bed bugs sheets

What do bed bugs look like on sheets

Before starting bed bug treatment or bed bug removal, it is very important for clients to understand the nature of bed bugs and how they affect our lives and how we can treat them. In addition, for effective bed bug treatment and control, it is key to understand the bed bug itself. So let me introduce the bed bug and bed bug treatment for you.

What do bed bugs look like on sheets?

Bed bugs are tiny little insects that suck the blood from humans and animals. The adult bed bug is 4 or 5mm long with a flattened oval body and no wings. It is a reddish-brown color, while the baby bed bugs are translucent, so it cannot be seen without the aid of a magnifying glass. They crawl around bedding and feed during the very early hours of the morning, about an hour before sunrise.

They are present throughout all months of the year and can reproduce all year round. The eggs are milky-white colored and about 1mm wide. They are usually found in clusters of anything up to a few hundred. Because bed bugs are so tiny and they multiply at a rapid rate, you can never be 100% sure you have got rid of them all. That’s why most people prefer to call in pest control professionals to eradicate them completely. However, if a bed bug bites you, you will probably not feel it right away.

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If the bed bug bites you, it simultaneously injects your skin with an anesthetic which numbs the surrounding area. This means you are unaware you are being bitten until the numbness wears off. Everyone reacts differently to bed bug bites. Some people get wells that weep puss from the middle, while others experience tiny red bumps like a rash. They are always incredibly itchy, and excessive scratching at them can cause infection in the skin or even scarring. Besides, bed bugs are not actually considered a medical threat because they do not transmit any known diseases. If you have bites on your body that you think may be caused by bedbugs, you should closely inspect your bedsheets for tiny droplets of blood.

Bed bug eggs hatch in one to two weeks, and the newborn nymphs begin to feed immediately. They pass through five molting stages before reaching maturity, requiring a feed during each of these stages. They are attracted to the warmth of human bodies and the carbon dioxide on our breath. Their favorite place to thrive in the bedrooms, but they can be found in cracks and crevices of other places throughout the day. Their most likely hideaways include the seams of mattresses, cracks in your bed frame or headboard and behind bedroom furniture.

Bed bugs are an insect which has performed an almost miraculous resurgence in the last ten years. In the past, many pest control companies went many years without even seeing a bed bug, but in recent years they have returned and are now found in any sort of dwelling from the poshest hotel to the humblest home.

There are a lot of fallacies and misconceptions about bed bugs. One of the biggest urban myths is that every bed has them. This is simply not true! Every bed has dust mites that feed on human skin, and these pests are not bed bugs.

What do bed bugs look like?

Bed bugs are visible to the naked eye and are surprisingly large, especially after a meal of blood! Adult bed bugs are about the size and shape of an apple pip and can move quite quickly when disturbed.

Bed Bug Bites

Bed bugs feed on blood, simply that and preferably yours! They prefer humans, but they will bite your cat, dog or other pets as well. They are nocturnal and will typically emerge in the early morning hours when their target is in a deep sleep. They sense their target by detecting the carbon dioxide in exhaled breath, and when they close in on their meal, they switch to infrared detection of body heat.

They inject their prey with a fluid anesthetic and anti-coagulant fluid, which stops you from feeling the bite and keeps the blood flowing. They need to feed about once every seven to ten days.

For these reasons, bed bug bites tend to be concentrated on the upper torso, bites on the ankles and lower legs suggest fleas, a cheaper and easier pest to deal with. Even though fleas don’t live on humans, they can be a nuisance pest, potentially causing illness.

Checking for bed bugs

If you think you may have bed bugs, the first thing we are going to tell you to do is to DO NOTHING until you have had them positively identified.

If you live in our operational area, we can call out to you to do an inspection. If you live anywhere else in the world, we obviously can’t do a treatment for you, but we can make an insect identification for you over the internet if you can send us a decent quality digital photograph of the insect or evidence that you have found.

You would be amazed at how many times we turn out to an infestation that is ‘definitely bed bugs’ according to the customer, but which turns out to be something totally different, easier and cheaper to treat on inspection.

Professional Bed Bug Treatment

Another urban myth is that bed bugs are confined to beds and that burning the beds will solve the problem. Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

Where do bed bugs come from?

Bed bugs live anywhere within around fifteen to twenty feet of where a person normally sleeps, which in most cases means the entire bedroom. This is why eradicating bed bugs is so difficult as they are not only in the beds but everywhere in the room, in the beds, under the carpets, in furniture, picture frames and even inside electrical sockets and switches.

You must call in a professional. Bed bugs are a difficult pest to eradicate, even for the pros! The treatment is time-consuming and exacting, but your pest controller will guide you in every stage of the procedure.

You will have to make preparations before the treatment so that your pest controller can access every possible hiding place, and there are several dos and don’ts to ensure that you don’t spread the problem further around your house.

There are many different preparations available to your contractor, but he will use an insecticide licensed for your country’s purpose.

If he is doing the job efficiently, he will treat everything in the room, undersides of drawers, inside box springs, backs of wardrobes, picture frames etc. He should also dust the insides of switch boxes and sockets.

The insecticide used will probably contain a cocktail of chemicals, including an insect growth hormone which will prevent any eggs which survive from developing.

Your contractor should then finish off with a precautionary spray treatment of stairs, etc., if any bugs have been dropped during the washing process.

In situations where the preparations and the treatments have been carried out diligently, it should only rarely be necessary to carry out a repeat visit, but it should be established beforehand if any second treatment is included in the price or would require a second payment.

We wrote the following section to help people with bed bug problems as a guideline on how to prepare a property for a bed bug treatment, but it contains many useful pointers which you may find interesting.

Dos and Don’ts of Bed Bug Treatment

Broadly speaking, you will need to take the following steps.

  • Involve any neighbors in any form of attached property. If you live in any form of communal housing, terraced house, semi-detached apartments, condos or flats, then you MUST involve your neighbors. Bed bugs spread like wildfire in these properties, and you risk the fact that the bugs have already spread. Worse still, they may have COME from your neighbors’, and ,you will constantly be re-infested unless they take action. We will refuse to carry out the treatment in these properties unless a full inspection and monitoring program is carried out in every property, as we know that we would be wasting our time and your money!
  • Your professional pest controller will identify with you and your neighbors (if appropriate) the extent of the infestation and will quote you a price for the work if that has not already been agreed upon.

DO NOT:

  • Burn, destroy or otherwise remove your bed/mattress. We can probably save the bed, and you will only spread the bugs throughout the house whilst moving it. If you transport the old bed to a tip, refuse dump etc., you risk contaminating the vehicle you transport it in.
  • Buy a new bed or mattress. It will be infested on the first night.
  • Using any sprays, bleaches, powders or potions, will make it more difficult for the professionals.
  • Sleep in another room, downstairs on the couch, or worse still, go and stay with a friend or relative. The bugs smell your exhaled breath, and they will follow you to other rooms in the house which may not be currently infested, thus making the task harder for your contractor and more expensive for you. If you stay with a friend or relative, you risk transporting the bugs with you.
  • Do not carry dirty linen unbagged through the house. You risk transporting the bed bugs.

Before The Bed Bug Treatment

Preparing for a bed bug treatment is a daunting task as EVERYTHING other than the furniture must be removed from the infested bedrooms. It is somewhat akin to moving house in scale.

We suggest that you tackle it in the following manner.

  • Obtain a large supply of good-quality bin/garbage bags in two different colors.
  • Bag up all bed linen and personal clothing in the bedroom, do not transport unbagged items as you risk the bugs dropping out all over the house.
  • Pre-sort those items which can be washed from those that can’t.
  • Those items which can be washed should be transported to your washing machine in sealed bags and washed at a high temperature (above 50 c). This will kill any bugs or eggs. If your tumble drier can achieve these sorts of temperatures, then tumble drying for ninety minutes will kill bugs and eggs.
  • Those items which cannot be washed or tumble dried can be bagged and placed in a chest freezer for five days. It may be worth buying a second-hand chest freezer for this purpose. Put the freezer in its coldest setting.
  • Place all newly washed items in a different-colored bag and store them away from unwashed items. Do not use the same bags you transported the unwashed items in, hence the idea of using different colored bags.
  • Empty all wardrobes and drawers in the room of ALL personal items and store them in sealed bags. Those items which will not be damaged by freezing should go in the chest freezer.
  • You must leave in the room any paintings or mirrors etc.
  • If possible, unfasten any fitted furniture from the walls to enable the backs to be treated. This is absolutely essential in the case of fitted headboards.
  • Takedown and wash or freeze any curtains.

When you have finished, your bedrooms should look as if you were moving house with the exception that the beds, stripped down to mattress level, should remain.

The house is now ready for bed bug treatment.

What to do after bed bug treatment?

Your pest control contractor should advise you to stay out of the house for a period, usually around four hours, after which you can start to put your house back together.

The following steps are essential.

  • Pull the bed away from the wall and fit bed bug moats and bed bug proof mattress covers. Some insects will have survived the treatment, but they will touch the insecticide and die as they cross the treated zone to get to you. Any bugs inside the mattress will not be able to get out and bite you and will die.
  • DO NOT vacuum carpets or mop floors for a period of 28 days after the treatment. If you do, you will remove the insecticide.
  • DO NOT sleep in another room. Any surviving bed bugs will attempt to get to you and will only die in the process in a treated room.
  • We recommend leaving the bed bug moats in situ permanently, as much for your peace of mind as for detection and prevention.

Other Types Of Bed Bug Treatment

In recent years other forms of bed bug treatment have become available, usually involving extremes of temperature.

One such method is to heat the entire property to around 140F, at which point the bugs and their eggs cannot survive. Another method involves using freezing carbon dioxide.

Whilst we feel that both of these methods may have their uses in specific situations, they both have one major drawback. There is no residual effect. As soon as the house returns to normal temperature, it is safe for the bugs.

If just one single female bed bug survives, then you have wasted your money!

By all means, investigate them, but we would strongly recommend an insecticidal method to give longer-lasting protection.

We fully understand that many people do not like the idea of using insecticides in their homes and especially in their beds, but all modern preparations are highly safe, licensed and fit for purpose, with extremely low mammalian toxicity.

More about Bed Bugs

People often assume that only dirty people get bed bugs, not at all! Surprisingly, upmarket hotels are fighting a losing battle with these pests, and some famous people have suffered.

Bed bugs do not live in dirt and squalor, their diet is YOU, and they are the ultimate in having no prejudices, white or black, rich or poor, young or old, they will bite you!

People often ask, ‘How did I get bed bugs?’ Well, it’s very difficult to say as they are so very easy to get these days. Maybe you stayed in a hotel or guesthouse that had them. Maybe you sat next to the wrong person on a bus, tube or train; transport-related cases are booming these days. If you live in an apartment or terraced row, any building in fact with attached neighbors, then maybe they just walked in under the door!

Bed bugs spread like wildfire in any form of a communal building, apartments, terraced rows, condos etc.

They evolved from bugs that feed on bats (Cimex pipistrella etc.) and probably evolved around the times when human beings started living in caves.

Bats would only live in the caves for half the year round, whereas human beings would inhabit the caves all year round, thus providing a better opportunity for a regular meal.

However, because the bugs historically had to endure long periods without feeding, modern-day bed bugs can survive for extended periods without a meal, up to a year or more in fact.

For many years they were practically extinct in many areas. The invention of highly effective insecticides such as DDT and the removal of much of the slum dwellings where they were prevalent saw pest controllers dealing with very few infestations during the middle and later part of the twentieth century. However, during the last few years, they have been back and with a vengeance.

To say they have reached plague proportions is not stretching the matter too far.

Unlike flies and many other insects, they have an ‘incomplete metamorphosis’ which means that they do not go through a larval or ‘maggot’ stage in their development, but the young hatch from eggs as a complete but smaller version of an adult and then grow by shedding their skins.

These skins are often found in beds and, along with streaks of blood and fecal matter, are some of the signs that an expert will use to check your bed for.

How To Prevent Bed Bugs

Many people are naturally concerned about getting a bed bug infestation and ask ‘How Can I Prevent Bed Bugs?’

The answer is that although there are preventative steps you can take, there is no 100% guarantee that these frightening and expensive insects won’t infest you.

The truth is that if you travel a lot, especially staying in areas where these pests are endemic, then there is a high chance that sooner or later, you will bring bed bugs home with you.

Bed Bugs And Their Smears

If you don’t travel much, don’t stay in hotels and don’t use public transport much then your chances of getting bed bugs are much reduced, unless of course, you live in the same block as somebody who does!

If you travel to the Far East or even cities like London and New York,, there is a fair chance that sooner or later you will encounter these pests sooner or later.

Fortunately, whilst there is no 100% safe method of preventing bed bug infestation, there are common sense things that you can do to a) reduce your chances of becoming infested and b) reduce the severity of the infestation if you are unfortunate enough to succumb.

Most of the bed bug infestations we deal with can be associated with an overseas location, a student child backpacking in Asia, staying in backpacking hostels etc. Many of the cases we deal with involve apartments leased to persons from overseas or are adjacent to them.

Some just involve sheer bad luck. Bed bugs are frighteningly easy to acquire.

So what can you do to reduce your chances of becoming infested?

Well, as we have discussed, many infestations start with a stay in an infested hotel or lodgings.

Your first safety precaution is to thoroughly check out any hotel before you book it. Fortunately, that is easy to do these days with Google.

Just Google the name of your hotel, location and ‘bed bugs’ so you would google ‘Freds Hotel Anytown Bed Bugs,’ and if anyone has reported a bed bug problem, it is likely to show up.

Check out the reports of your proposed hotel online, as bed bug problems are often reported there to give you forewarning before you book.

Even this, however, is no substitute for a visual inspection of the hotel bed before you even unpack your case.

It may be late, you may be tired after a long journey, but a 5-minute inspection of the bed may save you countless heartache and hundreds if not thousands of dollars.

As a precaution, you can carry with you an insect repellent which may have some effect.

We currently have a presentation under construction aimed at teaching hotel management and staff how to do regular inspections of hotel bedrooms for these pests. If you would like us to inform you when this is available, please fill in the contact form on this page.

Strip the bed down to mattress level. Inspect closely around the folds and edges of the mattress, looking for the dark smear marks as in the photos on this page. Check the folds of the mattress for bed bugs

Of course, live bugs and cast skins will be easily visible in an infestation of any size. Check the wood of the bed frame. Bed bug smears, which are digested blood, usually show up well against wooden frames.

If you see evidence of bed bugs refusing to stay in the hotel, although in a foreign country, that might not be all that simple. If you are on a package tour, get hold of your representative immediately and demand to change hotels, threaten to involve the press etc. But whatever you do, do not stay in that room, not even for half a night!

It is common to get bites on a foreign holiday, and that does not mean your hotel has a bed bug infestation. Mosquitoes, midges etc., can all cause bite-like reactions.

However, if you suspect bed bugs, then there are simple precautions you can take when you return home to lessen the chance of transferring the bugs to your home.

Bed Bug Smears On Wooden Frame

Pack all washable clothing in bin bags inside your case, and as soon as you return home, wash everything, including the clothes you stand up in, on a hot wash. Do that immediately after you return home.

Then place your case with any clothing, shoes etc., which can’t be washed inside your chest freezer for 4 or 5 days.

Beyond that, there is little else you can do to prevent an infestation. However, you can take steps to lessen the severity and catch one in the early stages.

The weak point in any bed bug treatment is bugs that get inside the mattress. We cannot get at these easily, and it may mean that the mattress needs to be replaced.

However, it is good to fit the bed with bed bug-proof mattress covers either as a precaution or as part of the treatment.

These covers are impermeable to bed bugs and extend the life of a mattress and so are well worth fitting in any case.

Bed Bug Moats

A wonderful new tool that has arrived on the market recently is the ‘bed bug moat,’ which is useful for both preventing infestation of your bed and for early detection should the worst happen.

Make sure that, if possible, the bed is pulled a few inches away from any walls, especially the headboard, and fit the bed with bed bug moats. Every bed should have them.

How To Get Rid Of Bed Bugs

As you are visiting this site, it is likely that you fall into one of several categories.

Possibly you may have bed bugs (Cimex lectularius) already and want to get rid of them. Maybe you suspect you may have bed bugs and want information, maybe you may be worried about getting a bed bug infestation and want to know how to prevent this, maybe you are getting what you suspect may be bed bug bites, or possibly you are just curious about bed bugs.

Don’t suffer bed bug bites; this site has the answer for you.

What are bed bugs?

There are a lot of fallacies and misconceptions about bed bugs. One of the biggest urban myths is that every bed has them. This is simply not true! Every bed has dust mites that feed on human skin, and these are not bed bugs!

Bed bugs are visible to the naked eye and are surprisingly large, especially after a meal of blood! Adult bed bugs are about the size and shape of an apple pip and can move quite quickly when disturbed.

Where did bed bugs come from?

They evolved from bugs that feed on bats (Cimex pipistrella etc.) and probably evolved around the times when human beings started living in caves.

Bats would only live in the caves for half the year round, whereas human beings would inhabit the caves all year round, thus providing a better opportunity for a regular meal.

However, because the bugs historically had to endure long periods without feeding, modern-day bed bugs can survive for extended periods without a meal, up to a year or more in fact.

For many years they were practically extinct in many areas. The invention of highly effective insecticides such as DDT and the removal of much of the slum dwellings where they were prevalent saw pest controllers dealing with very few infestations during the middle and later part of the twentieth century. However, during the last few years, they have been back and with a vengeance.

To say they have reached plague proportions is not stretching the matter too far. Bed bug bites are now commonplace.

Unlike flies and many other insects, they have an ‘incomplete metamorphosis’ which means that they do not go through a larval or ‘maggot’ stage in their development, but the young hatch from eggs as a complete but smaller version of an adult and then grow by shedding their skins. These skins are often found in beds.

What do bed bugs feed on?
Blood, simply that! Bed bug bites are when they take your blood. They prefer humans, but they will bite your cat, dog or other pets as well.

Bed Bug Bites

They are nocturnal and will typically emerge in the early morning hours when their target is in a deep sleep. They sense their target by detecting the carbon dioxide in exhaled breath, and when they close in on their meal, they switch to infrared detection of body heat.

When the bed bug bites, they inject their prey with a fluid anesthetic and anti-coagulant fluid, which stops you from feeling the bite and keeps the blood flowing. They need to feed about once every seven to ten days.

For these reasons, bed bug bites tend to be concentrated on the upper torso, bites on the ankles and lower legs suggest fleas.

Where do bed bugs live?

Another urban myth is that they are confined to beds and that burning the beds will solve the problem. Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

Bed bugs live anywhere within around fifteen to twenty feet of where a person normally sleeps, which in most cases means the entire bedroom. This is why eradicating bed bugs is so difficult as they are not only in the beds but everywhere in the room, in the beds, under the carpets, in furniture, picture frames and even inside electrical sockets and switches.

I have bed bugs, does this mean I’m a dirty person?

Not at all! Some surprisingly high-end hotels are fighting a losing battle with these pests, and some very famous people have suffered.

Bed bugs do not live in dirt and squalor, their diet is YOU, and they are the ultimate in having no prejudices, white or black, rich or poor, young or old, they will bite you!

How did I get bed bugs?

Well, very difficult to say as they are so very easy to get these days. Maybe you stayed in a hotel or guesthouse that had them. Maybe you sat next to the wrong person on a bus, tube or train; transport-related cases are booming these days. If you live in an apartment or terraced row, any building in fact with attached neighbors, then maybe they just walked in under the door!

Bed bugs spread like wildfire in any form of a communal building, apartments, terraced rows, condos etc.