BEDBUG (CIMICIDAE)

How does your home/hotel room become infested with bedbugs? They can be brought on a visiting person’s clothing or luggage. Furniture, clothing or backpacks that are brought in to the home. They can come from other hotel rooms being infested or nearby dwellings. You can bring them home by visiting somewhere and having the bedbug hitch a ride on your clothing, luggage, or body.

Did you know that bedbugs have a distinct smell of rotting raspberries? Sniffing out these bedbugs by certified bedbug detection dogs is around 85% accurate in most cases. Getting rid of these pesky pests requires a combination of different strategies so that you are assured that your problem is taken care of. Vacuuming, heat treatment, pesticides, and buying mattress/box spring covers are some ways that treatment for bedbugs are done. The size of a fully matured Bedbug is roughly that of an apple seed. So they are visible to the naked eye. They are usually light brown to reddish brown, with the nymph stages being more translucent until feeding, when they show a bright red abdomen which will turn brown after digesting the blood meal they consumed. Other nicknames for a bedbug include: wall louse, mahogany flat, crimson rambler, chinch bug and redcoat.

Look in the binding of your mattress or box spring, behind headboards, cracks and crevices of nightstands or behind curtains. If it is a severe infestation, many times you can see them in the corners of the ceilings in a room, or along the edge of the wall and ceiling. Treating all rooms affected, plus adjoining rooms – above, below and to the sides (especially in a Hotel) is recommended so that you don’t force the bedbugs into another location. Treat common walls between rooms with diatomaceous earth, or another pesticide since these voids tend to be a highway for the bedbugs to travel in between areas.