"Only a couple of weeks"
These are the words that I often hear when I’m talking to someone who has bed bugs,
“How long have you had the problem?” I'll ask, “Only a few weeks”, or "Only a couple of weeks", and my favourite, "Not long" is the answer.
I don’t blame people for underplaying the situation, firstly we don’t talk to other people about bed bugs, you’d be happy complaining to a workmate about a wasp nest in the summer and you may even comment on having rats in the loft but bed bugs? No, this is strictly taboo and something that conjures up a dirty, infested house, you’d be afraid that no-one in the office would speak to you and you’d banned from going near the coffee machine, but there it is, the forbidden subject.
Then secondly, you’re not going to know the exact day that you came home with bed bugs, and it takes a little time to connect being bitten at night and bed bugs, usually and rightly so, you think its mosquitos doing the biting and why would you jump to the bed bug conclusion straight away?
So anyway, just a few weeks is the common answer, and people are surprised when I tell them that no, it’s been a couple of months, so let’s look at why I say this.
Whether it’s a pregnant female insect or some eggs deposited on your suitcase, bed bug eggs take six to ten days to hatch and this all depends on temperatures, so with central heating in the winter months and summertime temperatures, an even week is good enough.
One week after, the eggs will hatch into the first stage which we call nymphs, these are nothing like the beautiful fairy like nymphs of Greek mythology, but scary mini versions of the adult bed bugs and just like them, they drink human blood and they’re hungry.
Bed bug growth and development
The nymphs or teenagers in bed bug age like to hang around and eat, just like our human teenagers except there’s no Deliveroo bringing in a MaccyD’s, instead they wait for you to come to bed. They will shed their skin in order to grow and this is called moulting, they will do this five times to eventually emerge as sexually mature adult bed bugs and this entire process takes them around three weeks, if the temperatures are high enough you supply them with enough blood. Now that’s a scary thought!
The warmer and more humid the environment the quicker they grow, so temperature is vital to bed bug development, once at the adult stage they will start to breed. Each female bed bug is a prolific breeder, and she will lay between 200 and 500 eggs in her lifetime at a rate of around five a day, she only needs to mate once and as her lifespan is nearly a year long, so egg production is slow but constant.
As the bed bug population grows so the spread of bed bugs expands, they have a need to squeeze into a tight crack or crevice to shelter and these are found in beds where joints come together, bolt sockets that hold the frame in place, and under wooden slats. The rule of thumb is, if you can get a sheet of paper into a space, then you’ll find bed bugs hiding there.
These spaces just don’t exist everywhere in a bed so like us, they prefer the most desirable residences first; think of sunbeds and German tourists (or from Essex), the best place to be is up on or around the headboard. They immediately pick up CO2 when you climb into bed, this wakes them up and lets them dinner has arrived, when the headboards full up, they’ll drift down into the bed, taking up the slats around the top end of the bed.
The late comers to the party have to find themselves a place elsewhere, now we have smelly zones: the crotch and our feet and you’ll find bed bugs taking up poolside seats in the middle of the bed and eventually at the far end. So when I see bed bugs in these zones, I know that its been more than a couple of weeks since its started.
Professional bed bug control in Maidenhead
Having filled the bed this is where the fun starts, well, from my perspective anyway, bed bugs will take up residence anywhere they can; these are the commuters and they’re happy to travel. You’ll find them living up in curtain pleats, behind pictures and even in cupboards, when they detect raised levels of CO2 as the night wears on, they’ll start their motors and travel in, consequently, these are the one’s you’ll see going home in the morning after a night out.
This is where typical steam and chemical treatments become difficult. Industrial steamers that we use in the industry are great because they make the pest controller dismantle the bed to get at those pesky crack and crevices where the insects lurk. Getting into the guts of the bed is essential and this is followed up by insecticides being sprayed onto the area and it being reassembled, finally chemicals are sprayed across the travelling surfaces for the commuters to crawl over where they will pick up small, accumulative doses.
The alternative is a heat treatment where the room temperature is raised up around 60 degrees centigrade and kept there for a sufficient amount of time for that heat to penetrate all of those little hiding places. Now the theory is great, we know heat kills but things like old English bond walls (solid walls to you and me), down lights that cut through plasterboard and single glazed windows all act, to prevent the temperatures from getting up to 60 degrees, along with that as heat rises, the air needs to be turned over with fans to bring it down to the lower levels where bed bugs may survive.
The essence is – the longer and the more widespread the infestation, then the harder its going to be to get rid of it and we have to accept that its not gone on for a few weeks, but maybe a few months.
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