A bed bug infestation can be a real nightmare for homeowners. Dealing with one can be difficult. Knowing a thing or two about bed bugs can help you cope with this problem.
First off, defining a bed bug should be your priority. It’s easy to come up with anti-bed bug measures only to fail because you didn’t have bed bugs after all.
Defining Bed Bugs
Bed bugs are flat, oval, and brown insects that are about a quarter of an inch in size. They live by feeding off the blood of animals and humans alike. After feeding, the adult bed bugs can expand to several times their size.
There is a belief that bed bugs can only be found in dirty places. That is a misconception. Bed bugs live by sucking the blood of animals, humans included, which means they make their habitat near their food source. And it just so happens that humans like to lie on their beds, and so bed bugs make their home in, on, and under your bed.
What’s worse, even clean homes and hotel rooms can be prone to a bed bug infestation. You cannot, therefore, tell if a place is infested or not just by looking at how clean it is at first glance. You need to check on the places where bed bugs are likely to be hiding.
Likely Locations
First of all, bed bugs can enter your home through your clothes and luggage, used items like beds and couches, and other materials that you’ve brought back home from a bed bug-infested place. Because they have small flat bodies, they can easily hide in cracks and crevices where it is not easy to detect them.
Bed bugs do not have nests, though they tend to clump together in their hiding spaces. Their hiding spaces are usually in mattresses, bed frames, headboards, and any other place where they can fit and where they are not visible.
Once they are in a room and once they start to multiply, they might start to spread inside the room. Although bed bugs cannot fly, they can move quickly over surfaces.
The Bed Bug Bite
The main reason bed bugs are considered pests is because they are parasitic; they live by sucking the blood of their host. Fortunately, no known disease can be transmitted through the bites of bed bugs, although there are instances of people developing allergies to them.
Bed bugs may need a few minutes to feed before they become fully engorged. Most of the time, the bite will be unnoticed while it is ongoing and the bug can crawl away to safety. The person will only notice the bite because of a slight irritation and itchiness.
A bed bug infestation can remain undetected for a long time and homeowners may blame the irritation on other causes, like allergies or mosquito bites.
Bed Bug Treatment
The best thing that you can do to fight treatment is to get in touch with an exterminator. Virginia Beach has a lot of them, and all of them have the right equipment for dealing with the infestation. For your part, you can clean the whole infested as thoroughly as you can and then get rid of the possible materials where they could be hiding.
A bed bug infestation can be a real problem. Knowing the signs of infestation and how you can deal with it can go a long way. You just have to be aware of where to look and what to look for.
