How To Get Rid Of Bed Bugs

It is doubtful that you grew up with bed bugs and the chances of you having come across one over the last fifteen years is still reasonably slender, but the chances are increasing. In some parts of the world’s inner cities, the incidence of bed bug encounters has risen by up to 100% per annum since the year 2000. Another report says that of 700 hotels surveyed, twenty-five percent of them had issues relating to bedbug infestation.

The key problem with bed bugs is their detection. Not everyone has a reaction to bed bug bites and if they do, it can take up to nine days to develop. That means that you could easily reprimand a hotel for the infestation, when you were bitten thousands of miles away on a different continent.

This can be a real difficulty if you travel a great deal. Then there is the fact that bedbug bites are not easily discernible. There is no red mark in the middle of the swelling as with mosquito bites, but they are frequently in rows of three, just like flea bites.

The good news is that although bedbugs are capable of passing on human diseases, they never have done so far to date. However, it is a frightening possibility, if it ever were to happen.

The bad news is that they are hardly affected by normal domestic insecticides. This is because bed bugs have become virtually immune to the average insecticides available on the shelf in your supermarket. Bedbugs also have a waxy top coat, which inhibits surfactant pesticides from being totally successful in destroying them.

Therefore, the most successful bedbug killers attempt to scrape off this waxy top coat. Some bedbug sprays do this by incorporating powered glass or powdered silica, which attaches itself to that waxy coat. As the insect wriggles itself into narrow crevices, the powder abrades the wax. This then allows the pesticides to do their job. The downside of this methodology is that it will take several days to get rid of them.

Professional bedbug exterminators use steam to get rid of an infestation these days. This is because no stage of the bed bug’s life, egg, nymph or adult can survive temperatures above 45c. If you want to try getting rid of your bedbugs yourself, you could hire a wall paper steam stripper or buy a hot air paint stripper. These will produce a temperature sufficient to destroy bedbugs.

The locations where bedbugs like to go into hiding are behind loose skirtings and architraves, in cracks in plaster and behind tears in wall paper. Their number one favourite of all time though is inside a ripped or torn mattress. They like to be as near to their victims as they can, which is something to keep in mind, when you go looking for bed bugs’ hiding places.

The other way of solving your bed bug problem is to call in the experts. This is also the best, if the most expensive, method of doing it, but at least you will know that your bedbug problem is over and you should have a guarantee too.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with bed bugs spray. If you are interested in this, please visit our website now at Picture Of Bed Bugs for more details.