How to eliminate bed bugs from flat?
I have tried pest control etc.
After a few days they come back due to moisture.
Eliminate bed bugs from flat
insectpest-control
Related Solutions
Bed bugs are hard to see. They get in small cracks (e.g. between the flooring and wall) and can survive for months. Finding them by sight will be next to impossible. But you could have a service inspect the place before you move in. I think some use trained dogs that can smell them.
That said, no matter how careful you are, bedbugs can migrate through small cracks, vents, a shared laundry facility, etc. So even if you don't have any before moving in, it's possible they will migrate to your unit once there's a food source (people).
We have fought this problem in our rentals before with success using the following techniques.
What doesn't work: Foggers. We treated the rental for MONTHS with weekly applications of foggers - 3 or 4 anti bedbug foggers per floor - hundreds of dollars spent - and the tenants had to leave the building for half a day every week and then deal with the stink and the toxic residues left behind. Not fun, and didn't work at all because bedbugs DON'T hang out where the fumes can get to them.
So, what do you need to do?
First, buy insect resistant, zippered mattress covers. These are usually some kind of plastic. You wrap each mattress in its own cover and zip it shut tight, sealing the bedbugs within the mattress inside. You must take care not to rip these covers or the bugs can get out again. This is done during the treatment process and for some time beyond.
Second, and this is the big step - Treat your entire house with diatomaceous earth (DE). DE is a non toxic, non pesticide means of controlling pests. It's a crushed silica product that is effective in killing not via poison, but by cutting the outer membrane of small insects.
Unlike most dust/powder which is smooth from erosion, DE has microscopic sized jagged edges. Many types of insects have an external shell which is coated with a kind of mucous membrane which helps them retain water. DE slices that membrane to shreds, and the bugs lose all of their moisture to evaporation, so they die of dehydration, NOT poison.
You can buy food grade DE online. It's safe to use around the house, and you can even dust your pets with it (keep away from the face, of course). We have three dogs and when fleas get in the house, we dust the animals and the areas they sleep with DE.
Now bedbugs are not jumpers, so the key with dealing with them is getting the DE where they live and where they travel.
Where they live: Your furniture. Those mattress covers? Open em up and dust both sides of the mattress LIBERALLY with DE, then close it up again. The bedbugs will get coated in it as they crawl around looking for an escape.
Your sofa/chairs - if you can, dust the INSIDES of larger pieces of furniture - heavily. Also apply dust in all the cracks and crevices.
Remove the wall plates - use a dusting sprayer like this:
and spray that dust into all the electrical junction boxes - the idea is to force the dust into the walls where bedbugs travel. (They don't like open areas, they prefer tight spaces and corners.
Also put a ring of dust down around your bed posts where they touch the floor, along the edges of the walls. Dust your carpets with it to.
I personally bought my supplies at Dirtworks ( http://www.dirtworks.net/Diatomaceous-Earth.html ) - I bought 2 five pound bags of food grade DE (which was 1 bag too many, honestly), a few puffer bottles, the glimmer sprayer, and we did ONE heavy application all over the entire property (we even dusted the lawn with the sprayer) and never had a bedbug complaint again.
Related Topic
- Prevent bed bugs
- Will I get more pests/insects if the neighbor sprays and I don’t
- What are the small white ants in the apartment and how to get rid of them
- Fruit fly type bugs always appear in the kitchen when the weather heats up
- This bug? And should I be concerned
- How to get rid of cockroaches using natural products
- What are these black bugs and how to get rid of them
Best Answer
Of all the sprays that exist, Temprid SC (imidacloprid + beta-cyfluthrin) and Transport (Acetamiprid + Bifenthrin) are found to be the best for controlling bed bugs. The best natural spray is Ecoraider. Ecoraider and Temprid SC do work together, but Ecoraider would be antagonistic with diatomaceous earth, because diatomaceous earth works by absorbing oil while Ecoraider is oil based... so they would completely cancel eachother. Diatomaceous earth and Temprid SC or Transport would work well together.
However, the real key to killing bedbugs is getting them to move, and crawl through a pesticide. Bed bugs will not move without an attractant, like carbon dioxide. Recently, histamine was discovered to "arrest" bed bugs... meaning that the bed bug will not move once it contacts histamine. This is pretty good news, but there's a few problems; first, you can't spray histamine everywhere (that would kill a person)! The second problem is that spraying histamine would cost an outrageous fortune! So, histamine works (better than glue) for trapping them, provided that you can attract them to a trap. The third major problem is that the company that was supposed to be producing these new lure, Contech, suddenly went out of business.
But chemical lures, except carbon dioxide, are poor attractants; they are used for monitoring- meaning that they are supposed to catch one or two bugs, just to indicate their presence; they are not a "control" method. The best control method (tried and true for centuries) is the pitfall trap, especially under bed and furniture legs. The best bait is a sleeping human. However, lots of work has been done, trapping bed bugs, and as a result, you can get a fair amount of control from a homemade trap. Commercial traps are limited by the fact that they need to sell something simple... which is what most people want. Consumers don't like to buy an elaborate trap, so commercial traps are not really made to work, as well as they are made to sell well, by being as simple as possible and still capture a few bugs. Still, pheromone lures might help with a DIY trap, especially in conjuction with carbon dioxide, and using the right objects and colors.
Bed bugs are attracted to large vertical objects. They are not attracted to pictures (like of a person). They are attracted to dark red and black. They climb surgical/cloth tape best. So, I would recommend using the DIY trap that Rutgers came up with, but I would also add a pheromone lure, if possible (although the extra $15 may not be totally worth it). And I would invest in some pitfall traps (for your bed and furniture legs). And I would pick up a bottle of Temprid SC.
But, home made traps aren't really going to collect all of the bed bugs... it might offer 60%-70% control by trapping (only)... the idea here is that it will hopefully cause all the bed bugs to at least move and inspect the room, which is absolutely critical for a pesticide to work. An insect must contact the insecticide! Use trap to draw them out into insecticide-treated areas... and you should also be able to monitor the size of the population and the control as time goes by.