You mean there is some truth to the goodnight adage, “Don’t let the bedbugs bite”?
I had bedbugs twice. I feel for you, there’s few things worse than trying to sleep in a bed in which you know you’re not safe.
My advice - toss the sofa AND get an exterminator. Don’t take any chances.
Wash or dry clean every last stitch of clothes you have. This could also be a good excuse to clean out your closets - sift out things you know you won’t wear anymore and toss them out. Anything you don’t have dry cleaned, throw in a dryer on high for no less than 30 minutes (preferably at least an hour.)
Once you have washed your clothes, keep them contained in sealed plastic bags. Get large sized, clear-plastic recycle bags, put your clothes inside, tie them up and give them a shake. You’ll be able to spot any lingering bugs as they fall out of your clothes (but thankfully still be contained within the bag.)
Sneakers apparently are an easy way to spread bedbugs. They can easily climb in the ridge soles (as opposed to smooth shoe or boot soles.) Take off any sneakers you wear and leave them outside your apartment.
Duane Reade sells plastic mattress wraps. Get one and contain your bed in it.
Scrub down your walls & floors with hot water & ammonia.
Bedbugs prefer to inhabit fabric. But they can live in anything wood or even plastic or metal appliances. Take all the pictures off your walls, especially if they are near your infected couch and inspect them. (This is the one that really freaked me out. I had a picture hanging several feet above my couch, and thought it would be unlikely that they’d be there, but when I moved the pics - a whole colony of them emerged! Yikes!)
All this is a hell of a lot of work, and pretty costly. But believe me…you will decide it is worth it in the end.
How timely. I live in an apartment and apparently the first floor is infested with them (I’m on the second floor). On thursday they’re going to spray the entire building, which is a drag but also really good because I’ve heard that if you just spray where they are, they just migrate.
The drag is that I have to get my budgies out for a couple of days. Does anyone know if it will kill my plants?
I’m happy to say that I’ve not seen a bed bug yet, but I also have a perimeter of diatomaceous earth all around every wall and opening which seems to be keeping them out. I think if I saw one, I’d run out, screaming my head off and drop a match behind me as I left.
Bed bugs don’t have sticky pads, that is why you should buy metal beds as opposed to wood or wicker in the future. I live in Florida now and I have everything metal, in a state where wicker is king
Living in a cruddy one-bedroom apartment that got infested by bugs migrating from a bug bombing downstairs, my roommate and I tackled it by:
a) Burning all of the bedding (minus one easily washable sheet each)
b) Throwing away the couch (aka my roommate’s bed) and any furniture with fabric
c) Dousing the entire carpet in rubbing alcohol to kill the bastards then covering it all with diatomoaceous earth.
d) Washing everything we owned and keeping it in sealed plastic bags.
e) I slept on a plastic-wrapped foam mattress on 5 foot metal poles (aka cruddy IKEA platform bed), so I never got bitten in bed. I just made sure to remove the ladder whenever I wasn’t climbing up or down so the cat couldn’t transfer them, and only climbed up there completely naked so my clothes wouldn’t transfer them. (Mind you, I would not recommend sleeping naked on plastic in an un- air conditioned apartment, but it had to be done) She slept on an air mattress surrounded by and dusted with diatomaceous earth.
f) Realized the slumlord wasn’t going to do anything about it, and moved.
Just to quell this line of thought now:
Even before DDT was banned, all known bedbug populations exhibited resistance to it.
Even thought DDT has been banned for many years, all known populations of bedbugs retain DDT resistance.
Even if we brought DDT back, it would either be useless from the start or would become useless almost immediately.
Here’s a link to a blog post (not mine) with collected citations:
http://newyorkvsbedbugs.org/2008/05/15/ddt-resistance-once-more-with-tables-and-sources/
Those with wooden frames can set the legs in metal cups. Either way, ensure no bedding touches the floor.
Steam?
So my wife’s Jiffy steamer might be the weapon of choice if we ever succumb to bedbugs?
That thing pours out great quantities of very hot steam.
I’m tossing the sofa and the bed.
I called the landlord and the exterminator is coming tomorrow to treat both my place and the downstairs apartment.
The lady downstairs says she has all white sheets and hasn’t seen a sign of droppings or blood stains. Hopefully that means they haven’t spread.
Her son works at the local hospital and says that they’re having problems with them there. :eek:
It’s true, apparently, that they don’t carry disease, but some people, like me unfortunately, can have allergic reactions to the bites. Those reactions can lead to secondary infections if you scratch enough.
It itches and burns enough that it’s difficult not to scratch unless you use some kind of topical anesthetic.
Of course. What, did you think bedbugs were made-up?
I took Thursday afternoon off, dismantled the sofa and the bed, and carried them downstairs from my second floor apartment, on what I think was one of the hottest days of the summer so far.
7:30 PM rolls around and no exterminator. 8:00, 8:30, 9:00, still no exterminator, and he’s not answering his phone or responding to our messages.
This morning, I stopped by the apartment (I’m not currently sleeping there) on the way to work. The nice lady downstairs gave me a note that the exterminator left on the building’s front door at 6:00 this morning. They didn’t hear him because he was ringing my buzzer and I wasn’t there.
She says she called him and he claimed that the landlord hadn’t called him and that he hadn’t received any of our voice messages except for one of the ones she left last night.
That sounds like bull to me because he addressed the note to “Dave” and apparently didn’t ring the downstairs buzzer (and believe me, you DON’T sleep through those buzzers).
If he didn’t get my messages, why did he address the note to me and only ring my buzzer? 
Supposedly he’s coming again 7:00 PM tonight. I hope he’s more competent at exterminating then he is at taking phone messages (or lying about them). :mad:
I believe the heat treatment has to include heat + time to be effective. 130F in the dryer has to be 130F for a minimum of 15 minutes, and I think most websites recommend 20-30 minutes. So things have to be in the dryer long enough for it to get all the clothes up to temperature and then keep it there. That’s why I would just leave them in there for the full hour cycle. There are services that do whole house heat treatment, where they have a truck that heats up, and all the belongings are transferred to the heat truck for treatment, then the house is treated either chemically, or I think they can also tent-treat the house somehow, not entirely clear on how they do that.
I think a wand steamer would get the little bloodsuckers running, but not necessarily kill them.
Bed bugs are easy to kill, like most insect problems it’s the eggs that get you. Heck, simple Windex sprayed on pretty much any bug will kill it. It’s killing the eggs that’s the problem and that is where the heat comes in.
The info on bed bugs I read, all say leaving it on at least an hour at 120 degree in the dryer will kill the eggs. The bed bugs will be dead long before that, it’s the eggs you want to kill
Take a long shower with the water as hot as you can stand, that’ll kill the itchies for at least an hour or two.
Thanks for the shower suggestion. The itchies responded to a topical anesthetic along with diphenhydramine and cortisone creams.
The guy came last night at 7:00. He seemed like a straightforward guy. In spite of my earlier post, I think that he really did have problems with his answering machine.
He didn’t see any signs of bugs in my apartment so removing the furniture may have taken care of most of the problem. He sprayed some stuff along all the woodwork, including around the doors and the stairway leading up to my apartment. He also sprayed it where the walls meet the ceiling. He said it consisted of a neurotoxin and birth control.
He waited a few minutes because he said that after he does it he usually sees sick bugs staggering out of the woodwork. Nothing like that happened so hopefully it means that they were confined to the sofa and possibly the bed.
He’ll come back for two more treatments in two week intervals.
The guy seemed to know all kinds of things about bedbug spread and reproduction. He said that they’ve become a big problem in recent years. He’s treated some wealthy people’s homes two and three times because they travel overseas a lot and keep unwittingly bringing them back.
He also said that if a male is alone with no females, it will become female and lay eggs, reproducing parthenogenetically. :eek:
So I went online to search for Diatomaceous earth (read in the other thread) and found it on Amazon.
The funny thing is the “People who bought this also bought” section which included “Triumph of the Straight Dope”, “The Return of the Straight Dope” and “The Straight Dope Tells All”.
So I guess a lot of dopers have bed bugs.
Like me.
I’m think I’m getting out of the woods with them but it’s damn hard to sleep worrying about them and thinking every little sensation is a bug.
I was shocked that food grade diatomaceous earth is sold.
Apparently some alternative health people eat it for colon cleansing and to remove supposed internal parasites.
Absolute bollocks. I have doubts about the qualifications of this turkey.
(cite: myself, an entomologist with many years bedbug research experience)
Well, that gives me pause…