Getting rid of bedbugs is not easy, but it is possible. Of course, bedbugs are a cause for great concern, but do not despair. Let’s say right away that a high standard of living and order in the apartment, and even frequent cleanings do not guarantee protection from these parasites. Therefore, no one is safe from living in the same area as bed bugs. But you shouldn’t despair or, especially, change your apartment or place of residence. We will show you how to get rid of bedbugs quickly, effectively and without making significant financial efforts.
How to detect bedbugs
Spotting bedbugs is easy if you know what they look like and where to look for them. During daylight hours, parasites hide; they try to go out “hunting” only at night, in the early morning, from three to six in the morning. The rest of the time they digest food in shelters. They can be places under mattresses on the bed, corners under baseboards and carpets, and clothing.
If you suspect that you have bedbugs, we advise you to inspect these areas. If, after carefully examining their hiding places, you find at least a few individuals, you can conclude that you really have a problem.
Bedbug larvae skins
You are more likely to find not the bedbugs themselves, but the chitinous shells left after the molting of their larvae. If the room has not been cleaned for a long time, including secluded corners that parasites use as shelters, then the dry skins of bedbug larvae accumulate there in large quantities. What deposits of dry skins are sure evidence that you really have bedbugs in your house.
The smell of bedbugs
Another sign by which you can detect bedbugs in the house is a characteristic smell. The smell of bedbugs is somewhat similar to the smell of almonds or fermented raspberries. For this reason, in some countries, sanitary services use dogs to search for areas infested with bedbugs.
Bedbug stains
Another sign of the presence of bedbugs in the area is small brown or brown spots that may appear on bedding. They arise as a result of the fact that a person tossing and turning on the bed crushes those insects that have already managed to drink blood.
Bedbug poop
Parasites can also be detected by their excrement.
If you find small black specks of dust in your apartment that look like poppy seeds, think about it: perhaps parasites have settled in your apartment. Bedbug excrement can be found near baseboards, behind cabinets, and under furniture. However, you should not think that unsanitary conditions are a prerequisite for the presence of bedbugs in a room. These insects are neutral about cleanliness in the area where they live. That is why you can catch bedbug larvae or eggs even in a luxury hotel. In addition, bedbugs migrate quickly and move through air ducts from apartment to apartment. Therefore, if your neighbors begin to poison bedbugs, it is possible that they will move to another habitat, that is, to you, while living conditions in already developed territories remain unfavorable for them.
How to recognize bedbugs in the house
Unfortunately, in our time, not everyone can recognize a bedbug for several reasons. Firstly, in our time they are not found in every apartment, and secondly, living next to a person, they rarely catch the eye. As a rule, these biting parasites are active at night, and during the day they can hide in the sofa, among bedding and other accessories when conditions favor this. Quite often, people get up in the morning with bites that are very itchy, but they associate these actions with the activity of mosquitoes, which are also active at night.
Features of the life of bedbugs:
- The bug has a flattened body that does not have wings. Typically, the size of a bedbug does not exceed 3 mm, but if the bedbug drinks human blood, its size can increase to 8 mm.
- The parasite is armed with a strong, thin proboscis, with which it pierces human skin.
- Hungry bedbugs show unprecedented activity, even climbing onto the ceiling to attack a sleeping person at night. Well-fed bugs, on the contrary, become quite slow.
- The color of the bug's body depends on how long ago it took food: a hungry bug's body has a light yellow tint; if it has recently eaten, then its color will be light scarlet, and if it managed to eat a long time ago, then the color of the parasite is dark brown shade.
It is very important to determine in time that there are bedbugs in the house. The first sign that the bites on the body belong to bedbugs is a kind of “path” formed by the bites of this parasite. That's why:
- Bedbugs, as a rule, bite several times, moving step by step to a new place, in search of a more suitable place. The distance between adjacent bite points can be several centimeters.
- In the morning you can see small blood stains on the bed. As the person turns over, he crushes the bedbugs.
- Dark spots can be found on wallpaper, baseboards and furniture, indicating the activity of dangerous parasites. In addition, this indicates a large number of them.
- A specific, unpleasant smell may appear near the sleeping place, as if there is a bucket of spoiled raspberries in this place. This smell comes from the excrement of a large number of parasites that are actively reproducing.
In this case, you will have to inspect the following places:
- Check the area under the mattress, as well as the wooden parts of the bed or sofa for black spots. Especially, you need to pay attention to the back of the sofa, which rarely moves from its place. In this place they feel quite comfortable.
- Check the back of appliances as they love places like this.
- You will have to look behind the peeling wallpaper, behind the paintings, as well as at the sockets and switches.
- You will have to remove paintings and other decor from the walls.
- Review everything in the closets where all the clothes are located, and also look into all the existing cracks.
- Some experts advise getting up early in the morning, when it is still dark outside, to determine the presence of bedbugs. To do this, you need to set an alarm for about 3 am and quickly turn on the light when it rings. During this time, it is unlikely that all the parasites will be able to hide and they can easily be found in the bed and on the wooden parts of the bed.
How to deal with bedbugs in an apartment?
Destruction of bedbugs
Destruction of bedbugs is effective if you choose the right method to combat them.
- The most effective and fastest way to kill bedbugs is to call a pest control service
. This method is suitable for you if you have enough financial resources and want to completely get rid of insects throughout the entire area. - An alternative to calling a pest control service is to use insecticidal preparations
. Financially, this is much more affordable than calling specialists, but it will require time and effort. With a strong desire and a competent approach, it allows you to get rid of parasites in an apartment or in a large room. - The safest way to get rid of bedbugs for apartment dwellers is temperature treatment
of furniture and premises. Its effectiveness is due to the fact that bedbugs easily adapt to chemical means of combating them, but cannot withstand room temperatures above +50 °C or below -30 °C. However, technically performing temperature treatment is quite difficult. You will need to call a specialist. - The use of folk remedies
in the fight against bed bugs. Compared to the other means listed above, this method of struggle is the least effective. In general, folk remedies can only repel insects migrating from unfavorable areas of residence, but do not destroy them.
Methods for getting rid of traces
Fighting bedbugs and traces of them
Removing stains on bedding is not so easy, since blood remains on them:
- Do not immediately throw laundry into hot water. In this case, red spots will remain in place of the bloody spots.
- Initially, you need to soak the bedding in cold water. You can add bleach.
- Only then throw it in the wash. We recommend a regime with a water temperature above 60 degrees Celsius, a duration of at least 30 minutes. In this case, you can destroy bedbug eggs on your laundry. When boiled, they die instantly.
To remove bedbug marks on furniture, use any cleaning agent. They are selected based on the material - fabric, wood, plastic, plastic, etc. You are allowed to use a folk remedy. Add baking soda and laundry soap to the water.
If traces of bedbugs remain on the wallpaper, you will have to peel them off; you can try to get rid of them if the wallpaper is washable. Cosmetic repairs are carried out in the room after the bedbugs are destroyed. You can't leave cracks in the wall either. Especially if pests enter the house from neighbors.
At the first signs of infestation in an apartment, it is necessary to take emergency measures: get rid of bedbugs yourself, or call specialists. In Moscow, processing a one-room apartment will cost about 1,400 rubles. It is carried out with a modern insecticidal preparation that remains active on the surface for about 6 months.
How to poison bedbugs
You need to poison bedbugs together.
First of all, you should find out in what area the bedbugs were found. To do this, talk to your neighbors. Often, bedbugs enter a new apartment from the rooms adjacent to it. If at least one apartment has bedbugs, then all the apartments closest to this room are in the danger zone. We will have to carry out the entire range of measures throughout this entire territory. If you find out that there are many apartments in the building infested with bedbugs, then be sure to call a pest control service: it will be impossible to cope with the parasites on your own. Only if you call a specialist can you be sure that the premises of neighboring apartments have been treated properly. Otherwise, there is a risk that your neighbors will buy ineffective cheap drugs or be too lazy to carry out the treatment.
If you find out that bedbugs live only in your apartment, or if you live in a private house, then you can use special preparations to combat bedbugs. However, you should prepare for a long confrontation.
Processing should be carried out as completely as possible. The choice of drug is also very important. It must have maximum effectiveness against bedbugs and at the same time be safe for humans and animals.
Particular attention should be paid to the smell of the drug used to combat bedbugs. Even if the drug is very effective, but its smell is unpleasant and too strong, it will be impossible to save the furniture. There have been cases where owners removed bedbugs, but were forced to throw away the furniture due to the persistent unpleasant odor of the insecticide.
Remedies for bedbugs
When choosing a remedy for bedbugs, you should give preference to microencapsulated preparations intended for self-use. Some of them are highly effective and have almost no odor. These are drugs such as Xulat Micro, Get, Delta Zone, Lambda Zone
and some others.
Repeated treatment for bedbugs
If you have treated your apartment with a modern product, but still suffer from bedbug bites, do not despair. Don't think that bedbugs are indestructible. Most likely, your products, like many others, did not have an effect on the bedbug eggs, and new larvae hatched from the surviving eggs after you were treated with insecticides. In this case, it is necessary to carry out the treatment again within two to three weeks. Larvae that will hatch from eggs that have already been laid will in this case not be able to grow to adulthood and will not be able to lay new eggs. If you re-treat your apartment once a week, you can get rid of bedbugs forever.
Sign #1: Bedbug bites
The first, most unambiguous sign is the marks of bedbug bites on the body. Firstly, they appear after the night, and secondly, they often form characteristic chains, as if the bug was walking along the line and biting (which, in fact, was the case).
Another very characteristic sign of bed bug bites is their apparent selectivity. From the same lice and fleas, bites are noticeable in almost all people. But when an apartment is infested with bedbugs, it often seems that the bedbugs bite some people in the house, but do not touch others. This is actually not true. It’s just that in some people, the bite sites swell and turn red, while others do not develop any reaction to the bites at all (or the swelling and redness go away before the person wakes up). And it seems that some people were bitten by insects, but others were not.
Separately, we talked in detail about this misconception...
Therefore, by the way, there may be a situation where bedbugs live in an apartment, and people don’t even suspect it. They are bitten, but they do not feel or worry. It is in such cases that you need to look for other signs of the presence of these parasites in your home.
If such bites appear regularly and all year round, there are almost certainly bedbugs in the house. Their bites can confuse them with fleas, but they can be identified by other signs.
In one of the experiments, our volunteer experienced for himself what a person feels when he is bitten by bedbugs...
By the way, bites are the first thing you can tell about the appearance of bedbugs in the house. Bedbugs begin to bite before other traces of their vital activity appear.
Preparations for controlling bedbugs
Medicines designed to combat bedbugs are available in various forms: these can be aerosols, chalk, powder, or a concentrated liquid suspension that must be diluted. Currently, insecticidal smoke bombs are also used, which make it possible to treat the entire apartment from parasites. However, the effectiveness of this method of combating bedbugs is called into question by some experts.
In any case, when choosing chemicals to eliminate bedbugs, it is necessary to take into account their toxicity.
There are frequent cases of poisoning with insecticidal preparations due to improper handling. Before treating the premises, be sure to take all household members and pets to another place. Pack the clothes in sealed bags; later they will need to be washed at temperatures above +60 ° C, as they may contain parasites or their eggs. Carry out the disinfestation work yourself wearing a respirator and gloves.
It should be remembered that all rooms must be treated at once, including the corridor, pantry, restroom, kitchen. If you carry out a partial treatment of the apartment, for example, only the bedroom, this may lead to undesirable consequences: in other rooms the parasites will survive and after some time you will experience an increase in the population of bedbugs, which can reduce all your efforts to nothing.
How to remove bedbugs using heat treatment?
Temperature treatment
is a fairly effective and safe way to combat bedbugs, which you can use yourself. It is easier to do such processing in a private house than in an apartment building.
Bedbugs die at temperatures below -30 °C or above +50 °C. Therefore, the method of fighting bedbugs using temperature treatment comes down to freezing the room or furniture in winter or steaming furniture and surfaces using improvised devices such as steamers, steam generators, and irons.
In the simplest version, the owners of a private house open the windows wide in the cold winter and leave the room for several days. It is important to pick up your pets, plants, aquarium and anything else that could be damaged by frost in advance. Bedbugs will die if the temperature drops below -22 °C. If the frost is not severe, then the parasites and especially their eggs will have a chance to survive. The disadvantages of this method are the high risk of rupture of the water supply system or water heating system at low temperatures.
If it is not possible to completely freeze the room, you can take it outside and leave the furniture and carpeting for several days. This method of fighting bedbugs can also be used in a comprehensive manner. When bedbug eggs do not die when treated with chemicals, it makes sense to take the furniture outside into the cold so that they have no chance of surviving.
also used as a means to combat bedbugs.
. It is used to treat furniture upholstery, including folds, which allows you to destroy both adult bedbugs, as well as larvae and eggs. Be careful and make sure you don't damage your furniture with the steam.
To combat bedbug eggs and their larvae in clothes and bedding, use temperature washing
in a mode above +60 °C in a washing machine or boil the laundry.
As an alternative to washing, you can use the following folk remedy
: We put clothes in a closed car and leave them in the sun during the day. Within a few hours the bedbugs will die.
