Bed bugs are disgusting little critters that will feed on your blood while you sleep. Bed bugs will hide in your mattress, pillows, bed covers, carpeting, curtains and walls, waiting for you to fall asleep so they can eat. This sounds like an excerpt taken from a script of a B rated horror movie, but it’s reality. The bed bug population has increased dramatically in recent years, making the slim possibility of you ever encountering bed bugs a very real probability in today’s society. Should you have a close encounter of the creepy, blood sucking kind, you will need to know how to get rid of bed bugs.
How To Get Rid Of Bed Bugs
It’s been said that in the event of a nuclear war, cockroaches would be the only survivors, I beg to differ, bed bugs will be the survivors. Bed bugs do not ingest poisons like cockroaches do, and trying to get rid of bed bugs with toxic chemical sprays, powders, traps, baits or foggers will not work. There is only one sure-fire way to get rid of bed bugs and that is with heat.
Bed bugs must be exposed to high heat before the adult and adolescent bugs are killed. Most apartment dwellers or home owners do not have the necessary equipment to expose bed bugs to killing heat without setting their dwellings on fire, so a professional exterminator that specializes in getting rid of bed bugs must be called in.
A professional exterminator will use a combination of high heat steam and chemical pesticides to rid your dwelling of bed bugs. The exterminator will have to make more than visit to your home to apply the treatment to get rid of all the bed bugs.
You can help expedite the riddance of the bed bugs by using the heat of your clothes dryer. Anything than can fit into a clothes dryer and is dryer safe, should be tumbled on high heat for at least 20 minutes. Bed bugs will lurk in stuffed toys, curtains, piles of dirty laundry or clean clothes folded neatly in your dresser drawers. After the dryer heat treatment, store the items in an air tight plastic bag or container until your dwelling is bed bug free to prevent re-infestation.
Cleanliness (or lack of) has nothing to do with a bed bug infestation. You may have the cleanest home in America and still have bed bugs. Just spend a night or two in a hotel that has bed bugs and you’ll most likely bring a few unwanted guests back home with you. If you have house guests that bring baggage along with them, there’s a possibility that bed bugs have hitched a ride into your home via the baggage.
I hope you will never need to know how to get rid of bed bugs, but if you do, heat is the only thing that will kill them.
Source:
http://www.usaweekend.com/10_issues/100103/100103bedbugs.html
