Bedbugs are tiny bugs that can dwell in your bedding, mattresses, linens, and furniture. Despite being exceptionally small, they are infamous for painful bites that can lead to allergies and other infections in humans and pet animals. Therefore, you need to look for the signs of bedbugs and take preventive measures as soon as possible.
While some natural ingredients can be used to remove bedbugs, they may not be highly effective, and a recurring infestation may follow. Therefore, consulting with a professional pest control agency, like Brooks Pest Control, maybe a good idea to help you get rid of the bedbugs.
How to identify bedbug infestation
Bedbugs can hide in different places in your home during the daytime as they are highly sensitive to brightness. Therefore, they become active only during the night, and you’ll experience bedbug bites only at night. The following are some common signs that can indicate bedbug infestation in your home.
- If you’re wondering, “do bed bugs jump,” the answer is no; they crawl but do not have the ability to jump or fly.
- Observing blood spots on bed sheets and mattresses.
- Finding pale yellow tiny eggshells or eggs
- bedbug droppings that look like black dots
- Finding fragments of bodies that look like the bugs themselves
- You may also find eggs of bedbugs the size of an apple seed.
- They leave behind a musty odor around the bed
- Finding bedbugs crawling around in your bed
- Waking up with itchy red marks on your body
Sometimes, people may misunderstand bedbug bites for mosquito bites. However, bedbug bites are in clusters or patterns like a zigzag or line, but mosquito bites are isolated and found on the exposed skin only.
Health threats posed by bedbugs
Bedbugs usually travel to your home through something, like an upholstered furniture piece, transported to your home from a place already infested by the bedbugs. Such infestations are usually common in condominiums. Regardless of how bedbugs get into your home, they pose following threats to humans.
- Bedbug bites are very irritating and cause severe itching in the affected areas, which can sometimes lead to bleeding as well.
- Itching can also cause open sores that become prone to bacterial attacks, leading to bacterial infections, which are also known as secondary infections.
- Bedbugs inject anesthetic and anticoagulant through their bites. The chemicals can cause allergic reactions in some people.
- Bedbugs can severely disrupt your sleep cycle, which can lead to issues like mental stress, insomnia, headaches, and much more.
- In some cases, bedbugs can also trigger asthma through airborne allergens.
- Although very rare, prolonged exposure to severe bedbug infestation can sometimes lead to anemia, causing your red blood cells and hemoglobin levels to go down.
- Bedbugs infestations cause sleeplessness, which can lead to insomnia.
Eliminating a bedbug infestation
Bedbugs are very small and less than 5mm long, which makes them harder to spot and kill by hand. Moreover, a female bedbug can lay more than 500 eggs throughout its life cycle and significantly increase the population. However, the following are some ways to eliminate a bedbug infestation.
- The most effective way to eliminate bedbugs from your home is to hire a professional pest control service. They have the requisite expertise, experience, skills, and tools to eliminate bedbugs.
- You can also try some methods on your own. First, you will have to identify the affected areas. Bedbugs are mostly found in mattresses, box springs, cracks in bed frames, baseboards, headboards, furniture, etc.
- Next, you must prevent the infestation from spreading further by vacuuming through the affected areas and sealing up the collected contents.
- Once done, you’ll have to wash all the linens and bedding in hot water for at least 30 minutes. Make sure you do not move infested items to a clean place, as it will spread the infestation further.
- After this, spray isopropyl alcohol, baking soda, tea tree oil, lavender oil, vinegar, and diatomaceous earth over the affected areas as it could reduce the infestation.
Bedbugs can be hard to kill as their thin bodies allow them to hide well in small spaces. Therefore, to eliminate bedbugs from the roots, you may need professional help. A professional bedbug removal treatment will help you remove the bugs permanently.