Find out if you have bed bugs in your home, and if you do find out the safe way to get rid of them from listening to our podcast.

Transcription:
Bed bugs are getting more and more popular these days, aren’t they?

You might have some bites that you wake up with. Bed bugs, you won’t actually feel them biting you. What they do is, they inject a narcotic in your skin, to numb the area before they start taking a blood meal. You might wake up with welts. Might be bed bugs, might not be.

What you want to do is look in your bed. Lift off the sheets and the covers. Look at the seam around your bed. Look at where it folds over, in the frame — and especially if your bed frame is wood — they love to leave their droppings and leave their eggs on the wood. Porous materials, like that. Look in the little cracks and crevices. They like to be touched on all sides. Those are the places you want to look for.

What a bed bug looks like? I would say it looks like a small, flat tick. It’s about the size and color of an apple seed, but only really thin and flat. If they’ve been biting you, they’ll have a little dark red circle where their belly would be.

Interviewer: Is it safe to treat for bed bugs?

Interviewee: Treating for bed bugs is as safe as we can be. The chemicals we use are toxic chemicals. They’re pesticides. Which to us means, they work.

The way we treat for bed bugs is really taking your bed apart, taking the chairs around your bed apart, flipping the carpet around from underneath the bed, or the couch, or places where you spend a lot of time.

We pinpoint these creatures. Part of the reason we pinpoint them, is for safety. Part of the reason is because they don’t groom. A lot of insects, when they come in contact with the chemical, they groom, they get it on their feet, on their footpads, they groom it into their system; they actually ingest it.

Bed bugs are filthy little buggers. They don’t groom; they don’t take showers, so to speak. We have to pinpoint our treatment right on the bedbugs, right on the eggs. We go with a fine-tooth comb through everything, using limited amount of chemicals and mostly chemicals that go away pretty quickly. Alcohol is one of the main chemicals we use in one of our products. We really cook everything down, cook the eggs, kill the bedbug on contact, because the residuals — the long-lasting chemicals you might be concerned about — just don’t work.