Bed bugs are extremely small insects and can often fit into tiny cracks. This makes it very hard to detect bed bugs in the home, office buildings and hotels. Although bed bugs are not known to carry diseases, they can affect an individual’s quality of life, causing distress, discomfort, embarrassment, and broken sleep. In the battle against bed bug infestations, the first thing an individual needs to know is the way to detect bed bugs and find out where the bugs are hiding.
Fecal stains, egg cases, and shed skins of bedbugs in crevices and cracks on or near beds indicate the possible presence of bed bugs, but they do not confirm an active bed bug infestation. A sweet and musty odor can sometimes suggest the presence of bed bugs. Of course, observing the bugs themselves can confirm an active infestation. You may also turn to professional pest-control companies to help you determine whether your home are facing the bed bug problem.
It is not an easy thing to find the hiding places of bed bugs. They can live anywhere in the home and hide in very tiny cracks in furniture and textiles. They tend to be most common in areas where people sleep and are mostly found in beds, including mattresses, mattress covers, box springs, and bed frames. They do not appear on the sleeping surfaces of beds as commonly as in the cracks and crevices linked with bed frames and mattresses. Besides, bed bugs often reside in curtains, picture frames, clothing articles, carpet edges, corners of dresser and other furniture, wallpaper cracks, floor molding, window and door molding, to name just a few. It is also surprisingly true that even vacant and seemingly clean homes may have bedbugs in them since the bugs can survive for up to over two months without any feeding.
Bed bug infestations come in different ways. The bugs may sneak their way into a new home along with luggage, furniture and bedding. That is why people need to have a second thought when purchasing second-hand furniture and should never buy already-used mattresses. It is also known that bed bugs can move from apartment to apartment through hollows and holes in the walls and the tubes through which wires and pipes run. To make matters worse, bed bugs may occur in many different locations if their population is large and they have dispersed from their more common areas to areas where they are normally less likely to be found.
Although there is no evidence that bed bugs can cause or spread human diseases, it is possible for people to get secondary bacterial infection if they scratch the skin bitten by the bugs. When the skin is scratched and broken, normal bacteria from the surface of the skin will be able to penetrate deeper. Therefore, do not scratch the area which is bitten by the bugs. The most urgent thing to do is call an experienced pest-control company, and ask the company to get rid of the bugs in the home in a professional manner.