How I fought bed bugs and won (but not without victims)

Who are bedbugs and why are they needed?

Before this adventure, I assumed that bed bugs were a thing of the past. You can only read about them in classical Russian literature - mattresses in shabby roadside hotels were often infested with them. Well, in the village as a child, I heard that sometimes they can spawn somewhere in the floorboards of a house.

A bed bug is a small brown bug (relatively speaking, they are not actually beetles) up to eight millimeters long. Unlike the cilantro-smelling bugs that you get on raspberries or sometimes swoop down on your head in the summer, they don’t smell much. And in general, they do not immediately announce their presence. And one could put up with them, but bedbugs need blood to reproduce and develop. And we become its source. Fun (not really) fact: a small animal like a rat can be eaten to death by a large enough colony of bedbugs.

These parasites crawl out in the dark, usually between two and five in the morning, bite warm human bodies and hide as if they were never there. But hungry beetles can crawl out at any time. This is what both adults do and just hatched bugs, which you can barely see at all. And because they are small and flat, they are almost impossible to crush when tossing and turning in your sleep. And their bites are painless - they won’t wake you up. They can chew even when you are not sleeping at all.

Adult bedbugs

Herbs against bloodsuckers

“Poison” does not come from the word “grass.” But if you think about it, you can identify an obvious connection between representatives of the flora and the destruction of parasites. It is not possible to eliminate bed bugs with the help of plants, but it is easy to scare them away. The table will tell you which herbs can “poison” blood-sucking insects.

Table - Plants against bedbugs

Plant repellents work well as preventive measures. But they are not able to drive bedbugs out of the house once and for all. Most likely, the insects will find a secluded corner, protected from unpleasant herbal odors. And when the “insecticide” plants lose their aromatic properties, the pests will return.

It is useless to fight bedbugs with garlic. Insects are not disgusted by its pungent smell.

How to get bedbugs in your home?

It’s very simple - just bring home one fertilized female. She will lay eggs almost all her life, about five eggs per day. Within a couple of months, a whole colony can form. You can bring bedbugs from anywhere, but the likelihood of picking them up is especially high in rural areas, on farms and farms (as was the case in my case). Bedbugs don’t care whether your home is clean or dirty, dry or damp, cold or hot. The main thing is that there is a source of blood. They can also crawl from their neighbors, but in general they don’t like to walk a lot and often change their habitat, just like people.

Bedbugs settle in any secluded places. Most often in the sofa or bed, where the owners sleep. They can be in the joints and under the casing. But old clothes on shelves and baseboards suit them just as well. They can also find a place for themselves under wallpaper - and also in books and even equipment. Their survival rate is extremely powerful. They can live for more than a year without food, hibernating. The only thing these creatures definitely don’t like is sudden temperature changes. Bedbugs die within an hour at temperatures above fifty degrees. Or you can try to freeze them, if the house stays at minus twenty or below for a couple of months, the parasites will die. In the villages this is how they used to deal with them: they went to stay with relatives and left the house open. My grandfather also told me a story about a gentleman who put the legs of his bed in buckets of water so that bedbugs could not climb on them. They say it didn't help - bedbugs can swim.

Mechanical methods

The most common are two mechanical folk methods. To implement the first, you will need a vacuum cleaner, to use the second, a steam generator. In the first case, bedbugs can only be “collected” in a garbage bag built into household appliances. In the second, kill insects, and not only sexually mature ones. One bad thing: both methods will steal a lot of time from the home “exterminator”, without giving any guarantee of effectiveness.

Vacuum cleaner

Peculiarity. By combining the mechanical method with the chemical method, you can get a pretty good result. To lure bedbugs out of the hiding places in which they are safely hidden, you will need ammonia. Bloodsuckers cannot stand the smell of this liquid. It is enough to place saucers with a smelly liquid near places where insects accumulate, and the living creatures will immediately begin to leave their homes. You can make the composition stronger.

What we do

1. Prepare the emulsion according to the following recipe: mix 100 g of denatured alcohol and 50 g of ammonia.
2. Pour the emulsion into a spray bottle and spray the room.
3. We turn on the vacuum cleaner, remove the brush attachment, and use the tube to quickly collect insects that have awakened from the aroma spreading throughout the apartment into the dust collector.

Steam generator

Peculiarity. The method is environmentally friendly, accessible and easy to implement. And also quite effective. It is noteworthy that the steam generator is capable of eliminating even eggs by destroying their shell. True, the method cannot be used near outlets. And condensation settling on the surface of the furniture can negatively affect its upholstery and further operation.

What we do

1. We turn on the steam generator and start from the most remote places: we steam curtains, cornices, joints of walls and furniture, niches behind paintings, cracks and other hard-to-reach locations.
2. Then we proceed to textile processing.
3. We carry out liquidation activities daily for several weeks, paying special attention to places where insect nests have been observed.
4. We refrain from wet cleaning until the treatments are completely completed.
5. We carefully inspect all things and pieces of furniture so as not to lose sight of a single parasite.

Bedbugs will turn you into an itchy paranoid

Each bug comes out to eat regularly once a week. It leaves a trail of bites on a person - from three to eight, but depending on your luck. If you are completely unlucky and you are allergic to bedbugs, each bite will swell like a healthy pie, like after a Mantoux test. Most often, their bites are similar to mosquito bites, but they itch many times more. In addition to the itching, there is also a burning sensation, as if you fell from a bicycle into nettles. And the main bonus is that bedbugs love to bite fingers and hands, the most unpleasant places for bites in principle.

A newly hatched bug immediately goes for blood, otherwise it will not be able to grow

Each bite lasts about two weeks. At the beginning of a relationship with bedbugs, there will be only a few of them - not a tragedy. But at the peak of the war I had more than a hundred of them. Arms, legs, feet, back and even neck were bitten. All this burned, itched and aesthetically looked rather creepy. It is almost impossible not to scratch the affected areas. I had to get a soft hair brush to comb it neatly. Well, spend some money on soothing ointments, but these are minor things.

At some point, bedbugs become so overwhelming that you start looking for them everywhere. You check your legs and arms every minute to see if a bug is running? Every breath of summer breeze that tickles your skin becomes a signal: it’s a bug! It’s difficult to get rid of this paranoia - I feel like it will stay with me for a long time.

Check your washing machine before use

If you're traveling, you may need to use a public laundry for your washing machine. It is worth remembering that bedbugs can live in such cars. Before you put your items in the drum, carefully inspect the inside of the machine using a flashlight. This will help you make sure there are no bugs left inside from the clothes of previous laundry users.

Bedbugs have to be poisoned - preparing for this process is similar to a search

In theory, everything is simple. The master will come and fill your home with a fog that kills all living things. In places where bedbugs are most likely to live, powdered poison will also be poured. But before the master arrives, you need to literally pack your whole life. All clothes (they will definitely have to be washed) and books, CDs, small equipment - everything is in bags. TV, computer, consoles - everything needs to be hidden. Move the furniture away. It is advisable to tear off the baseboards. And God forbid you have an old house with wooden floors: it is likely that you will have to remove the covering and then fill all the cracks with sealant.

With God's help, one treatment may be enough. But more often this procedure has to be repeated two or three times with a difference of a couple of weeks. The best part is that the bedbugs don’t die right away, but you can’t move out of the apartment. Surviving parasites must come out and come into contact with the poison. You literally have to sacrifice your flesh to them. Each treatment will cost about three thousand rubles, but it’s impossible to calculate the nerves spent. For an ideal result, you need to persuade the neighbors above, below and on the floor to do the same exterminatus - good luck!

I was especially lucky: although two treatments reduced the number of bedbugs, they did not kill them completely. And this is a normal phenomenon; back in the mid-1990s, American scientists reported that they were finding more and more colonies of bedbugs that were generally immune to most poisons - that’s evolution for you. I was absolutely sure that they lived in the sofa and even found one of them under the armrest - with beetle shit and chitin dropped by nymphs. As a result, we had to take extreme measures, but statistics say that they are required in approximately half of the cases.

Insulate the doors

Bed bugs are very small and can get through even small openings, but it is still important to take care of the insulation. This is especially significant for those who live in an apartment building. Use thick plastic covers on the bottom of the door to keep your home insect-proof.

Using a telescope, astronomers have discovered millions of galaxies in the cosmic web

Cyprus will lift mandatory quarantine for tourists from Russia from April 1

The State Duma has banned the removal of stowaway children from transport

I've been sleeping on an air mattress for a couple of weeks now because of bedbugs.

I threw the sofa in the trash. An absolutely beautiful sofa that was only three years old. There was only one alternative - to remove all the upholstery and find the nests, but it was cheaper to throw it away.

If bedbugs remain in the apartment, they will happily set up a colony in the new sofa (and new sofas can come from the factory with their own bedbugs - this happens). Therefore, a strategic decision was made to buy an air mattress for a while. If parasites are still living in the house, they will almost certainly soon be found under the mattress. But so far they are not visible, and the bites have finally passed. After I threw out the couch, I only caught a couple of bugs in the first two days - perhaps they came from the couch itself while I was tearing it apart and tearfully kicking it to get it into the elevator.

The war lasted all of August and now seems over, but I am not relaxing. A control treatment is planned for the near future - the room will already be devoid of baseboards and linoleum, just to be sure. And only then will I decide to add a new sofa to the house. I wish you never to face this misfortune!

Why do things need to be processed?

The fight against blood-sucking arthropods involves disinfestation of everything in the home. If you destroy the bloodsuckers in the sofa, but do not get rid of the bedbugs in your things, their numbers will increase again. Complete elimination can only be achieved with 100% destruction of insects at any stage of their life cycle.

Mikhail D.E.

Exterminator, 15 years of experience

To get rid of bedbugs in an apartment, you need to disinfest all residential premises. Surfaces, furniture, bedding and even residents’ clothes are treated. Without this, measures to destroy bedbugs will be ineffective: even a few surviving eggs will lead to self-infection.

Situation 5: Bedbugs live in an apartment and continue to bite without interruption after treatment

This happens when ineffective drugs are used against bedbugs, or even when effective drugs are used incorrectly. Some of them may die during etching, but a significant number survive and continue to bite as if nothing had happened.

Bugs on the fold of soft parts of the sofa

In such a situation, repeated treatment is required 10-12 days after the first. Such a repetition must necessarily be carried out with a means different from that used before, and based on a different active substance.

If this situation is repeated many times, it means that the problem is not in the means, but in the quality of processing. We encounter similar cases regularly when we see people trying to poison bedbugs themselves. They seem to be using good means, but they are doing it completely wrong. Because of this, bedbugs survive safely and survive many treatments in a row.

According to our statistics, more than 90% of independent treatments for bedbugs do not produce results, regardless of the quality of the product. At the same time, people often do not understand the differences between the groups of products and, for example, first poison the bedbugs with Karbofos, and then try to change the drug, and buy Fufanon for repeated baiting. People don’t know that these products are analogues of each other and work identically.

What’s worse is that, according to surveys of our clients, 65% of treatments from private SES do not produce results in the same way - from such companies, completely unprepared people often come to calls, who just yesterday decided to start poisoning bedbugs, having not found another job, and do not know about this activity nothing at all. Accordingly, the result of their work turns out to be the same as the result of the apartment owners’ independent fight against bedbugs. This is bad not only because people spend significant time and money on such pseudo-specialists, but also because such under-processing greatly reduces trust in pest control services in general. We then have to restore this trust for a long time, both through high-quality pest control and persuasion.

Destruction of bedbugs by freezing

Bedbugs are afraid of frost and when the temperature drops, they first fall into suspended animation and then die.

It is recommended to freeze insects in winter by exposing the mattress and other things to the cold under a canopy or in unheated rooms. At severe subzero temperatures, bedbugs and their larvae die.

But this method is not always effective. In regions with mild frosts, some individuals can survive by huddling in the folds of things and falling into suspended animation. When it warms up, they become active and begin to lay eggs, increasing the population of bloodsuckers.

Comfortable temperature for bedbugs

The development cycle of an insect from an egg to a sexually mature individual depends on the external environment. The most comfortable temperature range is from +20 to +30°C. Under such conditions, the larvae hatch and mature into a sexually mature individual within 35 days. And adult parasites live up to a year.

A slight heat of up to +32-35°C accelerates life processes, so the eggs mature faster, but the life expectancy of the bug is reduced to 10 months.

A temperature drop to +15-18°C inhibits the life activity of domestic bloodsuckers. They hatch and grow longer, but parasites can live up to 15 months.

When the temperature rises above +30°C or decreases above +15°C, eggs stop developing, and adult insects fall into a state of suspended animation. When a temperature comfortable for existence is established, the bedbugs will again begin to reproduce and suck human blood.

Safety precautions when fighting bedbugs

When using devices that supply hot steam, it is necessary to direct the spray nozzle at a sufficient distance from parts of the human body. You also need to take care to protect your hands before processing.

When destroying bedbugs, you need to take care of safety precautions.

When working with boiling water, it is advisable to ensure that the surface can withstand the boiling temperature.

To avoid burns, hold the container with water in gloves or use another protective agent.

Prevention measures

The reappearance of parasites in an apartment is due to people’s lack of awareness of measures to combat the penetration of bloodsuckers into living quarters.

Bedbugs only need humans to feed, so the parasite seeks to penetrate their territory. This happens in 3 ways:

1. From the neighbors. It only takes 30 minutes for a bedbug to escape from the adjacent premises through communications, cracks in doors and windows. To prevent this from happening, you will have to negotiate with your neighbors to jointly pay for calling a specialist from the SES. Employees of the sanitary and epidemiological station must get rid of bedbugs crawling out of the basement at the expense of the management company.
2. On the clothes of a person who has been in an apartment infested with blood-sucking creatures. Having noticed an object for migration, bedbugs try to move on it to a new place. After visiting such a premises, all clothing should be removed and washed, and shoes and other items should be treated in a suitable manner. The same advice applies after staying in a hotel or rented apartment.
3. On purchased old things. It is better not to use other people's furniture and household items. But if this happens, the purchased items should be left in the cold for several hours, and in the warm season they should be generously sprayed with special pesticides.

After visiting a property with bedbugs, items should be washed with the highest possible water temperature.

Destruction by high temperature

Compared to sub-zero temperatures, overheating stops the vital activity of bloodsuckers much faster, causing death.

A destructive temperature rise can be achieved using home methods. Bedbugs die at temperatures above +50°C, so they can be removed using home methods: washing in hot water with preliminary soaking in boiling water, or ironing with a very hot iron.

The inconvenience of the methods is that they are only suitable for clothing and bedding. Mattresses and upholstered furniture cannot be washed or ironed.

For large soft furnishings, it is recommended to treat with hot dry air or steam, which will kill insects and larvae, not giving them a chance to survive.

To destroy pests using high-temperature devices, it is recommended to invite a specialist. Professionals, working with a thermal gun, steam generator or other similar devices, will withstand temperatures at which blood-sucking insects will quickly die out.

Safety rules for using critical temperatures

Exposing domestic parasites to extreme heat or cold should be done with caution to avoid accidental injury or damage to the interior. To do this, you need to follow a number of rules:

• do not direct the jet towards people or pets;
• do not clean things that may warp due to temperature influences;
• do not put devices at maximum power (30-40% is enough for insects to die);
• You cannot work with cold when the heating system is on (at extreme subzero temperatures, bedbugs die, but heating devices may fail).

If you are not sure that you will be able to remove the parasites yourself, it is better to call professional services.

Situation 4. Bedbugs disappear for a long time (more than a month), but then appear again

Here we are almost certainly talking about re-infestation of the premises: bedbugs are either brought by people in their belongings or with furniture, or they themselves crawl into the apartment from neighboring premises. For more than a month, live bedbugs will not sit in a room where people constantly spend the night without biting their victims, and if there was such a long period of no bites, it means that there were no bedbugs in the apartment at that time.

In this situation, repeated disinfestation is required immediately after identifying bedbugs that have again entered the apartment.

What are bedbugs afraid of? What causes bedbugs to die.

What are bed bugs afraid of?

Bed bugs demonstrate a high level of resistance to various adverse circumstances in their environment. Evolution has endowed them with various abilities that help them in the constant struggle for survival. However, there are factors that bedbugs are afraid of and try to avoid.

1. Bedbugs have a highly developed sense of smell; they are able to sense a food source in a building even several floors away. Therefore, bedbugs avoid those rooms where any odors that are not natural to them are formed. The smells of perfume, bleach, tobacco, cigarette smoke, and burning will interfere with bedbugs’ orientation in space and cause them discomfort. Insects will try to leave such premises.

2. Bed bugs cannot tolerate loud noise. If loud music is constantly playing in the apartment or repair work is being carried out using tools that create strong sounds, then most likely the bedbugs will leave this place. This is why bedbugs do not grow in industrial premises.

3. Bed bugs do not get along well in environments with a high percentage of humidity. In order for bedbugs to leave the apartment, you need to create air humidity of at least 75-80%. This indicator can be achieved by using special room humidifiers. The fact is that with high humidity, bed bugs develop a harmful fungus on their chitinous cover, which causes severe inconvenience to these insects and can cause the death of bedbugs.

4. Bed bugs cannot tolerate regular table salt. Areas in the room treated with a highly salted solution will not be infested with bedbugs. The disadvantage of such protection is white salt stains and stains after such treatment.

5. Also, bedbugs will not be able to survive at temperatures above 45 degrees. If you manage to heat the room to this temperature and keep it in this state for at least 3 hours, the insects will die completely.

Leave your comments on the topic regarding this article.