How To Get Rid Of Bed Bugs In A Mattress 6 Ways Explained
Its dark in the night. The only sound you can hear in your room is of that ticking clock tick, tick, tick! But you can feel something slowly coming at you. You know its coming to suck your blood.
No! Were not talking about vampires. As the headline said, its the bed bugs. Killing them with hands isnt anything hard. But when you think about how to get rid of bed bugs in a mattress for good, the difficulty level goes directly to a whole other level.
But thats only when youve got no clue about how to pull the job off. Well, its time to ease the job up.
Contents
How To Find Bedbugs On Mattress
Bed bugs are roughly the size of an apple seed, which means that, although hard to spot, they are visible to the human eye. As a matter of fact, just like it was indicated above, they do leave signs of their presence on your mattress, bed, and bedding which you should check. If you suspect that there are bed bugs in your home, use these tips below to check your mattress.
Related: Getting rid of bed bugs means asking for help from the experts. To contain the situation, you can check out our home remedies for bed bugs.
How To Protect Your New Mattress
Youre probably thinking about how you will be able to protect your new mattress from bed bugs. One of the easiest ways to ensure that your bed will not be infested is by using a mattress encasement for the mattress, as well as the box spring as soon as soon as the new bed is delivered. You should also consider having your home professionally exterminated so that bed bugs do not make a blood meal out of you again.
Why is this necessary? You may have removed the bed bugs that were living in your old mattress, but this doesnt mean that youve gotten rid of all the bugs in your home. Keep in mind that bed bugs can crawl into cracks and crevices. Here, they will wait patiently for night to arrive before venturing out to feed on humans or animals.
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Tips Of Getting Rid Of Bed Bugs For Good
- Clear clutter and remove small items
- Launder soft toys, pillows, linens, and blankets
- Perform the treatment regularly over a few weeks, more than one treatments is always best
- Always treat the surrounding area too
- Monitor the affected areas closely
- Consider calling a professional if its a particularly large bed bug infestation
- Disinfect your mattress with this guide
Where Do Bed Bugs Live
Any place with a high turnover of people spending the nighthostels, hotels near airports, and resortsare most at risk. But the list continues apartments, barracks, buses, cabins, churches, community centers, cruise ships, dormitories, dressing rooms, health clubs, homes, hospitals, jets, laundromats, motels, motor homes, moving vans, nursing homes, office buildings, resorts, restaurants, schools, subways, theaters, trains, used furniture outlets. Bed bugs dont prefer locations based on sanitation or peoples hygiene. If theres blood, theyre happy.
Bed bugs and their relatives occur nearly worldwide. They became relatively scarce during the latter part of the 20th century, but their populations have resurged in recent years, particularly throughout parts of North America, Europe, and Australia.
What about in your home? Most stay near where people sleep, hiding near the bed, a couch or armchair even cribs and playpens. Their flat bodies allow them to hide in cracks and crevices around the room and in furniture joints. Hiding sites include mattress seams, bed frames, nearby furniture, or baseboards. Clutter offers more places to hide and makes it harder to get rid of them. Bed bugs can be found alone but more often congregate in groups. Theyre not social insects, though, and dont build nests.
Before treating, you need to confirm that you have bed bugs. The only way to do that is to find a bug and get it identified.
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Dont Allow Bed Bugs To Spread
When you decide to throw away your mattress, do it quickly. Most people will move it out of the bedroom and store it in the garage until you can throw it away. This is a big job, after all.
However, if you do this, the bed bugs will spread back through the house. They will be attracted to the scent of people and the heat of your home. They will spread from the garage into your downstairs rooms, and eventually get back to your bedroom anyway.
Instead, get it out of the room and take it straight to the dump. Doing so will ensure that the bed bugs dont have time to infest anything else.
Cutting Off Access To Your Bed
Part of the issue is not just that you have bed bugs in your bed, but also how they got there in the first place. Bed bugs cant jump or fly, they can only crawl. That means they need to climb to gain access to you, and their routes are limited to the legs of the bed frame, headboard, footboard, and walls that are in direct contact with the bed.
To cut off their access points, you need to position your bed so that it stands slightly away from the wall an inch is enough. You also need to use ClimbUp Interceptors to elevate the legs of your bed and trap any bed bugs in a talcum-lined pitfall. Once a professional pest control company has carried out the treatment steps, and isolated your bug-free bed, youll be able to sleep without fear of being bitten. The Climb Ups will not only keep the pesky bugs out of your bed but will also help you monitor the problem and determine if the treatment protocol is working.
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How Do I Have Specimens Identified
Put specimens in small, break-resistant containers such as a plastic pill bottle or a zipper-lock bag with 1 tsp of rubbing alcohol in it. Or tape them to a sheet of white paper with clear tape.
First, look at pictures on university websites. If you think its a bed bug, package it carefully to prevent damage and send to an expert for positive identification. Bed bugs have close relatives: poultry bugs, barn swallow bugs, bat bugs, and tropical bed bugs to name a few. They too can feed on humans and act like bed bugs do. For accurate identification, send a samplepreferably several adultsto a Cooperative Extension diagnostic lab.
Clean Cracks And Linens
Clean every nook and cranny with the wand of your vacuum it seems easy, but people forget hiding spots such as screw holes, gaps in baseboards, and cracks in the wall. Here is our list of places they like to hide).
Clean all your linens, even the teddy bears, everything in hot water and dry them on high heat if clothes permit. Do NOT take the clothes to the laundromat or you risk creating a problem for someone else.
Here is our list of treatment preparation steps you should follow.
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Ways To Remove Bed Bug On Your Own
Heat treatment method. You can utilize a clothing dryer on high heat. You can also utilize black plastic bags in a warm, closed vehicle in the sunlight, however success depends on your environment and also other aspects. DIY heat solutions might not function. Specialists have accessibility to more intensive and also tried and tested approaches that can even deal with entire houses with heat. You might also acquire a mobile heat chamber, which is generally quite efficient.
If the freezer is set to zero F, Cold treatment can be effective in the apartment condition. You have to leave the products in a sealed bag in the fridge freezer at that temperature level for 4 days. Constantly make use of a thermostat to inspect the temperature level, since house freezers are not always set to 0o.
Steam cleansers can get into splits and also materials to treat carpets, walls, bed structures, and also other furniture. The steam temperature level need to go to least 130o F however must not have a powerful air flow, or it may trigger Bed bugs to scatter. Utilize a diffuser to avoid spreading.
Signs Of A Bed Bug Infestation
The most evident indicator of bedbugs in the home is that individuals experience attacks that happened while they were asleep. Check out the bedrooms for Bed bugs and also indications of bedbug task if this happens.
Look carefully in bedding and the seams and tufts of bed mattress and box springs for bugs or eggs. The eggs will appear like little, pale poppy seeds.
Indications of bedbug activity might occur beneath loose locations of wallpaper near beds, in the edge of cabinets as well as workdesks, in the laundry, and in cabinets.
Keep an eye out for dark brownish or rust-colored bedbug droppings that discolor product as well as mattresses. Bedbug excrement is a liquid that looks either brown or black, and also it typically either grains up or is taken in by the material around it.
A big population of bedbugs might produce a coriander-like odor.
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Dont Sell A Mattress Infested With Bed Bugs
You could try and sell your mattress. However, it would be misleading to do so without telling people that its infested with bed bugs.
If you treat the mattress first, then perhaps you could sell it. However, theres a big drawback. Pesticides take weeks to get rid of every bed bug. It may still be infested when you sell it. This would put people off buying it, even if it were reasonably priced.
Furthermore, you would have to keep the mattress hanging around, perhaps for weeks. If it has even just a few bed bugs in it, they could infest your garage and the rest of your house. Its far better to throw the mattress away, if you want to get rid of it.
Why You Need To Remove Bed Bugs Quickly
Bed bugs reproduce very quickly and can go without feeding for nearly a year. Their eggs are tough to spot, even if you manage to remove the hatched and grown bugs. This makes it extremely difficult to get rid of them.
Many times, people think they got rid of the bed bugs only to find a new infestation weeks or months later. The sooner you deal with a bed bug infestation, the better. That way, you lessen the chances of a more extensive infestation.
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How To Remove Bedbugs On Mattress
Youre probably wondering how to remove bedbugs on a mattress so that you will be able to get a good nights sleep. After all, waking up to itchy bites on your skin is not a good sign, plus it can even affect your sleep too. That said, there are a few tips and tricks that may help keep you from being a blood meal for these bugs.
- Heat treatment To get rid of bed bugs on your mattress, start by washing your bedding, linens, pillowcases, blankets, and the like, using the highest possible setting. Bed bugs dont like heat, and this will kill them off.
- Vacuuming your mattress Vacuuming your mattress, especially the seams, can help remove the bed bugs. [
How Do I Find Out If I Have Bed Bugs
Have these on hand during the inspection:
- flashlight
- a vial, pill bottle, or ziplock bag to hold specimens for identification
- tweezers or sticky tape to help grab the bugs
- gloves
- knife, index card, or credit card for swiping bed bugs out of cracks
- trash bags and tape for bagging infested items
- vacuum cleaner : keep a few for identification and suck up the rest. Since the vacuum bag will have live bugs in it, take out the bag right away. Seal it in a plastic bag and throw it away.
Look for bed bugs in all their life stages: eggs, nymphs and adults. Also look for cast skins and blood spots. But note: blood spots, hatched eggs, and cast skins may be from an infestation thats been dealt with already. Live bed bugs are the only confirming evidence. Use a flashlighteven if the area is well litand work systematically. A magnifying glass will help you zoom in on hard to see spots. Start with one corner of the mattress and work around the piping, down the sides, and underneath. Do the same with the box spring. If you own the bed, slowly remove the dust cover on the bottom of the box spring and seal in a trash bag. Next, inspect the bed frame. If you can take it apart, do so. Bed bugs could be hiding in the joints.
One last way to inspectabout an hour before dawn, lift the sheets and turn on a flashlight. It might lead to a discovery, but this method can also be unsettling.
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Seal The Mattress Before Disposal
If you drag the mattress through the home, bed bugs will jump off it and infest the rest of the house. You can prevent this to an extent by sealing the mattress in an encasement.
When you get to the dump, you can take the mattress out of the encasement. Seal the encasement in an airtight box or bag before laundering it at home.
This should prevent at least some of the bugs from spreading.
Where Did Bed Bugs Come From
Bed bugs may have evolved when a close relative, the bat bug, switched to feeding off cave-dwelling humans. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans wrote about them. They were part of many peoples lives in the U.S. and around the world before World War II.
Then DDT came along. DDT seemed wonderful at the time. Unlike most of the insecticides sold in stores today, DDT had a lasting effecta long residual effect. Insects died when they crawled where DDT was used, even if it had been there for weeks. Though most homeowners used DDT for large pests like cockroaches, it did the bed bugs in too. When the bed bugs came out to feed, there was something there to kill them.
Modern furnishings and appliances helped too. Bed bugs dont care if a home is clean or messy. They just like good hiding spotsand food. When modern furniture came into style they had fewer hiding spots. Home appliances such as washing machines and vacuums helped keep them at bay. Bed bugs were a rarity in the US from the early 1950s through the late 1990s. A whole generation of people grew up whod never seen one.
Bed bugs had been off the radar for so long they were almost forgotten. By the time anyone noticed, they were back in a big way. Right now there are no traps or monitors proven to detect a population when its still small. And since bed bugs travel on things such as luggage, souvenirs, and furniture we bring into our homes, its hard to block their entry.
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Scrub The Bed Bugs Off The Mattress
In case your mattress is severely infested with bed bugs, start by removing most of them physically. Scrub the off the mattress with a stiff brush before carrying out vacuum cleaning, steam treatment or pesticide application. This may also be a good step to take before encasing the mattress. At least, scrubbing off most of the bed bugs will significantly reduce them and make your mattress look neater.
Do I Have To Throw Away My Mattress Due To Bed Bugs
Throwing away your mattress may be a bad idea. Heres why:
- Mattresses are expensive. Throwing one away and getting a new one isnt always an option.
- To throw away the mattress, you would have to pick it up and drag it outside. Doing so could spread bed bugs around your home, or give them to your neighbors.
- Bed bugs dont only live in your mattress. They can live in furniture, wall cracks, and floorboard cracks. You would still have bed bugs after youre done.
- Because there are still bed bugs in your room, buying a replacement mattress because of bed bugs would be a bad idea. The new mattress would become infested.
Its understandable if you dont want to sleep on an infested mattress. Bed bugs cause sleeping problems because they bite you, and because they play on your mind.
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Discard Your Mattress To Get Rid Of Bed Bugs
You may also choose to throw away the mattress to get rid of the bed bugs. This method of getting rid of bed bugs is considered to be appropriate if the mattress is severely infested or very old. If you choose to discard your mattress, don not leave it inside other structures or just outside the home. Make an effort to coordinate with the litter collectors to collect it as soon as you discard it. This will eliminate the possibility of the mattress overstaying outside before collection. In case this was to happen, an unsuspecting person could pick it with an intention of using it. It is also possible that the bed bugs may spread to the surrounding structures or places. This will only spread the bed bugs to other households.
Unfortunately, bed bugs do not only stay within the mattress. They are also located in other areas such as bed joints, on the walls and the furniture around the bed. However, most of the bed bugs and bed bug eggs are found on or in the mattress. Therefore, discarding your mattress may not eliminate all the bed bugs but will help will get rid of a huge percentage of bed bugs. But if the bed is also old or severely infested with the bed bugs, it may also be discarded together with the mattress. Definitely, this will be a more effective way of getting rid of the bed bugs.
