The first step to keeping your home bugbed-free is to avoid getting them in the first place. The University of Kentucky’s College of Agriculture reports, “Acquiring secondhand beds, couches and furniture is [one] way that the bugs are transported into previously non-infested dwellings.”
This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t mistrust every thrift store and consignment shop you go to. But a curbside sofa or chair that seems to be in perfectly good condition can in fact be infested with these resilient parasites.
Controlling Bedbugs
Once introduced into your home, it’s impossible to keep bedbugs contained. Unlike other insects, like cockroaches, bedbugs can thrive in a clean environment. All they need is a warm place to lay eggs and plenty of blood for feeding. Bedbugs will travel though your home via a host, like you, a pet, or even an item of clothing taken from the laundry basket on one floor of your home to the laundry room on another.
In other words, once you see a bedbug in your home, you can assume they are everywhere. Once that happens, without hesitation, call a professional pest control company that has experience exterminating bedbugs.
Exterminating Bedbugs
The first thing your exterminator will suggest is removing clutter from your home. If any bedbugs are found in a mattress or bedspring, you’ll be advised to dispose of it. Same with sofas, chairs and any other furniture. Because bedbugs are so adept at finding tiny spaces, like seams and other crevices, to live and lay eggs, it’s better to throw away infested furniture rather than attempt to kill each and every insect and egg.
How To Kill Bedbugs
Once your exterminator determines that your furniture is clean, or too infested to keep, you can move on to your belongings. Pest Control Technology magazine indicates that running your clothes through a normal wash cycle, and just five minutes in a clothes dryer, will kill bedbugs. It’s a good idea to wash and dry all of your clothing, sheets, blankets, and even cushion coverings. If you have a newer clothes dryer with a drying shelf, you can treat toys, books and other items that are not heat sensitive.
Because heat is so effective in killing bedbugs, you have a better chance of eliminating your problem if you steam clean your floors and carpets, especially the spaces between the floor and wall and all carpet seams, than using an insecticide. In fact, insecticides could possibly be useless. A University of Kentucky study has found that bedbugs in the U.S. appear to have developed a resistance to commonly used insecticides.
Staying Bedbug Free
Once your home has been treated. Once you’ve thrown away all infested furniture, cleaned your floors and put nearly every item you own through your clothes dryer, you’re still not scot-free. You will need to look for the telltale signs of bedbugs for many months to come and may even need repeat visits from your exterminator.
