How to Treat a Bed Bugs Infestation

Bed bugs are some of the worst pests, way worse than lice. What makes bed bugs so annoying is that at first, you might think that you have a few mosquito bites. But then they keep happening. You wake up with these huge bites, all in a row. While at first you might think they are mosquito bites, they itch so much more than that and for so much longer.

After finding out that you have bed bugs, you might just think that you can wash all of your sheets and that would be it. But no. They nest in the fabric of the bed, the wood of the headboard, and even the seams of your clothes. Clothes and sheets are the easy part; just wash them in very hot water. The mattress and headboard are trickier.

For one thing, you have to treat the mattress with a certain product, one that isn't that good at killing the blood suckers. What people used to use to kill them was very effective, but then they found out that there was an ingredient in it that was not good for people to be around. So of course, they took it off the market.

The current product will usually work on mattresses, after a few treatments and some vacuuming of the mattress. But it doesn't work as well on anything wood. If you have a wood headboard, the bugs will nest in there. And the awful thing is that they can go for over a year without a meal and survive. So unless you are able to reliably kill them, you might want to just throw out the furniture that they have infested.

One of the ways that I got rid of the bed bugs in my headboard was I wrapped the whole thing in big sheets of plastic, like the kind used to drape a room before they paint, and then left it out on my porch for two summers. Like I said before with washing clothes, very hot temperatures will kill them. If your summers don't get very hot, you could leave the furniture out in winter too. Extremely cold temperatures will also kill them. But I didn't even trust this method until after two years, when the insects would be dead anyway. Even then, I was paranoid until a few weeks had passed.

A little known fact is that bed bugs find their prey by following carbon monoxide emissions. Also, they will travel in seams of clothes and luggage. So if you have spent time in a motel lately, you might have brought home some new, definitely unwelcome bedmates, either in your luggage or even your clothes. Ever since the outbreak in New York, cities and states have started putting out travel advisories about this problem. So I would suggest checking those before you travel to make sure that you only bring home what you were planning to bring home.