Pests of wooden furniture in the house

• By Vil Malinoshevsky
• About bedbugs

Bed bugs most often settle in sofas and beds, since here they are closest to the food source - a sleeping person. Since they do not feed on anything other than human blood in the apartment, they have to constantly move from places of shelter to a sleeping person to feed. The sofa itself, on which people constantly sleep, is ideal for arranging such bedbug nests.

Judge for yourself:

1. From the nest in the sofa, the bug needs to move very little to bite a person and drink blood. The less he has to run, the lower the risk of being caught by a person and being destroyed. In a sofa, this risk is minimal: an insect needs to literally crawl from one side of the mattress or upholstery to the other - and that’s it, breakfast (or dinner) is served;
2. Then, there are a lot of places in sofas that are suitable for arranging nests. Folds of upholstery, joints of pillows, cavities between the upholstery and the frame, cracks in the joints of the frames are almost ideal hiding places. Here, bedbugs are difficult to get hold of, but thanks to their narrow body, each parasite is reliably hidden from prying eyes. In our practice, there were many cases when the sofa had to be disassembled literally down to the bolt, including tearing off all the hardboard and fabric from it in order to get to well-hidden bedbug nests - with eggs and nymphs;
3. Finally, sofas have more complex designs that are suitable for hiding places than simple beds. Large numbers of bedbugs can safely hide here, but it is more difficult to find them here, and if you can find them, it is more difficult to remove them from here, especially on your own, without the services of an exterminator.

Simply put, sofas are the safest and most comfortable place for bed bugs to live. It is not surprising that if they appear indoors, they multiply in the greatest numbers here, in the sofas.

The photo below shows what sofa structures infested with bedbugs look like:

Why do they even start on the couch? It's simple: bedbugs are either brought into the house by the residents themselves, or they migrate here from neighbors' premises. They can be accidentally brought in in a bag, on clothes, you can even accidentally buy a used and already contaminated sofa and bring it here.

If your neighbors have bedbugs, and your apartment is not well-renovated, it is almost certain that the parasites will sooner or later get into your home. And first of all, they will settle near the places where you sleep. Sleeping on the couch? They will probably settle near him and in him.

Why do bedbugs settle in houses and sofas?

So, keep in mind that bedbugs cannot live anywhere except apartments and houses. Very small wild populations of them live in caves in Turkmenistan, feeding on the blood of bats, but the bulk of these parasites live in human habitation. There are no specific reasons for their appearance in an apartment in general or in a sofa in particular - when they have the opportunity to move into neighboring rooms or they accidentally end up here, they move in and begin to reproduce in a new place, trying to be closer to the victim - a person.

In fact, if bedbugs find themselves in an apartment, they no longer have a choice: in order to survive, they need to start biting people. Therefore, there is no need to look for any malicious intent in their appearance on the sofa: they either ended up here by accident, with a suitcase or furniture, or they got in on their own if the neighbors had little food for them or dangers appeared (for example, the neighbors treated the apartment with an insecticide).

This is why bed bugs are often called couch bugs. This is not entirely correct; there is no separate type of “sofa” bugs - these are the same insects that live, for example, behind baseboards, behind cabinets, under parquet. They look the same, cause the same harm, and are removed in the same way.

The photo below shows the same bed bugs, only on the baseboard removed from the floor:

Please note that it is a mistake to believe that bedbugs live only in the sofa. Most often, this impression is created due to the fact that bedbugs bother a person only when he sleeps on the sofa. That’s why questions often arise about how to remove bedbugs from the sofa, without touching the rest of the apartment. In fact, bedbugs can crawl onto your sofa at night from behind baseboards, behind cabinets and under parquet floors. And if you don’t get them out of here, you won’t be able to completely get rid of them.

How to find bedbugs in a sofa and generally find out whether they are hiding in the sofa or somewhere nearby? Still, it may well be that they bite a person sleeping on the sofa, but then hide in some other places. So, finding them is both simple and at the same time difficult.

Fighting furniture moths - how to destroy furniture moths at home

Now the fight against this pest at home is effectively carried out using the following methods:

1. Heat treatments - in winter, you can get rid of larvae, eggs, butterflies by freezing, since the insect dies when the temperature is below zero degrees. Also, control at home will be successful when the temperature rises above 35°C, that is, to destroy the pest, it is enough to warm the thing outside in the summer. The effectiveness will be increased by ultraviolet radiation, which the larvae and other forms cannot tolerate. The most convenient method is to wash at temperatures above 50°C;

2. Mechanical processing - to get rid of the larva, it is enough to shake out the thing, since it is poorly held in it. This applies to woolen and cotton clothes; carpet and fur coats, the pest will also not be able to stay in its hiding places. Fighting with help using this method is not expensive, convenient, and it doesn’t matter what the insect looks like that a person is going to get rid of;

3. Chemical treatment - control with the help of modern aerosols and other means allows you to get rid of the insect quite effectively and safely;

4. Ultrasonic treatment is the most modern means with which you can get rid of insects.

Remedies for furniture moths are effective

If the apartment is already severely affected by such a pest, then it will not be possible to do without chemicals; if the homeowner does not use them immediately, then they will continue to feed, damaging things. The most effective in case of severe infestation are Raptor and Reid aerosols, and the “Sections against moths” product has also proven its success.

In the early stages, you can use the most economical chemicals: tablets, plates, their use period is up to six months. Washing at high temperatures (about 50°C) is also a successful method of control. Many people know what naphthalene looks like, but you need to understand that it only serves to scare away the flying form of the insect, that is, the larvae and eggs do not die from its influence. Using almost any folk method, a person will get the same result as from mothballs - the smells of tansy and other pungently smelling plants will drive away the flying pest, but the larvae will continue to exist.

When using chemical means, precautions must be taken, especially when processing takes place in the kitchen.

How to detect bedbugs in a sofa

Why is it difficult to find bedbugs in the sofa? Because to detect bedbugs you need to disassemble the sofa. And it’s not easy to open it and inspect the internal cavities - there may not be bedbugs here, because they all hide in more secluded places during the day. What you need to do is unwind the frame, inspect the contact areas of individual elements, remove the upholstery, remove the hardboard and padding. It is here, in the most inaccessible places, that bedbugs hide. And precisely because such work is labor-intensive and requires a lot of effort not only to disassemble the sofa, but also to then assemble it, few people do it.

And, by the way, precisely because disassembling a sofa and then putting it back together is very difficult, many people do not do this when processing. That’s why they can’t get rid of bedbugs on their own - they seem to use the same means that we, the specialists, use, and do everything according to the instructions, but these means simply don’t reach the main nests and the bedbugs remain alive there.

When we poison bedbugs, we disassemble the sofas down to the screws to determine where all the nests of the parasites are located. Sometimes this means you literally have to fight with clients. But our goal is not to save energy and preserve the sofa, but to destroy bedbugs.

This is one of the secrets of successful treatment - you need to find all the hiding places of parasites in the house, even if this means dismantling the sofa, tearing off the baseboards or raising the parquet. Otherwise, disinfestation will be carried out endlessly, and the bedbugs will not disappear anywhere. People don’t want to do this on their own, and therefore cannot get rid of bedbugs. We do this and remove the bedbugs.

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For example, this is what a nest of parasites looks like in a sofa, which would not have been found if a specialist had not dismantled the sofa:

Please note...

It is almost impossible to lure bedbugs out of the sofa, especially during the day. They themselves crawl out of it at night, when they crawl to suck blood to a person sleeping or simply lying on the sofa, or when they begin to be starved - trying to escape from the drug that irritates them.

If you dismantled the sofa and there really are bedbugs there, it is impossible not to notice their presence. Firstly, excrement will catch your eye - small black balls less than a millimeter in diameter.

Remains of chitinous coverings from molted nymphs and bedbug excrement in the hiding place on the upholstery of the sleeping place.

You will probably come across the bedbugs themselves. Adults have a wide but flattened brown body, while parasites that have just drunk are red.

This is what a hungry adult bug looks like:

Through the chitinous coverings one can see the intestines with blood remaining from the previous meal.

And so - already drunk with blood:

It can be seen that the segments of the parasite's body are slightly stretched due to the filling of the abdomen with blood.

By the way, on a leather sofa, because of their brown color, you may not even notice them. Be careful!

Nymphs have a slightly smaller body, but more elongated and lighter in color; young nymphs are generally whitish, translucent, and in well-fed ones, fresh blood is noticeable in the abdomen. The photo below shows several nymphs of different ages next to adults:

Photo by Dong-Hwan Joe, UC Riverside

In places where bedbugs accumulate, their eggs are also white, elongated in length, but still small - about 2-3 mm.

Empty egg shells - it is clear that there is nothing inside. Eggs with embryos have a dense white matte color.

As a rule, nests with a lot of bedbugs of different ages, eggs and excrement are the fastest to be discovered. However, you should carefully peel back and inspect all the seams, folds, and joints in the sofa - here you can find individual hidden individuals, especially adults.

Bugs on the inside of the sofa upholstery

By the way, if insects have been living in the sofa for a long time, the easiest way to determine whether the furniture is infested with them is by the abundance of skins from molted nymphs. Each bug sheds 4 skins of different sizes during its life, and therefore, within just a few months of their reproduction, entire deposits of such chitinous covers accumulate here. Such “symptoms” are enough to make a diagnosis that a sofa is infested with bedbugs.

It is difficult to determine the presence of bedbugs specifically in a sofa by smell and some indirect signs. Surely this can be done by finding parasites here.

For this reason, by the way, it is advisable to check a used sofa by disassembling it. It won’t be pleasant at all to pay money for such a soft box with bloodsuckers...

On a note

It very rarely happens that people bought a new sofa with bedbugs. Still, in stores and warehouses there is nothing for bedbugs to eat, and they do not settle in furniture here. Most often, new sofas are found to contain bedbugs that lived in the room even before the purchase of this furniture; there were few of them and they did not particularly bother people. The purchase of a new sofa simply coincided with the massive proliferation of parasites, they infested it and people got the impression that they had bought a sofa already “filled with stuffing”.

If you find bedbugs, you need to poison them. If you haven’t found it, but you suspect that they still live somewhere in the house, you need to look in other places - in other beds and sofas, in armchairs, behind baseboards, behind loose wallpaper - wherever there are secluded places, from in which parasites can reach a person’s resting place in a few minutes.

Look, for example, in the video in which places bedbugs are found when an apartment is heavily infested:

On a note

Therefore, by the way, you should not expect that if you throw out the sofa, the bedbugs will disappear from the apartment. If they really bother you, it means that there are a lot of them in the house, and therefore, some of them live not in the sofa, but near it - behind the baseboards, behind the furniture, under the linoleum and parquet. Even if there are most of them in the sofa, removing it will only provide a temporary respite: the remaining bedbugs in the apartment will multiply and everything will return to normal.

By the way, it happens that people have no suspicion of bedbugs, no one bites them, but some insects are found in the sofa. Most often these are beetles - grinders and longhorned beetles (their larvae gnaw passages in wooden furniture elements), leather beetles (their larvae can spoil fabric and upholstery made of other materials). Less often you can see cockroaches or fleas in sofas, less often - hay eaters or fleas. They also need to be poisoned, although the methods of exterminating them may be somewhat different, not the same as when exterminating bedbugs.

How to find out if there are bedbugs in your sofa

A number of signs indicate that there are bedbugs in the sofa, including: bites of unknown origin appear on the body. Bites are often confused with mosquito bites, but bedbug bites have a distinctive pattern. For example:

• The bite sites form a kind of “path”. There may be a distance of several centimeters between the bite sites, indicating that the parasite moved and drank blood in different places.
• Bites appear at intervals of about a week, since bedbugs do not feed every day. A red dot can be seen in the center of the bite point. This is blood, which indicates that the bug here pierced the human skin and drank blood.
• By morning, red-brown spots can be seen on the bedding, which indicates the presence of bedbugs.
• As a result of the appearance of parasite waste, a stale, musty odor can be noted.
• You can see dark spots on the elements of the bed or sofa, as well as around the baseboards, on the walls and on the floor. These are excrement of parasites that noticeably spoil the appearance of the home.
• After sleep, early in the morning, you can find satiated bedbugs that greatly increase in size. If the bug is hungry, then its size does not exceed 3 mm. When he drinks blood, he increases to 8 mm and barely moves. At this point, destroying the parasite will not be difficult.

how to get rid of bedbugs in 3 minutes, destruction

Where do bedbugs come from on the sofa?

There are two ways for bedbugs to appear in a sofa, both quite prosaic and banal:

1. Bed bugs get into rooms from neighbors, find sleeping people, bite them, and then hide in the sofa. Gradually they settle here and multiply;
2. People accidentally bring in bed bugs - in bags and suitcases after business trips and tours, with used household appliances and furniture (including already infested sofas). Bedbugs here first live in the first shelters they come across, but gradually move closer to people and settle in the sofa.

At first, when there are few bedbugs in the sofa, people do not pay attention to their bites, mistaking them for mosquitoes, and even for allergies. When the bites become strong, people begin to look for parasites, and by this time they are already multiplying in very large numbers. And when a person finds whole nests in the sofa, he gets the mistaken impression that bedbugs appeared here in large quantities at once.

A single bug bite can easily be confused with a mosquito.

On a note

Very often, the owners of such infected sofas even think that their home was infected on purpose: greedy exterminators planted bedbugs under the door, furniture sellers in the store entered into a share with the sanitary services and in the store they infested the sofas with hordes of parasites, a harmful neighbor or mother-in-law brought bedbugs in her bag - and so on. Of course, all these versions are as absurd as they are laughable, but it is quite possible to understand people who cannot believe that such a horde of bedbugs appeared in the room on their own.

But the fact is a fact: bedbugs have already infested the sofa. How can we poison them here now?

House fleas

From a scientific point of view, there is no such blood-sucking species as the bed flea. This is the name given to several species of insects that live and develop stably on the body of animals. Under certain conditions, parasites migrate - they colonize houses, change hosts and feed on the blood of people.

Animals whose fleas parasitize humans:

• cats;
• dogs;
• rodents;
• birds.

Characteristics of the insect

Fleas are very small in size - no more than 5 mm, the mouthparts have a piercing-sucking structure, and the body is flattened on the sides. Killing a parasite with cotton is almost impossible. It is difficult to determine the presence of fleas immediately after entering an apartment. Usually, a person thinks about the existence of an unwanted “neighbor” after the parasite has multiplied and began to actively attack. Flea bites are painful; it does not have enzymes that “pain-kill” the host’s body.

A characteristic sign of an attack by this type of parasite are small stains of human blood on bed linen, shaped like commas.

Places where fleas accumulate are small cracks and crevices, under wallpaper, baseboards, floors, carpets, trash cans and animal beds. With the onset of darkness, insects begin to actively search for a food source. The lower extremities of the human body are an accessible zone for parasitism and are affected first. The flea jumps 2 meters in height, this allows it to climb into the bed and attack the sleeping person. For a flea, clothing is not an obstacle; it can easily climb onto any part of the body - arms, stomach, shoulders, neck. The parasite is dangerous because it spreads helminth eggs and fatal diseases:

• anthrax;
• hepatitis;
• encephalitis;
• plague;
• brucellosis;
• trypanosomiasis;
• tularemia.

Prevention

A flea can even appear in an apartment where there are no animals, coming from neighboring rooms - the entrance, basement, attic, or neighbors. Methods to combat the parasite:

• If there is an animal in the house, treat the pet and etch the bedding (house).
• Disinfect the premises using chemical insecticidal preparations - concentrates or aerosols.
• In winter, you can freeze out parasites by leaving the room open for several hours at sub-zero temperatures outside.

How to properly destroy bedbugs in a sofa?

At a minimum, you need to find all the places in the room where parasites may be hiding. Sometimes for this you have to make a complete revolution in the apartment, but if this is not done, some nests may remain unfound, then during processing they will be missed and the bugs will survive here. Therefore, the sofa is just the beginning. Often people start there, find bedbugs here, then check the entire apartment and discover that even more parasites are hiding under carpets and parquet, behind cabinets, behind wallpaper, behind baseboards - the situation can be individual in each apartment.

It may, however, be that the bedbugs have settled only in the sofa, but before treatment you need to make sure of this by carefully checking all other possible places of their hiding places.

For example, this is how a good specialist examines possible hiding places for bedbugs if the parasites themselves are not visible in the apartment:

But then you examined the sofa and became convinced that it was infected. It needs to be treated with a product that will quickly and reliably destroy bedbugs. These can be different insecticidal preparations, from relatively inexpensive (for example, Karbofos) to quite expensive. In some apartments, bedbugs may be immune to frequently used drugs; in others, they can be killed with cheap drugs from the market. Therefore, in many cases, the first treatment is a kind of verification. If the bedbugs are dead, then the remedy works against them. If they survived (at least some part of them), it means that they will need to be poisoned again with another drug.

To treat sofas, we use imported products with a complex composition and relatively new insecticides as active ingredients. Bedbugs are not resistant to such drugs and, if treated correctly, all parasites die. However, these products are quite expensive, they are not sold in markets, and it is profitable to poison bedbugs with them when it is possible to purchase them at wholesale prices. It is irrational to use them independently at home.

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All parts of the sofa, all the filling of the soft parts, all the upholstery are carefully processed with this product. Those places where the nests are located are sprayed with double amounts of the product. It is advisable to wipe them mechanically with rags or gloves in order to crush the eggs here - they are more resistant to insecticides and after treatment, larvae can hatch from them.

It is, of course, advisable to spray all sofa structures under high pressure so that the product penetrates to a greater depth of the soft parts, under the upholstery, under the seams and into the joints. However, this effect can only be achieved by using professional equipment - special foggers that create so-called cold fog, which, due to their high cost, are used only by professional disinfectors. In addition to them, it is sometimes advisable to use hot fog, in which the product, like smoke, is drawn even into those hiding places of bedbugs that could not be found and which are impossible to reach (for example, in cracks in the walls).

This processing is carried out as follows:

A simple spray bottle will not work so thoroughly to treat the details of the sofa.

If bedbugs were found in other places in the apartment, all these places need to be treated as carefully as the structure of the sofa. When processing, windows, doors and ventilation in the apartment must be closed.

The sofa should not be assembled immediately after treatment. It must be left disassembled, leave the room and close it tightly. After 2-3 hours, you can ventilate the room, assemble the sofa, but do not wash or wipe it. The material will be saturated with the product, but there will be no product on the surface, and sleeping on such a sofa will be completely safe. Moreover, if you cover it with a sheet, the sleeping person will not come into contact with the product. But if several bedbugs survive in or near the sofa, then in attempts to get close to the person after treatment, they will move along the treated surfaces and get poisoned.

It is believed that bedbugs can be destroyed in a sofa if you take it out into the cold and keep it outside for 2-3 days. This is true, but in reality these measures do not help get rid of bedbugs. It’s just that in most apartments, bedbugs hide in the sofa and in other places. Even if all the parasites in the sofa die, those that are behind the baseboards or under the floors will survive and infest the sofa when it returns. But freezing the entire apartment is more difficult and dangerous - the water pipes may defrost.

Sometimes bedbugs can be completely removed by steaming the sofa with a household steam generator. In this case, a jet of steam is used to treat the seams of soft elements, their joints, cracks between boards, and any cavities in which bedbugs may be located. There are reviews of people who completely eliminated parasites using such measures. However, it can hardly be considered absolutely reliable: most people who use steam generators and steam cleaners cannot clean the sofa from bedbugs using them alone.

How to get bedbugs out of a sofa yourself using folk remedies

Many people don't know if bed bugs can be removed from their couch. To fight them you need to know what they are afraid of. So, these parasites do not like strong odors, high and low temperatures, and some acids.

Vinegar

To remove bed bugs from a sofa using vinegar, you need to do the following:

• prepare acetic acid;
• treat all furniture with liquid, especially in recesses and seams;
• repeat the procedure after 2-3 days.

How to remove bedbugs from a sofa with herbs

You can fight pests with wormwood, tansy or cloves. They cannot stand their pungent smell. Place the plant in areas where insects gather.

Advice! It does not have to be fresh grass; dried specimens will also work.

Freezing

Some people have managed to defeat insects by freezing them, but this method is not always effective, since the pest is very tenacious and can withstand frost of 20 °C.

High temperatures

You can control the pest using heat. The best option is to treat the furniture with a steam generator. If this electrical appliance is not at hand, use an iron with a steaming effect. Before starting work, it is recommended to lay out all the furniture, because you need to process it from all sides.

Another way is to pour boiling water over the furniture. Do this if the sofa is not of particular value. After this, you need to put the furniture outside until completely dry and vacuum it.

Salt

The product can be used as an auxiliary, for example, if any processing has already been carried out. For a stronger effect, add ethyl alcohol and hydrogen peroxide to the solution. These substances do not harm humans. They only work on bedbugs.

Turpentine

This remedy is extremely effective, but requires caution. The recipe is simple:

• Mix one tablespoon of turpentine in a glass of boiling water;
• add a piece of laundry soap;
• mix the product.

It should be applied to areas where bedbugs live.
When working, do not forget about your safety - it can harm the respiratory system and visual organs. After treatment, thoroughly ventilate the room. Want to know everything! A few years ago, a new furniture fabric, microvelor, entered the market. This material is pleasant to the touch, durable and wear-resistant, has dust-repellent properties, and is resistant to fading and moisture.

Maybe just try to scare the bedbugs out of the sofa with wormwood or vinegar?

In general, there is no point in trying to somehow expel or scare away bedbugs from the sofa. Sometimes this is how they try to fight them: lay out herbs, pour in vinegar or alcohol. The parasites still won’t leave the apartment, they won’t stop biting people, only the intensity of their bites may decrease slightly for a while. In general, you need to count on the fact that either you destroy the bedbugs, or they bite you. You definitely won’t be able to scare them away, drive them away, or ward them off with spells or essential oils.