Let’s recap all of the information that we know here about bed bugs – from the history of how to get rid of bed bugs once and for all. Bed bugs have been around probably as long as we have – if not longer as us humans are not the only thing that they can feed on. There has been evidence that tracks all the back to medieval times in Europe. Also by native Americans – which had some way of getting rid of bed bugs back then – but what worked back then when it came to figuring out how to get rid of bed bugs does not work these days due to them adjusting to almost everything we throw at them.

Bed bugs are were very common in the United States around the time of world war one. Through various types of pesticides, which are now banned in the United States, and a little bit a luck the bed bugs seemed to disappear by the end of World War 2. But it wasn’t long, maybe a decade or two, that reports of bed bugs started to come up again among U.S. citizens.

People were experiencing these blood sucking insects in many places, from hotel rooms, cruise ships, houses, apartments and schools. Once again they are starting to become a problem in the United States.

As you may have heard they are wingless – they vary in color from a reddish brown to red all depending on if they just fed or not, as they change colors because you can see the blood in them – or might I say your blood. They do not transfer or hold any kind of communal diseases that we know about. There are a couple of reasons why we hate them – mostly because no one likes sleeping with insects, that is just disgusting and not healthy. Another reason why we hate them is because they leave bumps when they bite us that are very itchy. Much more itchier than other types of insect bites, such as ones from mosquitoes.

They can go well over a year without a meal – they are very thin and oval shaped making it easy for them to hide just about anywhere that they want. But with all of those sneaky attributes they have they have some weaknesses too. They can be killed easily by heat – heat that is above 120 degrees will kill them instantly. There are also many special kinds of pesticides that are specifically made to kill bed bugs. The problem with this is that they can be a bit pricey, and unless you really know what you are doing, it would probably be cheaper to hire a professional to get rid of bed bugs for you.

If you go over all of the information in this blog you will be surely educated and on your way to exterminating bed bugs on your own. This place is not the only resource though, just do a search and you will see that there are tons of great resources that are out there that will help you get rid of bed bugs. But for most people – they may not have the time to learn what it takes to kill bed bugs, that is why I recommend that you hire a professional as buying the pesticide (that works) made for bed bugs can get very expensive.

Cimex lectularius, or, also referred to as a bed bug, but we might as well say bed bugs because it is near impossible to be just one. So you have seen the hype around them, you may even have determined that your home has bed bugs, now you must learn how to get rid of bed bugs. But the fact is, in order to pull this off you are going to have to spend money in most cases, and you are going to have to apply every method that you have ever read about when it comes to successfully learning how to get rid of bed bugs. A lot of people may argue that the easiest way to get rid of bed bugs would be to have it done professionally.

Professionals deal with this all of the time – so this means that they more than likely have a lot more knowledge about getting rid of them than you do. If you refuse to pay someone to kill them then you need to do some reading and learn everything about them. Where they hide, when they feed, how often they feed, and how the hell to kill them once you start discovering some of their hiding spots.

You can either use extreme cold to kill bed bugs or you can use extreme heat. If you asked me I would go with heat first because it kills them almost instantly. Some sources of heat that you could use that may be lying around the house would be a hair dryer. You will have to put it on the highest temperature setting and you may need an extension cord so that you can hit up all of the spots that you think the bed bugs may be hiding.

A hair dryer will not only kill bed bugs almost instantly, it will also destroy their eggs, which is what you ultimaitly need to do in order to halt the reproduction cycle. Another thing that you could use to kill them, especially when it comes to your bed is a steam iron. This is very good for getting into those cracks and crevices in the mattress that I keep talking about, the place that they love to hide their eggs and camp out there themselves during the day time. Steam will kill them instantly and their eggs to.

If you are trying to use pesticides you must be very careful of what you use. For instance there may be a small chance that if you let off a bunch of foggers in your home that it may get rid of some of the bed bugs. But foggers usually do not do the trick, even if you do use 5 times the recommended amount, which can be very dangerous to  your health, and very sever to your pets if you have any.

If you are someone that watches a lot of television, particularly the news channels or the local news channels then you may have heard about bed bugs inside of hotels. Believe it or not this is very common and happens much more in many hotels that are not going to admit this. I was recently in a hotel, I am not going to give out the name or the location though, and I noticed that the next day had a bunch of insect bites all over my body.

I did not notice the bites though until well after the check out time was. So what I did is I had called up my bank and disputed the charges that were put on my credit card – and also called up the hotel themselves and told them the situation. They were very willing to work with me as they did not want to be exposed as a hotel that has a bed bug infestation. They could lose a lot of money as they would have to shut down the entire hotel to have to spray for bed bugs, as if they are swarming around in one room then they are very likely to be in other rooms in the hotel.

In fact I cannot see how they cannot be in any other rooms as they are more mobile than people think and have no trouble crawling through walls and cracks to wait for their dinner. The hotel was close to Disney world so there are always people in the rooms, and we all know that bed bugs can live for months without having to feed so they have no trouble at all waiting around a couple of days, which they will usually not have to – just to get a fresh bite of dinner.

So how do you know if the hotel that you are staying in has bed bugs or not? I really have no idea – but one thing that you can do when you first get to the room is look for traces of them. Some of the evidence they will leave behind will be in the cracks and the crevices of the mattress. Sheds of skin and small blood spots are some good evidence that may indicate that the room is infested with bed bugs. You may even be able to see a couple of them crawling around as they can be easily seen with the naked eye. But if you are sure that the room has bed bugs you can request another room, or dispute the charges and get your money back – most large businesses such as hotels do not want any problems when it comes to there main source of money – and they sure as hell do not want to shut down for a couple of days due to being infested with bed bugs.

By now you should know that bed bugs are wingless insects – seeing as they do not fly how the heck did they get into my home? This is a question that is asked by many people and it still goes unanswered. One might believe that if they keep a house messy, poor hygiene, letting the dished stack up and not taking the trash out daily that this will lead to bed bugs coming into your home. This is a fallacy. One thing this will lead to though is ants and roaches, which in my opinion are worse than bed bugs, especially roaches, they are just plain disgusting and definitely do not want roaches in my home.

The bed bugs have to be brought into your home somehow. Either by luggage, clothes, old used furniture or mattresses. Let me give you an example how one of my buddies got bed bugs in his home, and this did happen through not being that hygienic by the way. He had a found a mattress by a dumpster, and the mattress looked nearly brand new and was a top of the line mattress too.

He didn’t have a mattress, so guess what my buddy did, he brought the mattress into his home, and a couple of nights went by when he started to notice that there were insect bites that were showing up on his skin. Sure enough there were bed bugs that were living in that mattress by the dumpster, kind of makes you wonder how a brand new mattress got there in the first place. So whoever previously owned that mattress got rid of a lot of bed bugs by dumping the mattress – that doesn’t mean that they got rid of them completely though, as they could still be hiding in all of the other spots that I have beaten with a hammer – trying to get this information about where they can hide into your head.

So now you can see how these blood sucking insects can spread to so many places, and because a single bed bug can lay up to a thousand eggs in a year, they are becoming a serious problem. Another way that bed bugs can get into your home is from hotel visits. Yes I know that sounds horrible but many people think that hotels were the place that all bed bug infestations begin – as they could have got their by people from other countries bringing them here, unintentionally of course, I hope.

So the moral of the story is be sure that you check mattresses for bed bugs before you bring them into your home. A simple stupid check will only take you about 5 minutes depending on how thorough you want to be, but I guarantee you that it will be worth it as once your home gets infested with bed bugs it can be a pain in the ass to get rid of them all.

Keep that in mind when you see a nice mattress for sale at a garage sale, there might be a reason that they are trying to sell it off so cheap, I know it is messed up but you will be surprised at what some people may do to get some extra money in their pockets, especially the way that the economy is struggling. On another note I would not recommend taking a mattress from a dumpster to bring into your home or you could be inviting hundreds of bed bugs and bed bug eggs into your home.

Just because a hotel is a 5 star hotel and has a big name does not mean that they are free of bed bugs. Bed bugs are not attracted to trash or anything so cleaniness rarely has anything to do with them – although it will give them more places to hide if there is a lot of trash and crap laying around. Bed bugs are attracted to carbon monoxide that we breathe and they can sense this – knowing that if they take a bite out of our skin they will get the blood that they need to survive.

There was a time before World War 1 when bed bugs were commonly found and then all of a sudden they disappeared from the United States completely. One of the theories that happened is that bed bugs made a come back and they started off in hotels. The reason some may think this is true is people from other countries brought them here in there luggage, laid some eggs, snacked on some hotel occupents and then started to spread. From the hotel they get into the luggage of the person or the group staying in the hotel, which then they can make it back to someone’s house or apartment.

That is how the bed bug cycle goes according to my knowledge so this is why you must be aware of this when you are staying at a hotel. So the more that you know about hotel bed bugs the less likely you will be to take them home with you in your luggage. What I do when I first check into my hotel room is I look for any evidence of bed bugs being in the room and I will start by looking at the mattress for red and black streaks. If they are there you will be able to find some sort of evidence in most cases. If you cant that does not mean that they are not there.

Here are some tips that you can take to ensure that the bed bugs do not travel with you back to your home and start their own little colony inside of your home. Keep the luggage as far away from the bed as possible – if you have been keeping up with this blog you know that they hide close to their dinner. There are also insect repellent gels that you could apply to your luggage also.

When you get home make sure that you wash all of your clothes that were in the luggage with hot water that is over 120 degrees F. Doing this will kill any of the stowaways that you do not want invading your home. So the best way to avoid bringing home bed bugs from a hotel is to be knowledgeable and very aware of how often bed bugs are in hotels. If you are careful about this and apply the knowledge of what you know about them then you should be alright.

If you are currently having problems with blood sucking insects that like to snack on you, commonly referred to as bed bugs, then I may have a couple of solutions that will help you get rid of bed bugs once and for all. A lot of factors are going to come into place though – the most important factor of this is how bad the infestation is. How many bites or new bites are you seeing on your skin? You may even be able to see them if you take off the sheets to the bed and look inbetween the cracks of the mattress. If you see that your mattress has been infected – the best thing that you should do is get rid of it.

Some may say that you can wrap it up in black trash bags – and if you live in a tropical envoroment that get about 90 degrees or more you can leave it out in the hot sun all day, and this may kill all of the bed bugs and all of their eggs since they can not survive if the temperature is more than 120 degrees as they will die almost instantly.

So if you want my personal opinion than I would say just toss the mattress and start over. One important thing that you must do is not to throw a brand new mattress in the room right away – just because you got rid of the bed bugs in your old mattress does not mean that they are all gone as bed bugs have many hiding places.

This will be the time to hunt for these blood sucking insects and get rid of them once and for all. But it is all going to depend on how bad the infestation is though. If it is serious then you should consider hiring a professional exterminator. If you do not want to do that then you better read everything that I cover here in this blog plus more to make sure that you know when your home is infested.

If you move into a new apartment, good for you, but there are some facts that you should now and some precautions that you should take also as there are many apartments that are out there that have bed bugs. Sure after someone moves out the apartment get cleaned, painted, and made ready for someone to move in, but very few people ever think about if they are moving into a room that has bed bugs or not. The thing is that many people share rooms with bed bugs when they move into their new home and do not even realize it.

Not everyone is educated about bed bugs, but if there was one thing that everyone should know about them is that they can live almost everywhere, and they are the best hitchhikers in the world. Meaning some of them will go with the person moving out of the apartment by hitchhiking somewhere – hiding in the mattress, clothes, furniture (especially wooden furniture), just about anything that they can think of. There will also be that bunch, more than likely, that will stay behind and await their dinner.

Bed bugs are very patient too, just because an apartment stays vacant for awhile, does not mean that the bed bugs are going to starve to death. They can survive up to 18 months without a meal – so it is going to be pretty hard to kill them through means of starvation. New people move into the vacant apartment, and then they will be the next meal. It sucks that it works like this but there are a lot of apartments that are out there that are infested with bed bugs and the tenants are not aware of it. Bed bugs can also travel through walls, they are flat shaped and minuscule so there are not many cracks and crevices that they can’t squeeze through.

So think about that if you are currently residing in an apartment, or are planning on moving into an apartment. If you do discover that you are sharing an apartment with bed bugs then it is the responsibility of the landlord to solve the situation – renting out apartments that are infested with bed bugs is not good business and that is a story that a news reporter would love to jump on as fast as they can. So this is why the landlord should take care of the bed bug situation as fast as possible by either moving you to another apartment or getting pest control out there to remedy the situation.

If you have been looking on the net for information about bed bugs removal then you may already be aware of a couple of things about them. They are wingless, they are oval shaped, and the color of them can range from red to brown depending on how long it has been since they last fed. They do not need to eat everyday – nor do they need to eat every week. They can go up to a year without feeding – but how do bed bugs reproduce? Like many insects they lay eggs – and they can lay a bunch of them too as they mature pretty darn fast. If you want to be successful in bed bugs removal then you are going to have to learn the life cycle of them. Knowledge is the key to successfully removing bed bugs from your home.

Just think about this for a second before I tell you how many eggs an adult female can lay. When a bed bug is first hatched – it is known as a nymph. How long it will take to grow into an adult will depend on how often the bed bug feeds, and it is almost impossible to starve a bed bug to death unless you leave the house for a couple of years, which may do the trick, but you must also remember that bed bugs can live without food for a year or more and they feed on animals too, such as dogs, cats, bats, etc.
From the time that the bed bug hatches, it will only need to feed about 3 or 4 times before they are mature enough to lay some eggs. That is it, can you imagine how quick the reproduction cycle of bed bugs can escalate? The female bedbug can lay anywhere from 200 to 1100 per year – so this is why it is so important that you must find and destroy the eggs when going through an extermination.

The eggs though are a lot smaller than a fully grown adult bed bug so there are some cases when it can make it more difficult to find the eggs than the bed bugs itself. They will lay the eggs in dark spots – these dark spots are the hiding spots, and one thing that bed bugs know how to do better than many other insects that crawl around this planet, is hide. They are the exceptionally great when it comes to hiding, and they will put the same effort into their eggs when they are laying them to ensure that their population lives on.

The eggs and bed bugs are not that hard to kill, the hardest part of the whole process is finding them. If you see a bunch of small black dots in an inconspicuous space such as in cracks of a mattress or up in the corner of a pop corned ceiling then you may have found a batch of future bed bugs. Extreme heat will kill them – steam iron, boiling water, or you could attempt to squash them. There are many pesticides that are available on the market these days that can kill bed bugs, just make sure that they do not effect your pets if you have any as many of them are dangerous, due to the ability for bed bugs to adapt to modern bug sprays that may kill ants and roaches, but the bed bugs and their eggs can adapt much better making it just that much more difficult to get rid of once and for all.

So now you are aware of how fast bed bugs can spread you know the importance of getting rid of them as quickly as possible. The less there are the easier the task will be – the more there are the harder it is going to be to get rid of bed bugs – so do not hesitate if you find out that you home has been infested. Get on it quickly or you could be tossing out mattresses and other furniture.

Before you can go about killing bed bugs and getting rid of them for good – you must first find them. This can be a very difficult task due to the fact that there are so many spots for them to hide it can make it a very tedious task to get rid of bed bugs. This is why professionals make so much money because they know all of the hiding spots of bed bugs and what to look for as far as evidence of an infestation goes.

The most common hiding place for bed bugs is of course your bed – as many would think though. They love to hide in places of the mattress that are inconspicuous. They also do not mind just hanging out in the box sping of the mattress either, so make sure that you flip the mattress often when you are checking for bed bugs in your mattress. There are certain types of covers that can limit the bed bug from getting into those crevices where bed bugs love to hide out in. Although I do not believe that they are 100% effective, the effectiveness of them is up in the 90% area in my personal opinioin.

Some other spots they like to hide out in are the corners of walls, if you have a pop corn ceiling then this is also one of there favorite spots to hang out at during the day. Under window sills is another place that they can camp out at, also if you have blinds or curtains in your bedroom you should check those to thoroughly for any signs of bed bugs hiding out there.

Behind outlet covers is another tight spot that not many people would think that a bed bug may be hiding or laying their eggs. So make sure that you do not overlook this when you are trying to pin point and destroy these insects. Some other common spots that you should check are night stands and lamps. Also if you have clothes laying around there is no reason at all that they will not use that as a hiding spot.

If you really think about it the bed bugs are not very fast movers and in most cases they are hiding within about 20 feet of where you sleep as they know that they can quickly step down while you are sleeping to get a bite to eat. As they can travel much further than that in most cases they will not so this will make it easier for you to track them down, kill them and there eggs and saving you loads of money when it comes to this type of extermination.

If you have carpet in your bedroom you will want to make sure that you have it steam cleaned on a regular basis as they will hide there too. Do not over look anything when it comes to trying to discover their hiding spots – so the next time you are looking for bed bugs, you must remember that they can virtually hide anywhere they want to.

There have been many studies about bed bug bites and whether or not they can transmit any diseases or not. Everyone of them so far has pointed to the answer no, that bed bug bites do not contain any type of disease or sickness. So what is the big deal about them anyway if they cant hurt us? Actually the bites that are left by bed bugs can hurt as they become very very itchy. Much more than a mosquito bite – this could be due to the difference of the saliva that is injected into the skin when being bitten by a bed bug.

There are some people that are even allergic to the bed bug saliva and this will cause very bad itching that is almost uncontrollable. The best thing to do would get some type of herb to treat the bed bug bites or the rashes. These can be a pain in the butt to find if you do not have a budget but if you go to your local herb store they can point you in the right direction when it comes to the best thing to treat bed bug bites.

The bump itself can last up to 5 days, sometimes a little less and sometimes a little more, it is what it is people. Controlling the urge to itch the bumps without an anti itching insect bite herb can be very tough. It can be even more tough to control the urge to itch bed bug bites when it comes to children. And consistent itching can tear away at the skin leaving scars and very nasty scratches that could get infected from exposing the skin.

If you are experiencing bed bug bites you must take action to get them out of your home or the situation will only get worst before it gets better. But it is also wise to treat the bites with herbs in the mean while to prevent yourself from marking up your skin from excessive scratching at the skin.