Category: Home Ec

Because our infestation consisted of a relatively small number of bed bugs, our primary goal was to prevent any instars from reaching maturity and breeding. The secondary goal was to eliminate any existing adults, one of which seemed to be an egg-laying female.

An ordinary house, ours included, presents an essentially infinite number of harborages suitable for bed bugs. Despite what the references will tell you, it’s impossible to remove / seal / stuff all of the cracks and crevices in which bed bugs may reside between meals. We didn’t make extraordinary efforts along those lines.

On the other hand, here’s a simple truth that I haven’t seen anywhere in the literature: The numbers are on your side! To wit:

• You have many opportunities to kill any given bed bug during its progression from egg to adult

Each of the five instar stages must have at least one blood meal before molting to the next stage. If you have only a 50% chance of killing the bug at each feeding, only 3% of the eggs will reach maturity: 0.031 = 0.5⁵. That’s still too many, but if you’re 75% effective at killing the bug that just bit you, you can reduce the odds of having an adult bug to essentially zero: 0.001 = 0.25⁵.

You do that by:

• Making your floors inhospitable
• Isolating your furniture
• Calling down the angelfire every single time you get bitten

Bed bugs may crawl on walls as well as floors, but most of your furniture stands on the floor. Spreading diatomaceous earth along the floor, covering a few inches from the baseboard, ensures that bed bugs will pick up a lethal coating of sharp dust particles. This won’t kill them immediately, but it’s cumulatively quite effective. Best of all, diatomaceous earth isn’t poisonous to you.

With all of your furniture isolated from the floor, using cheap and effective home-brew traps that I’ll discuss later, you know that the bed bug that just bit you is in one of two places:

• on the furniture
• on you

Sterilize both locations and you’ve most likely killed the bug.

Repeat as needed.

Because bed bugs inject an anesthetic while they withdraw blood, you probably won’t feel a thing during the bite. Indeed, you probably won’t feel an early instar crawl along your skin, even though you’d swear you should. We generally notice the itching sensation shortly after the bite, while we’re still sitting in the same position. If you don’t react to bites, this technique won’t work.

At that point, we stripped down, put all our clothes directly into trash bags without letting them touch the floor, sealed the bags, and took a thorough shower. Bed bugs prefer living in clothing to living on skin, but a smaller instar may not have made the leap and you want to be certain you got rid of it.

You then wash your clothing and run it through the dryer to be certain you killed the bug.

During one particularly trying day, I took four showers. This will be rough on your skin and your clothing, but … consider the alternative.

You must then make a decision: try to disinsect (a new term to us, too!) the furniture or discard it. After reading the process required to kill insects in upholstered furniture, we chose to discard (after acquiring bites while sitting on each item) a pair of rather old Barcaounger recliners, the living room couch (which is currently isolated and abandoned in place, pending a spring pickup), three office chairs, and sundry other bits and pieces.

While we were not certain that those furniture items contained bugs, nuking them from orbit was the only way to be sure the bug wouldn’t grow up and reproduce.

Our living room furniture currently consists of a rocking chair, a footstool, some straight chairs (one serving as a desk chair), three pole lamps, a table, two desks, and very little else. What remains is easily sterilized, offers few harborages, and can be (is!) isolated from the floor.

I told you this would be expensive.

You must be certain you kill the bug that just bit you and we think there’s no other way to make that happen. Spreading the type of insecticide required to kill bed bugs all over your furniture seems neither practical nor desirable. You could bag the furniture up and wait for a year until the bugs die from natural causes, but that’s simply not practical.

Repeat as needed. With any luck, you will run out of bugs before you run out of furniture.

Then there’s what we did to our bedroom. But, first, I must digress into pesticides.

The first thing to understand about our infestation is that we never actually saw an adult bed bug. In fact, of the hundred-odd photos I took during the experience, it’s not clear that any show a bed bug.

That’s a crucial difference between our infestation and the horror stories you’ll read about elsewhere. Our infestation consisted of a relatively few bed bugs and, because we (generally) acted quickly, decisively, and consistently, they didn’t multiply beyond control.

There is no mistaking a bed bug bite, however, and that will probably be the first indication that you have an infestation. The references in the first post in this series should give you a general idea of what a bite looks and feels like, but here’s a quick summary:

• You’ve never felt a bite itch like that in your life
• Two or three such bites, a few cm apart, are diagnostic

Some people have a long-delayed reaction or no reaction at all. If you’re one of those folks, then our techniques probably won’t work for you, unless the rest of your family has more “normal” reactions.

Bed bugs are obligate hematophages: they must have at least one blood meal at each stage of their life cycle. That’s where you come in. While they prefer humans, it seems any mammal will serve in a pinch, and if you’re the sort with indoor dogs or cats, you have a real problem.

Because they’re only a few millimeters long, bed bugs tend to stay relatively close to their food supply (i.e., you), rather than commute long distances. The bed bugs you brought home will, most likely, quickly take up lodging in your bed, a favorite chair, or the desk where you sit for a few hours. Eliminating all of those lodgings, known as harborages, is essentially impossible, despite what you read in the references.

Each of the five instars from egg to adult requires at least one blood meal to provide enough energy to grow and molt. An adult female bed bug requires one meal after mating, after which she can produce a few hundred eggs without another meal. Although the references aren’t forthcoming, we think bed bugs have no qualms about introducing loops in their family trees: any male may inseminate any female.

(Digression: So you think you’re comfortable with weird sexual practices? This will turn your stomach: bed bugs practice traumatic insemination.)

Our overall plan of battle, then, was quite simple:

• Eliminate as many harborages as practical
• Prevent every instar from progressing to the next stage
• Prevent breeding

The plan may be simple, but the implementation posed some, ah, difficulties…

Back in July, we returned from our bicycling vacation with a few bed bugs in our luggage. We have our suspicions about where they came from, but that’s not really relevant: bed bugs can come from nearly anywhere. You can bring a bed bug home from a classy hotel just as easily as from a sleazy dive… and you will!

After three months, we think we’ve eliminated the last bed bug: no bites for the last three weeks. One can never be absolutely certain, but that’s definitely a good sign, particularly in combination with the monitoring measures we’re using.

We accomplished this on our own, without the use of a licensed PCO (Pest Control Operator) and without the use of toxic chemicals. It was, however, extremely expensive in terms of time, materials, and furnishings, as well as completely disrupting our family life.

While our methods definitely do not scale to the level required for a major infestation, most likely you’ll be in our situation: you return from a vacation with one or two, um, guests. If you understand what we’ve done and why we’ve done it, you’ll have a better basis for your own decisions and actions.

So.

Most of what you’ll find in the usual Internet forums comes from (possibly) well-meaning folks who haven’t done any reading or experimentation: it’s raw anecdotal experience. Not to slander them, but it’s better to start with the basics, which you get from the primary sources.

To that end, here are the better sources we’ve found and used:

• A good overview at, of all places, Wikipedia. Pay particular attention to the life cycle.
• Highly detailed information from the Australian Department of Entomology at their Bed Bug home page. Print the Code of Practice PDF as a booklet, bind it, and read thoroughly.
• Cornell University’s Integrated Pest Management overview and an excellent Guidelines for Prevention and Management of Bed Bugs in Shelters and Group Living Facilities.
• A fundamental study from the Bad Old Days: The ecology of the bed-bug, Cimex lectularius L., in Britain Report on Research, 1935-40.
• The definitive study of what attracts bedbugs to traps: Bed Bug (Heteroptera: Cimicidae) Attraction to Pitfall Traps Baited With Carbon Dioxide, Heat, and Chemical Lure.

With those references in hand, I can describe what we did and how it worked. If you’re the sort who can’t drive past a nasty accident without gawking (and we are all that sort, really), then the next week or so should be good for at least that level of amusement…

A note to the potential purchasers of our house, when you read this in what’s currently our future: yeah, bed bugs. The only difference between this house and the next one on your list is that you know what happened here, what we did, and how it worked out. Trust me on this: no other homeowner will tell you anything about their bed bug experiences, to the extent of lying to your face.

Believe it.

Update: Here’s a quick index to the rest of (this chapter of) the Bed Bug Story:

• Overview
• Infestation and Breeding
• Assured Destruction
• Pesticides
• Killing Fields
• Thermal Kill
• Disinsecting the Bedroom
• Lures
• Traps From Planet Powder
• Furniture Isolation
• Living on Planet Sticky
• Dying on Planet Sticky