Bed Bug Prevention: Rooms that are dirty with clothes on the floor or food left out are no more likely to contain bed bugs than a five-star hotel. Bed bugs can be found anywhere that people are sleeping. It's not very useful to argue over whose fault it is that bed bugs are introduced into a building. It's actually nearly impossible to prove, never intentional, and even for the most diligent people, never totally preventable. There are three ways that bed bugs can find their way to your home (although millions of places to find bed bugs) as follows: (1) Travel: Unknowingly bringing bed bugs home from hotel, hospital, college, friends house. (2) Furniture: Purchasing used (or sometime new) furniture that contains bed bugs, especially mattresses. (3) Multi-tenant buildings: Once bed bugs are introduced to one unit, they will eventually find their way to any and all adjacent units/bedrooms.

Bed Bugs 101: Since most bed bugs are large enough to see with the naked eye, you would think that people would notice them in an infested room right away. Unfortunately, most people do not know where to look and what to look for. Early infestations, when just a few bed bugs are present, are extremely difficult to find. While inspecting your hotel room (or anywhere you sleep outside the house) is essential to early detection, many people have reported bringing bed bugs home even after a thorough inspection. This is because bed bugs are very good at hiding in cracks and crevices. When just a few bed bugs are present, they typically will be well hidden behind the headboard or inside the box spring. Tell-tale signs, like cast skins and black fecal droppings, will only be noticeably present on a mattress or bed skirt after an infestation has grown in number over a period of weeks and months.

If you find out that someone in your building suspects bed bugs, it is essential that you inspect your bedrooms right away, no matter how far away the infested unit is from yours. If the infestation was left unchecked for a long period of time, the bed bugs could easily have made their way to any and all floors of the building. If you, or a pest control professional, do not find any signs of bed bugs, we still strongly recommend investing in encasements and monitors. It is rare to find a landlord that will have all units inspected and treated when the first unit makes a complaint. If all units are not inspected then it is likely that bed bugs are still hiding in an untreated unit just waiting for the right day to crawl into your bedroom.

The reason that a bed bug infestation can go undetected for weeks is that many people do not react to bed bug bites initially. Everyone has different sensitivites to the bites. Some people will itch right away, some people will itch a few days later and some people will not itch at all until the bites become very frequent. When two people share a bed or bedroom that is infested, it is common that only one will notice itchy welts even though both people are getting bitten each night. For this reason, bed bugs frequently get misdiagnosed.

Worried that your children could bring bed bugs home with them from college? You should be. Colleges are heavily infested since students travel frequently giving them more opportunity to bring bed bugs home in their bags. We recommend purchasing monitors to send to college students for use in their dorms. If they use monitors in their dorm room, then can inspect the monitors carefully prior to coming home. If the monitors are free of bed bugs, the likelihood that they will bring bed bugs home are greatly reduced.