Did you wake up to find some red rashes on your body or saw some brownish marks on the bedspread or pillowcases? These are telltale signs of Bed Bugs! In the past two decades or so, these pests have spread rapidly. It has become so prevalent that most people would have had bed bugs at home at least once. Though it is not a health hazard, having these bugs crawling in your bedding is annoying and so are the itches and the skin allergies it causes. These tiny creatures track into your house with the luggage when you travel or through the handbags and school bags that you carry around. If you have bed bugs at home, read below to know how to get rid of them.
Get It Inspected
Having bed bugs at home may be common, but treating them effectively is a challenge even after all these years. They are highly adaptable and over time they have accustomed to many pesticides used to kill them. So using over the counter insecticides and pesticides may not do any harm to them.
Moreover, manual techniques will not help in getting rid of them completely. The best way to handle this issue is to hire pest control services, that are loaded with the latest equipment, opine experts from a bed bugs Portland company. This equipment can identify hidden perches for these critters. So, you can know they are gone for sure.
Do Not Move Out Of Your Room
Many people make the mistake of sleeping in a different room after they find out there are bugs on their mattresses. But doing so will only make things worse as these bugs come searching for their blood meal. That means you are helping them infest more rooms and also it is easier to exterminate these pests when it is contained in one place than hunting them in several places.
Early identification of Bed Bugs helps
Early identification of bed bugs is instrumental in containing the rapid infestation and also elimination. Some of the early signs of bed bugs are bites and to identify any bed bug stains on your sheets. Another is to look for early signs of brown-black fecal matter on the dashboards, bed springs, mattresses, and pillowcases. Use a flashlight and check for eggs, dead skin and bugs in cracks of your bed frames, furniture, and even the walls and electrical outlets. It is also pertinent to be educated about these pests, how they spread, and their dangers.
Knowing how they look is critical as many other bugs like carpet beetles, bat bugs, spider beetles and roach nymphs all look like. They are tiny but the adult bugs and even their eggs are visible to the naked eye. These can reproduce quite rapidly and go without food for many months. Bed bugs hunt for their food at night and are active until a few hours before dawn. They are hiding during the day as they are sensitive to light.
Proper inspection is the foremost step in killing the bed bugs but it is easier said than done for an untrained eye. The best recommendation is to have a reputed pest management company do it for you. The process of identification, elimination and sanitation is a time-consuming process. It also needs great expertise to deal with it in the best way with minimum risks. Hence taking the help of professionals is more effective than dealing with the menace yourself.
Keep The Place Clean
Even after hiring a professional pest control service, it is important to clean all the infested areas and in the process, kill any pests that you can find before they arrive. Some of the cleaning methods include vacuuming, taping them or using a sticky lint roller. If you are using the vacuum, remove the bag, seal it and dispose of it properly. Next is to take care of the bedding and the mattress. All the bedding that can be cleaned using hot water, needs to be laundered in a washing machine and dried using the max heat settings to kill the bugs. Use mattress encasement so that any bugs in it are trapped and do not come out. Interceptors can be placed below the legs of bed frames and other furniture so that they get trapped while they are climbing up. Move all the furniture including the bed frames away from the wall, so that they do not crawl throw it.
Don’t throw away things like mattresses and your other belongings just to get rid of these pests. Since they do not cause illness as such, there is no need to panic and make it an expensive issue. Make the right decision of calling a pest control service rather than doing things in haste.
