It’s the holiday season and for many, that means it’s time to travel. Whether the trip is to visit family or to relax on a warm beach, Americans will hit the road in record numbers. If your overnights are in motels, resorts, or grandma’s guestroom, make sure the bed you sleep in is not shared with bugs—bed bugs to be exact.
Facts About Bed Bugs
Not to put a damper on the festivities, but bed bugs can cause a long-awaited holiday to turn itchy and, well, icky. Bed bugs are flat, brown, and wingless and choose to live in quiet, dark locations. They are also blood-sucking parasites with a preference for human blood. A warm body in a darkened room is essentially a bed bug buffet. Their bites are not dangerous or painful, but the saliva they leave behind can cause welts or hives which can take up to 9 days to appear. That means just about the time your inlaws decide to head home from a perfect vacation, those itchy welts will start to appear and fond memories might be erased.
But there is hope. Bed bugs like to congregate making them easy to find, and their blood-sucking habit leaves behind the telltale sign of blood spots. When you enter a new bedroom, pull back the covers on the bed and check on top of and under the mattress. Also take a look behind paintings, along floorboards, and on the carpet. If you see bed bugs, ask for another room or a refund. The same precautions can be taken when visiting the home of a relative, but if bed bugs are found, more tact may be needed in telling your host.
If you are hosting family, inspect for bed bugs long before your guests arrive. For the best insurance, contact your local pest control company to treat your home and ensure your guests leave with only great memories and not itchy lesions.
Treatments For Bed Bugs
Northwest Pest Control can talk to you about our K9 detection and heat treatments for bed bugs that we offer in partnership with several local companies. K9 detection is essentially a dog sniffing out the bugs in much the same ways dogs can be trained to detect bombs or drugs. Even one bug can alert the dog’s senses to a problem providing a much more efficient inspection than just looking with your own eyes.
As an alternative to chemical treatments, a heat treatment is an effective entire home eradication method. Specially designed equipment is brought into the home to raise the temperature to between 135 and 145 degrees. At that temperature bed bugs and their eggs will be killed within 90 minutes. The process takes between six and eight hours.
And aside from these newer approaches, there are chemical treatments that get the job done quickly.
Contact Northwest Pest Control and we’ll get all the bed bugs out of your home before those first holiday guests arrive. We will also be sure to leave behind no telltale signs so your family will never have to know they are sleeping where bed bugs once thrived. Happy holidays!