Treating luggages for bed bugs

If you are paranoid about bed bugs, you can take these precautions after travel:

1. Keep luggages in the car under the hot sun for several hours to kill bed bugs.
2. Wash clothes immediately and dry them. Make sure that the transport to the laundry room does not spread the bugs. 
3. Carefully inspect your bags, scrub with stiff bristles, and vacuum the heck out of it.
4. Seal the vacuum bag when done. 

Treating bedbugs with insecticide

Once you have positively identified a bed bug infestation (see article), quickly get professional help.

Don't apply pesticides yourself. According to the Environmental Health and Safety school at Harvard, Gentrol and Phantom are registered bed bug pesticides that professional pest control experts can use. Residual insecticides last for a month or so, which is good, because the chorion (egg shells) of the bugs protect them. It's a good idea to get another inspection three weeks later.

Do not allow spraying of pesticides on your mattress or anywhere that you would directly contact.

Controlling bed bugs

Drat! Despite your precaution, you got those critters in your house. Get professional help ASAP (see future article)! In the meantime, you can keep them from feeding by creating obstacles to the food source—which, unfortunately is your unconscious body.

Create a bed bug-free zone by doing the following:

1. Disrupt pathways to the bed and you.

• Coat the legs of your bed with vaseline or mineral around 2 inches wide.
• Place a barrier of chalk or silica aerogel around the bed posts.
• Wrap double-sided carpet tape (or other tape) around the bed legs and the floor area.

2. Eliminate hiding places

• Caulk cracks, and areas where pipes and wires penetrate walls and baseboards.
• Encase the mattress with tight bed bug cover. Replacing it does nothing. The bugs can come back.
• Pull the bed away from the wall, make sure no linen or blanket touches the floor.
• Reduce clutter to minimize hiding places. 

3. Thoroughly clean suspect area

• Inspect crevices and bed area and suck bugs up with vacuum cleaner. Use stiff bristle brushes to dislodge eggs. 
• Dismantle bed frames to find more hiding places.
• Remove drawers from desks and drawers
• Turn over furniture

Identifying and collecting bedbugs

Bed bugs, or what nerdy entomologists call cimex lectularius, are light yellow in color in juvenile bugs who have not fed and reddish brown in adult bugs. They are the size of apple seeds and can be seen by the naked eye.

They are nocturnal, so the best way to catch them is waiting until the middle of the night. They tend to hide in mattresses and crevices close to a food source—you.

You can collect them in small leak-proof containers filled with rubbing alcohol. Send teh

Detecting bedbugs

How do you know if you have a bed bug infestation?

• You wake up with itchy welts that appear in a cluster or row of threes. That's their calling card. But don't freak out, yet it could be another insect. Also 1 in 3 folks are lucky enough to not have reactions to bed bug bites
• You see tiny black spots or rust staines on mattress seams, headboards, baseboards, or corners where walls meet. It looks kinda like moldy.
• They smell like rotting coconuts. 

The key to getting rid of bed bugs is detecting an infestation early and treating it before it spreads.

Building a bedbug detector for under $20

If you think you might have bedbug infestation (you have insect bites that are arrayed in a row or cluster), you can create a MacGyver trap that is just as good as the ones used by professionals. You cannot exterminate the bugs with this method, but you could detect them and contact exterminators.

The folks are Rutgers University experimented with various homemade contraptions until they built a trap superior to the ones used by exterminators for detecting an infestation. (They presented at the 2009 meeting of the Entomological Society of America)

Here are the stuff you'll need:

• Plastic food and water dish for cats (or a similar plastic bowl with smooth lining)
• Insulated 1/3 galloon jug sold in camping-supply or sports stores (Yay! to another excuse to visit REI!)
• 2.5 lbs of dry ice (~$1/lb). The dry ice is the bait. The CO2, which is mistaken as human breath, lures the bloodsuckers. 
• Gloves (because you should never handle dry ice with your bare hands!)
• Sandpaper
• Talcum powder
• Tape

Build the contraption with the following steps:

1. Put on gloves and place 2.5 lbs of dry ice pellets inside the insulated jug. 
2. Leave the spout open to let the CO2 evaporate. It should seep out completely in 11 hours at room temperature and no faster.
   If the CO2 is seeping out too rapidly, partially cover the spout. 
3. Overturn the food dish, scuff the outer rim with sandpaper to give the bloodsuckers better traction. 
4. Create a paper ramp on the food dish by taping the sandpaper (or other pieces of paper) to the dish. 
5. Make the inside of the food dish even more slippery by dusting it with talcum powder.
   Once the bedbugs get into the moat, they can't scuttle out of the steep, slippery rim. Bwahaha! 
6. Place the bait, which is the thermos/insualted jug with dry ice, in the middle of the overturned food dish. 

Bedbugs: Non-emo vampires that like the dark and won't sparkle in sunlight

Bedbugs give us the heebie-jeebies. These vampires were wiped out from the United States back in the day when people sprayed DDT on anything that scuttled or moved, including pesky coworkers and overly smelly men. But they (the bedbugs, not the smelly men, who—to the disappointment of women in that era—never disappeared) were reintroduced into the country when international travel became common.

Photo: Visuals Unlimited / Corbis | Source: New York Daily News

Like Jason in Friday the 13th, pesticide-resistent bed bugs are notoriously difficult to get rid of. If even a single female with eggs survive the extermination, you have another infestation in your hands. Temporarily moving out of your house won't help since a bedbug can survive for up to 18* months without food [ This is your cue to run to the showers screaming. ].

The best way to deal with bedbugs is not get them in the first place. Here are a few precautions you should follow when you travel:

• Before you book a hotel, check with the Bedbug Registry. 
• When you arrive at the hotel, do not put your luggage and stuff on the bed. Put them on non-upholstered furniture (the luggage stand, for example) instead.
• Do not lay your clothes in the drawer (bedbugs like wood, crevices, and protected areas). Instead, keep your stuff in your luggage or hang your clothes up in the closet. Keeping them in the bathroom works. 
• Learn what bedbugs look like.  
• Take out the bedsheets and check the mattresses (all of them, not just the one you are laying on) for signs of blood or bedbugs. Lift the mattress over your head to check for signs under the mattress. Carefully inspect the folds and creases of the mattress. Check the entire length of the fold around the mattress, both top and bottom. 
• Check the headboards. Lift them off from their hinges and inspect the crevices. Headboards are unwieldy, so it's easier to work with another person, but one strong person can manage it.
• Use a very bright headlamp (like the kind they sell in outdoor stores) while doing the inspection.

Other tips:

• Avoid used stuff. 
• Be aware that they're not just in hotel rooms. They have been discovered  in offices, stores (Abercombie in New York had to close down for fumigation), theaters, trains, hospital waiting rooms, and gyms. No need to be paranoid, but just keep an eye out for itchy welts, so that you can take precautions (described next).   
• If you discover itchy welts that you suspect are bedbug bites, take precautions before you return home. Heat will kill them. Bag all your clothes, wash them (including ones you didn't wear) and dry them in high heat (greater than 125 degrees Fahrenheit). Bag your luggage and leave them in the back of your car under the hot sun for at least a day. Once the infestation starts, the nightmare begins. 
• See our article on spotting an existing infestation. 

For a more thorough article, see the University of Kentucky: College of Agriculture site. 

* This figure is based on older records about earlier infestations. Some reports recorded 12 months, which is still creepily long. The pesticide-resistent strain in our era might live to only 2 months without a bloodmeal. But still. Eww.