Bed bug control is on everyone’s mind today. Often people don’t know they even have an infestation until it gets out of hand. Then figuring out how to kill bed bugs can become a nightmare experience.

The most effective kind of bed bugs control is to detect them early, before they get out of hand.

One form of early detection is to hire a bed bug detection dog. Similar to drug sniffing dogs, these canines are trained to sniff out bedbugs and can discover the pests within minutes. Usually the dogs are used in places such as hotels, motels, schools, health care facilities, and hospitals. Now homeowners are starting to use them as well. But bed bug detection dogs aren’t cheap, and can cost up to $400 an hour.

For those of us who can’t afford that kind of money, passive bedbug monitors provide a more reasonably priced form of bed bugs control. These devices are exactly what their name implies. They have no moving parts and do not use up anything that has to be replaced.

Passive bed bug monitors aren’t an alternative to bed bug treatment. What they do is alert you to the presence of the pests. Deciding how to get rid of bed bugs is another matter, which might require the services of a pest control professional.

Many passive bedbug monitors are available at reasonable prices. Here are three popular ones.

Climbup® Insect Interceptor

Climbup Insect Interceptor® is a simple and inexpensive bedbug monitor. It consists of a cup within a cup, both coated with slippery talc that prevents the pests from climbing up the cups’ sides. You put the bed leg inside the inner cup. If bedbugs are on the bed, they’ll fall into the inner cup when they climb down the leg. If they’re some place else in the room and try to get onto the bed, they’ll fall into the outer cup when they climb up the bed leg. Besides alerting you to the presence of bedbugs, this simple system also lets you determine whether the pests are on your bed or in some other part of the room.

You can use Climbup Insect Interceptor not just on beds, but on any piece of furniture that has legs.

Some people have criticized Climbup Insect Interceptor because bedbugs can drop from the mattress onto the floor and thus not be trapped in the inner cup. But the purpose of the device isn’t to trap every bedbug. It’s to tell you whether or not you have them in the first place.

BB Alert® Passive

Bedbugs love to hang out in small crevices. BB Alert® Passive is a small, rectangular device with a white border and has a lot of crevices. You place the monitor near places where bedbugs like to hide. The pests are attracted to BB Alert Passive’s crevices, so they go inside them. As they go in and out of the device, the insects leave fecal stains on the white border, which alerts you to an infestation.

Bed Bug Barrier

Bed Bug Barrier is an inverted glue trap that captures bedbugs climbing onto your bed. The monitor comes in two versions. The first you attach to the top of your bed legs. The second is a castor you attach to the bottom of your bed legs. The pests climb up the bed legs and get stuck in the glue, providing visual evidence of an infestation.

Bed bugs control is important. And passive bedbug monitors provide a good way to learn if you have the critters. But a negative result doesn’t mean you don’t have an infestation. It simply means that the monitor didn’t detect any of them. It might the next time you use it.

Discovering bedbugs is easy; figuring how to get rid of them is difficult. You can try your own home-grown bed bug treatment on them, but if that doesn’t work you should call in a professional pest exterminator. They know how to kill bed bugs. It’s their business.