What Not To Do If You Find Bed Bugs In Your Home

Move Items And Spray

If you see bed bugs in a bedroom, moving items out of that room makes sense, and spray the bed and mattress with pesticides. You might even think to spray pesticides on other objects before you take them out of the room. There are two significant problems with this. The first is that bed bugs inside objects will not be affected by your attempts to kill them with a spray. Sprayed insecticides are topical. They do not act like the gases of fumigation. The bugs inside a piece of furniture or television are not likely to die. That leads us to the second problem: you can spread the infestation when you move items from a bedroom to a living room. While taking all the items out of a room and placing them in the center of your kitchen or dining room floor might be a good preparation step before heat treatment, it is not a good idea to do when trying to target a bed bug infestation.

Spray And Pray

There are quite a few things you can spray on bed bugs and kill them. But, apart from giving you a little bit of happiness for the moment, you're not going to fix your problem. In fact, spraying bed bugs can make your problem worse. When bed bugs feel threatened, they flee. This can drive them deep into your walls. Even worse than this, your attempts to kill them with chemicals could make them resistant to pesticides. Bed bugs shed their cuticle (skin) as they pass from one instar (development stage) to the next. Bugs that have come into contact with pesticides are known to produce a new cuticle that is more resistant than the last. So, if you'd prefer not to have superbugs in your home, it is best not to go this route.

Kill Them With Heat

You are probably aware that heat is one of the best ways to kill bed bugs. But, before you decide to turn your oven on 600 and open the door or buy expensive heaters to put around your home, you should know that it isn't easy to raise the temperature of a home to around 120 degrees Fahrenheit for one hour. If you leave even one spot that is not hot enough to kill those bugs, they'll find it and hide in it. But, beyond being ineffective, do-it-yourself heat treatments have led to a catastrophic loss of property and life.