stain is bed bugs dried excrement.
If any female bedbugs have laid eggs, you will see some really small white creamy colored eggs and maybe some small nymph stages of bed bugs there. There is no need to look further to find out if you have bed bugs if you see excrement stains and shed skins. Not to mention eggs and nymphs, this pretty much cinches it.
You have a case of bedbugs. Put this together with the bed bug bites and you will want to call in a professional pest controller to solve the problem.
Your bed bug problem is then diagnosed. More on treatment and preparation for treatment later.
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To Real Estate Companies and Property Managers: If you own or manage multi unit residential properties in Richmond, Delta, or Surrey, BC - feel free to call or email me for quotations on pest control services in your neighborhood.
Al Smith – 604-723-9722
alsmith@metro-pest-control.com or
propestcontroller@gmail.com
(References Can Be Provided on request)
P.S. I do some Micro Blogging On Twitter. Look me up at: @pestcontrolpro
Bed Bug Control, Why Are Bed Bugs In Our Future?
Great article on how and why bed bugs are making a resurgence in most large North American cities, including Metro Vancouver.
Bed Bug Populations Surge – Is it Too Late to Stem the Tide? By Harry Case
In my job as a sales and marketing manager and as a licensed pest control technician and field representative, one of the functions I perform is researching pest related news around the USA. I spend a large number of hours on this research, so I have a pretty good handle on which pests are making news and which ones are of concern to people.
The number one pest, as counted by the news articles I’ve seen, is the common bed bug, Cimex, lectarius. These unsavory creatures have, to date, not been proven to transmit disease from one person to another, but they do spread fear, embarrassment, discomfort and misery.
By the early 1950’s bed bugs were nearly eliminated from the North American continent as a result of the widespread use of DDT. Their numbers were so decimated that generations raised after that time thought they were a myth, perpetuated in a nursery rhyme.
Unfortunately, bed bugs are very real. The banning of DDT and the marked increase in international travel, have rapidly given us a resurgence of these nasty pests. Their increase started slowly at first, sort of like the front side of a bell curve, but then accelerated and intensified.
We now appear to be on the steep and rapidly rising back side of the curve, with no idea of when the population will peak or when the curve will flatten out. The number and variety of places they now infest is quite astonishing!
First re-discovered just a few years ago, in US hotels and motels, they now infest apartments, homes, movie theaters, hospitals, retail clothing outlets and offices, as well as public and university libraries. They can be picked up in taxicabs, busses, trains and aircraft. They’re even on cruise ships! They will eventually be found anywhere humans are.
The current curative measures work fairly well in eliminating these pests but they are time consuming, labor intensive and expensive. A typical control program for a home under 2,000 square feet treatment can involve multiple visits by technicians and cost $600 to $1,000 to treat.
That’s if the infestation is mild to moderate. Heavy infestations can be more involved with a much higher price tag. When conventional means are used, effective treatment requires taking apart beds and furniture for treatment of all surfaces when possible, removing belongings from the structure for fumigation, dry cleaning of draperies, cloth wall hangings and clothing that cannot be laundered or hot laundering and drying of washable clothes.
Carpet edges must often be lifted and treated underneath. Wall voids should also be treated in areas around the bed or bedroom. In many cases articles such as upholstered furniture, mattresses, electronics and the like cannot be treated sufficiently and must be replaced altogether.
Mattresses cannot generally be treated but there are mattress and box spring encasements available on the market that are bed bug resistant and do a good job of keeping any bugs confined inside until they starve to death. There are also some encasements available for sofas and some other upholstered furniture.
Some populations of bed bugs are becoming pesticide resistant. Fortunately, alternative measures are available. When practical, smaller spaces, such as apartments or student dorms can be heat treated with most belongings still inside, but this is a costly process. At times entire structures must be fumigated a time tested and effective, but expensive method.
It seems obvious that, in the case of bed bugs, the proverbial ounce of prevention may be worth 5 pounds of cure. Preventing a bedbug infestation in your home requires vigilance on your part. You can’t depend on anyone else. If you rent, your landlord will not be able to protect you. He or she cannot determine where you travel, what you bring back from those travels, who visits your home or what they might bring into your home.
Although some state or local regulations may, I think unfairly, require that landlords are responsible to pay for treatment, they are not required to replace your non-treatable belongings or furniture and you may end up paying large sums of money for new items. You are the only one with any chance at preventing an infestation in your home.
Measures you can take are as follows: If you go to a hotel place your luggage on the luggage rack, not the floor or the bed. Bed bugs don’t do well trying to scale the rack’s metal legs. Before you unpack check the room. Pull back the sheets and check the mattress for bed bugs or any brown or black spots that might be bed bug feces. Look for molted skins.
Check areas around the bed, behind the headboard, the drawers of the night stand and other furniture. Look under the bed. Think like a bed bug. What tight little places are there where they would be likely to hide.
If you see any signs of bed bugs take yourself and your luggage out of the room, notify the management and insist on another room. Check that room out as well.
Something you can do prior to booking a hotel is look up one of the online bed bug registries for that locale. If there are reports of activity in that hotel select another one. When you get home from travelling, re-check your luggage before you enter your home.
Be sure there are no bed bugs before you bring it in. Be careful of who comes in to your home to visit. Bed bugs can be carried in on clothing or other belongings, from and infested home.
There are other measures you can take but I won’t go into them here. For more information I suggest going to the UC Berkely website and looking up articles by entomologist Gail Getty.
All of these methods are effective in treating an identified infestation and hopefully preventing some infestations, but do nothing to provide a long term solution. As the numbers of bed bugs and the places they infest grows, so will the difficulty and complexity of prevention by current means.
It seems reasonable to me that a better solution is needed. We need a broad and far reaching approach aimed at more easily destroying and preventing these pests from spreading. I certainly don’t advocate bringing back DDT but, perhaps, something with a similar effect on these bugs, without the risks or environmental effects that DDT had.
May be an effective, long-lasting, Cimex specific, insect growth regulator could be the solution. Perhaps we can look at natural bed bug pathogens or parasites. If things get bad enough we may have to resort to chemical means.
It seems obvious to me that, if we don’t develop a powerful method for control and prevention, we will end up with bed bugs and the chronic suffering that they bring, as part of normal life. I, for one, see that outcome as unacceptable.
http://www.pestcontrolcenter.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Harry_Case
For service in Richmond, Delta, and Surrey BC, Canada, call Al Smith at Metro Pest Control – 604-723-9722
Bed Bugs Are Here . . . Back Again
Received one of my many pest control newsletters today and it had an interesting video about Bedbugs and how they can seek you out.
The video is from the National Geographic channel who did a piece about bedbugs and how the bedbug has returned from obscurity.
I thought it might be interesting for you to watch. Here it is, by the way if you are squeamish about insects, especially bedbugs crawling over your flesh, you might just give this video a pass.
There is more great information coming on bedbugs biology, bedbug habitat, bedbug control, bedbug history, and how to inspect for bedbug problems. Bedbugs are getting to be a serious problem in most large North American cities.
Here’s that video . . .
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Looking for service to eliminate bed bugs in your home located in Richmond, BC (Canada) ? Call Me at Metro Pest Control – Al Smith, 604-723-9722 or email me at: alsmith@metro-pest-control.com or propestcontroller@gmail.com
New Look At Metro Pest Control Online
Time To Get Back Into Writing About The Pest Control Game!
Well, it has been a while since I last posted any information to this website. I have been busy with servicing clients and solving pest problems.
There must be little tidbits of info I can pass on a couple of times per week if I really think about it . . . even if it’s just to post guest author’s articles of interest.
Since I work in the field every day, and come up against different pest challenges all the time, you would think I would have no shortage of material to pass on.
So . . . what is the problem? Why am I not writing more?
Business is good! I have had to delay writing about pest control and focus on doing pest control because there seems to be huge demand this year for our services.
One thing I pride myself on is great response times and guaranteed results quick. Customers call me, leave me messages and/or point me towards the problem they need to solve and I get it done in timely fashion.
Since my commitment to my pest control customers includes “Results Guaranteed” and the satisfaction of my customers is important to me, I have been taking care of business!
Now, I will take some time to write about some of the pest control challenges I face daily and pass on some tips and strategies to you.
You should be seeing a least a post a week on some good stuff. Keep in mind that I am a specialist in structural pest control in multi unit buildings (apartments, townhouse complexes, condominiums, etc.), not agricultural subject matter.
I have experience with most building pests but my best work includes clearing bedbugs, pharaoh ants, german cockroaches, mice or rats from residential multi-unit complexes. (Apartments and Townhomes)
To Real Estate Companies and Property Managers: If you own or manage multi unit residential properties in Richmond, Delta, or Surrey, BC - feel free to call or email me for quotations on pest control services in your neighborhood.
Al Smith – 604-723-9722
alsmith@metro-pest-control.com or
propestcontroller@gmail.com
(References Can Be Provided on request)
P.S. I do some Micro Blogging On Twitter. Look me up at: @pestcontrolpro
P.P.S. Since legislation is different in every area, I suggest that you always seek out local guidelines and laws governing the area you live in before purchasing or using any pesticides.
