Where bed bugs hide in the home — Isaac’s student essay

Where Bed Bugs Hide In The Home?

This is a topic which is very personal to myself and my wife. While living in Texas we ended up with bedbugs in our apartment. We did not know the battle we were getting ourselves into. Our apartment staff was very helpful in getting some professionals to spray our place, but we took matters into our own hands to help expedite the process.

Bedbugs are attracted to carbon dioxide when we breathe and also when we excrete it from our skin. So, one place that we are breathing, and stationary is when we sleep at night. These pests get their name from it. Bedbugs like to stay and lay their eggs around the mattress at the head of the bed. Look under the sheets around the seams of the mattress for bedbug excrement, eggs, skin sheds and the bedbugs themselves.

There are several products you can buy to repel and kill bedbugs. We did not use many of these things. We simply put rubbing alcohol in a spray bottle and sprayed all our mattresses. This must be done multiple times because the spay does not kill eggs before they hatch. Since the eggs hatch after a week or two, we would spray on a 10-day rotation to try and kill them after they hatch.

The next place to look for bedbugs on and under the box spring if you have one. This was where we found a lot of bugs. In fact, this is when we decided to go ahead and replace our bed, mattress, and box spring. It was due to be replaced, but this pushed us over the edge. If your box spring has an open bottom this will make it easy to spray. Ours was not so we just soaked the entire thing a few times before we decided to replace it.

Another place to look is around the floorboards and the carpet. The bedbugs will retreat to this place because they can get down in the carpet next to the floorboards. It is important to look along every wall and especially behind furniture where there is not any foot traffic. We would pay extra attention to these areas when spraying for them with the rubbing alcohol.

The next place to search out these pests is in your clothing. They will smell the carbon dioxide from when we wear them so things that are worn several times between wearing can be hot spots. When we began looking through our drawers and closets for multiple use clothing items, we just washed everything we had at one time. It is critical that when you dry the clothing, that it is set on a high heat. This is what will kill the bugs. It took us an entire evening at a laundromat to do this, but we got it done. For items that must be dry cleaned and not washed we put them trough the dryer on a high heat.

Bedbugs are not easy to eradicate. However, with some persistence and planning, you can get them on the run in a few short days and keep them away if you persist over a few weeks to a month.

Author: Isaac Ingram

Western Governors University

Student Scholarships

Every year Thrive Pest Control hosts an essay contest and the reward is a 1-year scholarship at a 4-year university in the United States. This blog post is one of those scholarships.