No matter how much you hate bed bugs infesting your mattresses, clothes, and furniture, it is a fact that these pests are very common. They will seem to appear out of nowhere and grow rapidly over a short period of time. What is unfortunate is that the bed bug problem does not go away easily. Although you will come across a variety of sprays for bed bug treatment at home improvement stores, most of them fail to deliver the desired results. For a treatment to be effective, it should not just kill the bed bugs that come in direct contact with a particular pesticide, but it should completely eliminate the entire bed bug population from a room or area.
Removal of bed bugs from a house or property is hard, particularly when the infestation has reached a severe stage. Furthermore, if a treatment method does not kill all the bed bugs, the remaining pests will grow and multiply again and the problem will come back again to haunt homeowners.
What Attracts Bed Bugs
To deal with any problem, you should dig into its root cause. If you plan to avoid bed bug attacks, you should have some knowledge about what attracts these pests to a house, building, or hotel. People have many incorrect opinions about what draws bed bugs into homes and apartments.
Is it dirty conditions that attract bed bugs?
No.
It is a misbelief that bed bugs will be attracted to dirty places. Bed bugs are a type of pests that can thrive under any condition. All they need to live and multiply is the blood of humans and warm-blooded animals.
Bed bugs have a special sensing capability, which allows them to detect body heat and warmth from a few feet away. Once they find the food source (blood meal) is available in a particular area, they will be attracted. Another trait that is unique to bed bugs is that they can live in a wide range of materials such as cushions, laundry, furniture, suitcases, cardboard boxes, etc. As long as they have their blood meals available, they will be able to live and thrive in a place.
Main Causes of Bed Bug Infestation
It is important to know what causes a bed bug infestation in the first place. How do bed bugs actually enter a house, apartment, or building which had no infestation before? There is no one-word answer to this.
Though there are multiple means through which bed bugs find their way into a house, all of these are mostly related to transportation. If you or someone carries an infested item into your home, bed bugs will be transported to the property. This will all happen while you remain fully unaware of it.
Key causes of a bed bug infestation include:
- Bringing used furniture into the home
- Cross-contamination of bed bugs between rooms or houses
- Hitchhiking of bed bugs onto luggage you travel with
- The arrival of new guests into the home
Travel is widely considered to be a key reason for the transportation of bed bugs from one place to another place or property. If you stayed at a hotel or resort which had a bed bug infestation, your luggage and clothing will get contaminated and you will carry the bed bugs with you wherever you go. You should be particularly careful when you purchase a used furniture item. As you bring infested items into the house, you will have a bed bug infestation in your home soon. Likewise, bed bugs can also travel from an infested room or building to another.
Effectiveness of a Bed Bug Treatment
As soon as you spot the presence of bed bugs in your home, you should start taking action. What is more important is to apply those treatment methods that will exterminate the entire population of bed bugs.
Bed bug treatments should be selected based on:
- The severity of the infestation
- Cost of treatment
- Location of the infested property
Homeowners and renters often employ DIY control methods to get rid of a bed bug infestation. Do-it-yourself techniques kill bed bugs, but they do not kill all the bed bugs you have in the house. After the treatment is over, remaining bed bugs multiply rapidly again and the problem remains. When it comes to effectiveness, you should always try to avoid using over-the-counter pesticides. Most of these do not work well and they also contain very harmful chemicals.
Bed bug sprays available in stores are not very effective, because they only kill those bed bugs that come in direct contact.
Complete removal of bed bugs from a house is actually a time-consuming process. You can never expect one treatment to do the job. According to experts, one-time treatment will not remove all the bed bugs. For the best results, you will need to apply multiple treatments in succession, as per the specific needs of the type and size of bed bug infestation you have.
How to Effectively Get Rid of Bed Bugs
All bed bug problems are not the same. It is only after a pest inspection that you will be able to know how severe the infestation is. Pest control specialists first assess the entire pest situation and consider several factors before they develop a custom solution to eradicate bed bug infestations.
The most effective treatment for the removal of a bed bug infestation consists of the following four essential steps:
Identification:
It is extremely important to conduct a proper inspection of the area where you have a bed bug attack. There are multiple signs that you need to watch out for in order to identify an infestation.
First of all, you need to look in every potential area or crack where bed bugs can live, hide and reproduce. The sofa cushions, seams of the mattress, bed frames, cracks in doors and windows, a seam of carpets, suitcases, and all furniture items must be properly checked to evaluate the actual level of the bed bug infestation. Unless it is found how severe the bed bug problem is, application of any treatment will simply be guesswork. So, it will not prove to be very effective.
A pest control company such as Final Exterminators uses various tools and techniques to discover each bed bug hideout. Feel free to reach out to one of our pest control specialists for professional help.
Contain:
The next crucial step of the procedure is to contain the infestation before it can get worse and spread to other adjacent rooms or areas. This is again a step, which requires skillful techniques.
Getting rid of the live bed bugs is vital to contain the infestation in an effective manner. A pest control expert will vacuum all those seams, joints, and cracks to suck up live bed bugs and remove them in a careful manner so that the infestation does not transfer to any other area. Then all the affected mattresses, clothing, textiles, and linens will be washed in hot and dry water. Steam can also be used to kill live bed bugs present in the infested items. Since this is only containment, this will not get rid of the entire bed bug infestation in your building or apartment.
Kill:
Finally, it is time to eliminate the entire bed bug infestation. Based on the severity of your pest problem, specialists will either suggest one effective bed bug treatment or a combination of more than one treatment for the most effectiveness. Use of steam, insecticides, temperature (high and freezing), and desiccants are some of the most powerful methods to remove bed bugs as well as hatched eggs once and for all from your home, apartment, or building.
Monitor:
Once the entire infestation has been effectively treated and all the bed bugs have been exterminated, it is important to make sure these tiny blood-sucking pests do not come back again.
Severe bed bug infestations can take many weeks to go away. After every step of the treatment procedure, the infested area will be checked. If there is a sign of any new bed bug activity, treatment will be repeated. At the same time, you will need to adhere to some best practices such as keeping an eye out for dried blood spots on beddings, mattress protection, and vigilant travel to keep any new infestations away. A pest control specialist will be able to properly carry out the entire procedure as well as guide you in the process for the best results.
Talk to a Bed Bug Treatment Specialist
If all of your DIY solutions have failed and the bed bug problem in your home or building has not gone away, you should get in touch with a professional pest control expert or exterminator. In fact, hiring a professional is the fastest and the most effective way to eradicate a bed bug infestation. Operating in and near Moreno Valley, CA, Final Exterminators is the ideal company you can rely on for the removal of all kinds of bed bug infestation in your property.
You can reach out to our office via a quick phone call or shoot us an email using the contact form given on our website.
