How to freeze bedbugs: a detailed guide

There are not so many effective folk remedies that can really have at least some effect on bedbugs and tropical bugs. Even fewer of them are relatively modern, safe and adequate for use in an apartment or private house. Temperature exposure is one of the working options for local pest control. Steamers and washing at water temperatures of 60°C and above can effectively combat bedbugs on individual clothes and objects that can withstand high temperatures and humidity without damage. But is it possible to influence pests with cold? Are bedbugs afraid of frost? At what temperatures do they die and how to use the temperature method correctly to get rid of insects without ruining things or causing damage to your home?

Mechanism of action

As you know, all insects are cold-blooded creatures. Their body temperature is not constant and depends on the environment. Cold-bloodedness provides insects with a slow metabolism, so they can go without food for a long time.

If the insect's body temperature becomes too low, body fluids will begin to freeze and damage tissue, leading to rapid death. This factor is key for the freezing method - parasites are very afraid of frost.

How to prepare for professional destruction procedure

It is quite difficult to remove bedbugs on your own. Therefore, in most cases, it is best to involve a team of professional inspectors to destroy them. To fight, they use either special chemicals or heat treatment. When the procedure is performed properly, both of these methods have fairly high efficiency rates.

You should prepare for the professional destruction procedure in advance. To do this you need to do the following:

Carry out wet cleaning. In this case, you should act especially carefully; remaining dirt and dust will significantly reduce the effectiveness of treatment measures.
Pack the dishes in plastic bags and put the food in the refrigerator. At the same time, do not forget about bowls for pets.
Be sure to cover the aquarium and temporarily turn off its compressor.
If possible, put as many things as possible into cabinets, and move the cabinets themselves away from the wall.
Immediately before processing, check that there are no people or pets.

Temperature

Bed bugs are heat-loving insects, the optimal temperature for which is +20-35 degrees Celsius. If the temperature drops below +20 degrees, the metabolism of bedbugs slows down greatly. This manifests itself primarily in the form of a slowdown in the development of larvae and eggs, and also reduces the overall activity of parasites.

Temperatures below zero are lethal for bed bugs. When the temperature drops below zero, insects first go into suspended animation and then die. However, persistent parasites are capable of staying in suspended animation for quite a long time, withstanding frost down to -15 degrees. At this temperature, bedbugs can survive from a week to a month. Therefore, the optimal temperature for freezing is -20 degrees - in such frost, bedbugs and their eggs die within 2-3 days.

Climate influence

Insects live in homes and have adapted to living at room temperatures. Cold weather, due to frequent and prolonged ventilation, makes bloodsuckers lethargic, and slight warming increases their activity.

When fighting bedbugs, you need to create conditions that are uncomfortable for them:

keep the windows open more often to cool the room;
treat things with a steamer or household steam generator.

Creating an unfavorable climate will cause the death of bloodsuckers or force them to migrate.

Freezing

If you decide to use freezing methods, then first of all you need to wait for suitable weather. As soon as the thermometer shows below -15, you can begin disinfestation.

First of all, you need to remove all the furniture from the house, especially the one on which you and your household sleep. In the house itself, you need to open all the windows, and if possible, the doors, so that the room freezes properly. 2-3 days after the start of disinfestation, you can shake out dead insects from the furniture and bring it back. At the right temperature, the bedbug freezing method kills 100% of the insects and their offspring.

Does frost kill bedbugs?

So is it possible to kill bedbugs with frost? Yes, bedbugs can be killed by exposure to sub-zero temperatures. The body of a bug contains a lot of liquid, even its food - blood, is a liquid. Water starts to freeze at 0°C, but it will take colder conditions for a bedbug to freeze completely and die, so temperature primarily influences whether frost kills bedbugs. It should be sufficient to kill 100% of the population within the impact radius.

Flaws

The first and main disadvantage of freezing is the weather. Old grandparents often complain that winters are not what they used to be - temperatures below -20 are quite rare and often only occur on two or three days a year. In central Russia, the average temperature in winter is -8-12 degrees. Of course, you can freeze bedbugs at this temperature, but few people can leave home for several weeks.

However, not everyone can live away from home for two or three days. During the freezing period, you will have to ask to visit family or friends, move to the country, live in a hotel or rented apartment. Since not everyone has such capabilities, this greatly limits the use of this method.

Alas, at low temperatures not only bedbugs freeze, but also water in household communications. Even in a private home, the use of freezing is associated with certain hassles - you need to drain the water from all heating radiators and drain the sewer. In an apartment building this is not always possible, especially in older buildings. And if in some cases the heating can still be turned off, then this trick will not work with the sewer system - severe frost can cause a real accident in the water supply of the entire house and huge losses. And this is not counting such little things in life as the icy floors of the upstairs neighbors. For this reason, freezing is rarely used for pest control of residential buildings. Most often it is used to kill bedbugs in garages, chicken coops and other industrial facilities.

Another disadvantage is... thieves. By taking the furniture outside and leaving the house with the windows wide open for several days, you risk facing the banal theft of your things.

Reviews, expert opinion

Getting rid of bloodsuckers is a long process and not always successful. According to experts, to get a positive result you need to:

Unite with your neighbors. This will increase the guarantee of complete destruction, otherwise insects will migrate between rooms.
Select multiple methods. Freeze the furniture or treat it with heat, and boil or wash things and iron them well.

If the struggle is unsuccessful, then you need to call an insect extermination service. Treatment with insecticides almost always brings good results.

User reviews of bed bug control vary. Some share their success, reporting that they were able to locate the nests and the problem was fixed. But the majority indicates that it is possible to remove parasites only for a short time, and then they come again.

There are also different opinions about insect extermination services. Most write that sanitation helped and they managed to get rid of all the creatures. And some complain about poor quality work and short-lived results. In the second option, the reason may be repeated migration of parasites from neighbors or the use of low-quality insecticides.

Bedbugs do not tolerate critical temperatures well. Creating unfavorable conditions will destroy parasites. And if the fight with home methods turned out to be ineffective, then the solution would be to call the special services to fight the insects.

Results

The freezing method is an effective means of killing bedbugs quickly and cheaply. However, a number of restrictions make it available only for processing technical premises, and even then not always - the weather imposes certain restrictions. However, this does not mean that this method cannot be used at all.

When using chemical disinfestation methods, many are faced with the need to treat bed linen, clothing and mattresses. No one wants to do this, even when using unscented products - especially in the case of children's clothing and bedding. In this case, frost comes to the rescue - just take the mattress and contaminated items out onto the balcony for a few days. During the warmer months, contaminated items can be processed in the freezer. It will be especially convenient for owners of large freezers - they are spacious and capable of creating very low temperatures.

Thus, freezing in residential buildings can be used as an effective additional method of disinfestation. But it is better to choose insecticides as the main treatment method - they create a long-lasting protective effect and can be used almost anywhere. If you do not want to use insecticides, then you can resort to another thermal disinfestation method. We are talking about the so-called burning out, which acts in exactly the opposite way than freezing. Special powerful heaters are brought into the room, which warm the air to a temperature of +55-60 degrees. At such a high temperature, bedbugs die within a few hours - for all their heat-loving nature, they can withstand heat much worse than frost. The burning method is also 100% effective, but this treatment is much more expensive than classic chemical disinfestation.

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Survival, mortality and life stages of insects depending on temperature

Knowing the relationship between climatic conditions and the life activity of bedbugs, you can do without the use of chemicals. To do this, you need to find all colonies of parasites, and after processing, make sure that not a single living individual remains.

Survival chart

A bedbug can live in discomfort for a long time. At the same time, it does not show signs of presence in a person’s home: its vital activity is suspended, the body dries up. This can last for a year until conditions suitable for it are restored. To kill all pests, it is advisable to familiarize yourself with the graph of the dependence of life on ambient temperature.

Death rate graph

Higher temperatures lead to the death of blood-sucking insects faster, as confirmed by the graph. When heated to 60°C, pests will not show signs of life after 5-10 minutes, and at 80°C – after a few seconds.

To kill bedbugs, the temperature must exceed +60 °C.