Bed Bug Infestation Signs
The first thing that a Corporate Care professional bed bug exterminator will look for are the signs of a bed bug infestation. There are specific things that a professional bed bug exterminator is looking for, including:
- Shed skins – bed bugs go through several life cycles and they leave behind their shed skins.
- Fecal spots – bed bugs are rather rude and will leave fecal deposits that look like tiny black dots from a felt tip pen behind.
- Blood spots – the bugs can become crushed and leave behind blood spots or the wounds they leave on you can bleed a bit, too. Tiny spots of blood on sheets are a telltale sign.
- Odors – in a very heavy infestation, even a human nose can detect the unpleasant, somewhat sweet smell of a bed bug invasion. Bed bugs also give off a hormonal scent when disturbed, too.
- Insects – if you look in the right places, like creases, cracks, crevices, you can also find the live bugs. They are small and sometimes hard to see, not much bigger than an apple seed in some life stages, but our highly trained bed bug experts can find them.
Bed Bug Prevention
The mobile nature of bed bugs limits their prevention. Avoidance is especially challenging in hotels, motels and apartments because occupants and their belongings are constantly changing, which affords many opportunities for the bugs to be introduced. Everyone should be wary of acquiring second hand beds, bedding, and furniture. At a minimum, such items should be examined closely before being brought into the home.
When traveling, it’s prudent to examine the bed and headboard area for signs of the bugs, and elevate luggage off the floor. If your room does have a problem, notify hotel management immediately and move to another room. Make sure the new room is not immediately adjacent to the infested room that you are departing.
Bed Bug Habits
Bed bugs hide during the day in dark, protected sites. Despite their name, the attractant is not the bed itself, but the warm-blooded person that lays in it quietly for hours at a time – so they can be anywhere a host is nearby.
Bed bugs usually inhabit seams, tufts, and folds of mattresses, later spreading to crevices in the bedstead. In heavier infestations, they may occupy hiding places farther from the bed, hiding in window and door frames, electrical boxes, floor cracks, baseboards, furniture, and under the tack board of wall-to-wall carpeting.
They can rapidly spread through a multiple residence building, hotel or other accommodations, as about 3% of the infestation is usually found moving away from the host!
Bed Bug Bites
One of the first signs of a bed bug infestation is waking up with bed bug bites on your arms, legs, torso and other parts of the body. Bed bugs require a blood meal at regular intervals and when they bite, they inject some chemicals to ensure the blood flows. This includes an anticoagulant and an anesthetic so you don’t feel the bites and the blood does not clot too quickly.
Bed bug bites are sometimes referred to as bed bug rash. This is because they may appear as raised bumps, similar to mosquito bites, or as red marks or rash-like bites across the skin.
The good news is that bed bug bites are not known to be a health concern as far as disease transmission. However, at Corporate Care our bed bug exterminator experts understand it can be mentally taxing to find yourself being bitten by insects at night.
Bed Bug Control and Removal
Corporate Care bed bug control specialists use an integrated pest management approach that looks at the entire situation and goes beyond just elimination of the pest. We also work with you on prevention and provide advice and solutions to make sure bed bugs don’t come back and bother you again.
Call us at 01707009599 for a pest management quote to deal with the problem.
