It is a myth that bed bugs can live for a year without feeding, it can only occur in cold temperatures and never in heated human dwellings
At temperatures of 55F, without ant activity and feeding, they live about five months.
At temperatures of 68F,without activity and feeding, they live about three months.
Alvero Romaro, University of Kentucky performed experiments where colonies of bedbugs were placed in an unoccupied building at 68F and recorded their behavior with time lapse cameras. The bed bugs didn’t forage or feed and the study gave a normal mortality rate of 92 days (average)
At the 57th Annual Meeting of the Entomological Society of America in 2009, newer generations of pesticide-resistant bed bugs in Virginia were reported to survive only two months without feeding.
Is there a source to cite for this information. Possibly a pear reviews article?
Experience and direct observation. Bedbug lifespan depend on temperature, at 68°F a dormant bedbug can live up to three months without feeding, whereas an active bedbug cannot last more than three at most four feeding cycles at 80°f (bed temperature). Using all their energy in vain, within a few weeks, they quickly die of starvation. “Experts” who declare that the bedbug can live up to a year haven’t done their homework. This is a condition that can happen only under specific circumstances, meaning controled by the temperature.
For those who would like to have their own two years old bedbug, it is very simple. Bi-monthly feed the bedbug you choosed and put it in the refrigerator between blood meals. It will live for as long as you keep it up, keeping a live bedbug in the fridge where it constanty hibernates as bedbugs do at near-freezing temperature. The immortal bedbug will get you in the Guiness World’s Book of Records.
You have the means to end up this controversy. Gather a medium to large bedbug colony and place it in an empty appartment left at 68°F and without anybody ever around. Place time-lapse cameras to observe the bedbug behavior and how long they can really survive without a blood meal. That’s an experiment anybody can make, all you need to know is how to catch live bedbugs without pesticides and handle them so you control and neutralize their actions as needed.
Alvero Romaro, University of Kentucky performed these experiments. The bedbugs didn’t forage or feed and the study gave a normal mortality rate (starvation and desiccation) of 92 days for dormant bedbugs.
The thing is that it does not matter how long a bedbug can live. What matters is what you can do to block them, keep them from feeding, catch them, asphixiate them end ultimately starve them to death. I do not care how long a bedbug lives, all I care about is how long a bedbug dies and the bedbug trap lasts longer than any bedbug can live.
“University of Kentucky performed these experiments” would have been a sufficient response. I ended up finding on my own and reading all that a very long time ago now.
Since “University of Kentucky performed these experiments” would have been a sufficient response, I guess I should stop telling people what they did. that simple declaration should be enough to solve the bedbug problem. But according to you, you knew about this for a long time so my question is has it ever been useful to you?
I used it to make the most efficient and most reliable bedbug trap in the world while other people talked about the semantics or ways we should say things. These experiments have not done only by the University of Kentucky but are made daily by thousands of people and they want to know how long it takes for bedbugs to die.
Something is missing in the University of Kentucky experiments about how long it takes for bedbugs to die without food. Isn’t it about time that people are told that they have bedbugs only because they can feed? First you must stop bedbugs from being able to feed and then and only then can you count the days that bedbugs could not feed. Isn’t that what the University of Kentucky did by placing supervised bedbugs in an unoccupied room and using time-lapse cameras to find out when they die?
The trap works and it worked for hundreds of thousands of people. Poison-pushers do not know about this because people can now get rid of bedbugs before calling an exterminator. No bedbugs means no poison. Stop feeding bedbugs if you want to get rid of them. How long will it take for bedbugs to die? You will see it with your own eyes by doing your own experiments and then forget about bedbugs.
JulesNoise
My point was only that I was seeking a citation if there was one, that is all. Not a long-winded browbeating over your how much you value anecdotal evidence. You really read a lot into things.
Providing credible citation is a good thing. :)
Also, you make a lot of assumptions about people in the short novel you’ve written here.
Jules:
Thank you for pointing this out. Two months ago (26.9.2014) I suspected that I had a bedbug invasion in my bedroom, and saw, under my mattress, how bad it had gotten. I immediately checked the Web to see what will kill enough of these bugs to make it easier for me to finish off the remaining stragglers. I suspect that these were the offspring of one I had brought home from a subway train.
First off, my bed was already falling apart before I knew I had bugs in them, and I got rid of it, along with the mattress and pillows. Second, I started sleeping in another room, but never before I checked my clothes, socks, shoes, pajamas and underwear before I went into my alternate sleeping area; and I always did my checking in the room that was invaded, or in the bathroom which is VERY close by (my assumption is that a hitchhiking bug will not jump off en route; they want to stay close as possible to their food). As far as I know, not one bug has managed to escape my bedroom to any other place. My doorway has semi-gloss paint around it, and I don’t think they can climb very well on gloss or semi-gloss (correct me if I’m wrong). DE dust lines the floor under the doorway.
Third, I sprayed wherever and whenever I see a bug, and my floor has DE in several places, especially where the floor meets the wall. Fourth, I have bagged several items in Ziploc plastic bags, to keep them from using those items as hideouts, or trapping any that I didn’t find beforehand. Most of the items I have bagged are things I rarely look at or use. If any bugs are still inside, they’re guaranteed to suffocate or starve to death before I go back to that item and open up the bag.
I have had CO2 traps from time to time, either manufactured by one of those AS-SEEN-ON-TV companies, or self-made. I caught a bunch of babies in one of those $10 traps, and I’ve rousted a couple of bugs out of their hiding places with a self-made trap.
As I said before, I believe these were the offspring of a subway bug that hitched a ride on me as I went home. I saw maybe 50 on the surface and in the folds of my mattress, mattress overlay and pillows; so, depending on whether there were any INSIDE the mattress and pillows, I might have had upwards to 150 of them. No doubt I had stragglers elsewhere after getting rid of the bed. I killed about 40 of them, between my first discovery and the end of October. This month (November), I killed 4 of them.
One of those 4, I found between the fold of a very old news article. The other 3, I caught crawling the walls and the ceiling. If I must say so, those 3 were starving and desperate. You did say that the first order in killing bedbugs is to deprive them of their food.
Now comes the issue with temperature. For that, I am amused and disgusted with how many of these online “experts” seem eager to make people believe you CAN’T kill these bugs by a combination of methods I’ve mentioned here. They want people to believe that you must summon a professional exterminator, and not necessarily as a last resort. That might be true if one had over 1,000 of them and was still seeing them crawl the walls and ceiling; but I had maybe 100, and it has been a week since I killed my last bug, one that was probably hibernating.
113 degrees Fahrenheit will kill these bugs, but only recently did I discover, from other articles on the Web, that even if you can’t afford to buy or rent a heater big and/or hot enough to kill them, you can starve them to death quicker as the room temperature rises. The higher the temperature, the less time it takes to starve them to death. For 8 months out of a year, the average temperature of my bedroom, with no air conditioning and my windows closed, is always above 80. In the winter, one of my pipes is almost always hot. My room is positioned in such a way that, in the summer, the thermometer can go as high as 93 inside.
With my radiator off in the fall and winter, and the boiler room to this apartment complex pumping heat through the other pipe, it is usually 81 to 84. With my radiator on, it will go above 85, maybe 90 if I turn it way up. I thought I read, at one Web site, that at 81 degrees a bug may live perhaps a month and a half without blood.
In October, I saw many bugs crawl the ceiling. This month, only one. Lately, I’ve been able to spend many hours in this room, without seeing a bug come toward me and with no bugs on me or my clothes; leading me to conclude that it was indeed a subway bug that started the invasion, and that they are not migrants from another apartment.
I plan to get a new folding bed and traps to lay under the legs and wheels, and I’ll have to get either plastic or a bug-proof cover for my mattress and new pillows. But what about the ceiling? I have a popcorn ceiling, and I want to get double-sided tape, perhaps mounting tape. Will it hold? What kind of double-sided tape should I use?
@__Sean
— The bed is gone and a lot of bedbugs along with it. The bed is their first hiding place, getting rid of it got rid of the main harborages. I recommend keeping the bed, getting rid of only the bedbugs every time we can, but in your case you had other reasons to do it.
— Sleeping in another room usually attract bedbugs to the alternative sleeping place. The precautions you took before going to sleep kept bedbugs from finding you and they remained in the first room, waiting for your return.
— I do not know what you sprayed with, but I suspect you used one of the bedbug resistant products that are sold to the public. They are useless and only serves to spread bedbugs.
— Bagging up everything in plastic is the first recommendation we find. It seems to make sense to protect items we do not or seldom use, but it will only trap a few bedbugs that will make all your bagged items inaccessible. There is a easier and better way to clear out bedbugs out of anything, call them out with hunger, offer them a meal that they will never reach. Bedbugs will come out of hiding all by themselves and will end up in a trap. The room will gradually be cleared of bedbugs without you having to do anything more than to set your trap.
— CO2 traps work on the floor and catch bedbugs going towards the bed. It is the combination of the shield on the bed and bedbug barriers on the walls and legs of the furniture that stops bedbugs and keep them from feeding. The CO2 traps catch bedbugs when they move.
— All the bedbugs you saw or found are the offsprings of a single bedbug, I call that lone single bedbug the mother-of-all-bedbugs. Where did you get it, nobody knows. The subway is a possibility or it could be from somewhere else. It really does not matter, bedbugs are always discovered months after we inadvertently brought the first one home. Killing bedbugs as you find them keeps their numbers down, you fought bedbugs as best as you can but you could not eliminate them all, we see the big ones and we kill them but the small ones are almost invisible and they elude us. You got a lot of information that you hoped would work but it was incomplete, we have to stop bedbugs from feeding without scattering them. Then and only then we control the infestation, keeping them from molting and from laying eggs. Starvation does that, it keeps bedbugs from growing and from multiplying, without our blood to feed on, the bedbug cannot survive.
— The bedbugs you found are bedbugs that left the bed to find a better place to hide. Bedbugs leave the bed when a colony matures, meaning when the first agressive males appear. Males bedbugs attack any other blood-fed bedbug and they leave the bed to be safe from them. Another source of bedbug scattering are intensive human activities. Bedbugs flee and hide deeper in the cracks and crevices only to come out when everything has calmed down. Chasing bedbugs never works. Those scattered bedbugs will always come back towards the bed to try to feed. We can and we do catch them when they come out of hiding. Hunger is the greatest bedbug weakness, it makes them take chances and it usually works, except when their paths are blocked and when they have insurmontable obstacles in their way.
— Bedbugs like all insects are dependent on temperature. The warmer it is, the more active the insects are. You are right in thinking that the higher the temperature, the less time it takes to starve them to death. That’s exactly what happen under a bedbug shield. Bedbugs so close to their warm food, yet unable to bite are nightly warmed up into hunger and remain active. Bedbugs in a bed but under a shield cannot go dormant and they spend all their energy in vain trying to go through the shield, they starve within a few weeks.
— A lot can be said about online “experts”. Why would they tell everybody that you cannot kill bedbugs by yourself? Money is their only interest, not your well-being.On one hand they tell you that you can’t do it and on the other hand they say they will never eradicate the bedbug. Meanwhile, you have nothing left but to call them when you can’t take it anymore. Why don’t they use natural ways to eliminate the bedbug for good? There is no money to be made by telling people how to do it, poison-pushers need the bedbug to stay in business, so according to them, the bedbug is here to stay. I made the bedbug trap, shield and barriers to completely eliminate the bedbug and it is killing their business.
— Higher temperatures will make bedbugs more active and shortening their life span. There is a danger in trying to kill bedbugs with heat. It is true that bedbugs start to die at 113°F butthe rise in temperature must be quick, otherwise bedbugs will be able to feel the heat and move away deeper in the walls where it is cooler. Those surviving bedbugs will come back when the heat is down, It is also one of the best way to push bedbugs into adjacent appartments.
— Bedbugs are easily stopped from crawling on the walls and the ceiling. Bedbugs are climbers and they need a surface with asperities to hang on to climb. Smooth and slippery surfaces are the best to stop bedbugs. They cannot grip on them and they keep slipping and sliding, always falling back, unable to get across that slick surface that I call a bedbug barrier. That’s what it is, a barrier bedbugs cannot get across. To see bedbugs struggle in vain to get across that barrier, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5sFz9jC-nQ. It is amazing what a simple band of Scotch tape can do to stop bedbugs. Place a band of 3/4″ Scotch tape above the baseboards of the walls to keep bedbugs from being able to climb up. Place a second band of 3/4″ Scotch tape near the ceiling to keep them off it. In the case of a popcorn ceiling, the tape can be placed on the walls instead of the ceiling. More tape can be placed on the legs of the bed and the furniture to keep bedbugs from being able to climb up in them. The same technique can be used anywhere you want to keep bedbugs out of and that includes closets, trims, light switches, electric outlets, frames… anywhere you feel bedbugs could go. That tape is one of your best defense against bedbugs. Why don’t they say anything about it? There is no money to be made by telling people how good that tape is.
— Don’t use double-sided tape. Most of the time it does not work because the tape is not sticky enough and it also collects dust and lint making the tape even less efficient. The smooth and shiny side of common Scotch tape is sufficient to stop any bedbug but if you want even more protection, brush the tape with talcum powder, as slippery as snow on ice, impossible to climb on.
— It is useless to put a cover on a new mattress. Use a bedbug shield under the mattress instead. A new bed can be made completely proof to bedbugs using the same Scotch tape barriers as before. See http://julesnoise.com/2013/06/20/50/ for examples on how to use tape to make a bedbug shield. With bedbug barriers, a bedbug shield for the bed and CO2 bedbug traps to catch roaming bedbugs, you will be completely protected against bedbugs and you will make them die within a few weeks if you do not let them go dormant. Wake them up, make them hungry and lure them to their death. That’s what the bedbug trap does, and it catches them right down to the last one.
Control and elimination of all bedbugs.
JulesNoise
Jules: I used organic bug spray; first bottle was FabriClear, then I switched to Green RestEasy because of its cinnamon smell.
The bed that I got rid of was one that folded into a mini-couch; the IKEA LYCKSELE. I intend my next one to be a pure folding bed with legs (as opposed to one with beams touching the floor), like the Sleep Revolution Getaway Elite. That way, i can put traps under the legs and wheels.
I have plenty of clear tape that I use to seal shipping boxes. Talcum powder, i can use to pad the clear side; but it will be a challenge to find places on the ceiling to stick it to (unless I try to apply the tape to the popcorn ceiling), because I have 2 very high shelves that can’t be moved so easily. Above both ends of the bed, I have plenty of clearance.
That video of yours, showing the bugs falling off the sooner they touch the clear plastic tape, is very encouraging. I’ll have to try it in all the strategic places on my next bed, starting with the legs and beams holding the wheels.
With regard to male bugs attacking other bugs, it is quite possible that any bug that is closer to starving to death will attack and/or kill a bug that was among the last to feed? If there are any still alive in my room (I’ve killed 4 this month, after killing 40 last month), they haven’t fed in nearly 2 months, with the exception of one that was on my shoe 5 weeks ago, full of blood, and I nailed it. There have been none on my floor since, my guess being that the DE is working.
@__Sean
Both FabriClear and Green RestEasy are commercial names of Cyhalothrin, a diluted organic compound that is used as a pesticide. It is a pyrethroid, a class of man-made insecticides that mimic the structure and insecticidal properties of the naturally-occurring insecticide pyrethrum which comes from the flowers of chrysanthemums. Synthetic pyrethroids, like lambda-cyhalothrin, are often preferred as an active ingredient in insecticides because they remain effective for longer periods of time. It is a colorless solid, although samples can appear beige, with a mild odor. It has a low water solubility and is nonvolatile. It is used to control insects in cotton crops. It belongs to the family of synthetic chemicals called pyrethroids and functions as a neurotoxin, affecting neuron membranes by prolonging sodium channel activation. It is not known to rapidly harm most mammals or birds, but is dangerously toxic to fish, bees and to cats: in cats it may induce hyperexcitability, tremors, seizures, and even death. In general, it has a low mammalian toxicity and is poorly absorbed by skin.
For your bed, you can get any type you want, all beds can be protected against bedbugs. With a bed whose beams are touching the floor, (the same being true for any night table, dresser, desk, chair, couch or anything resting on the floor) all that you need are four to six plastic floor protectors over 1/4″ high. Put six squares of clear wrapping tape where you will nail the floor protectors into the beams. Adult bedbugs measure 1/4″ and if you picked smooth floor protectors made of plastic or polished metal, bedbugs will have a hard time to climb up on them. If you add talcum powder to the floor protectors, they then become impossible to climb on for bedbugs. But the best is yet to come, those six squares of clear wrapping tape that you nailed the floor protectors into also are impossible for bedbugs to get a grip in, even without the talcum powder. Bedbugs simply cannot walk upside down on smooth slippey clear wrapping tape. It is so much better than the debatable infamous Climb-up Interceptors sold for 5$/each. Climb-up Interceptors work only on bed legs while the floor protectors work on everything. Actually, it is a bedbug barrier, one of the same bedbug barriers you put around trims, switches, windows, frames, on the bottom and top of the walls and on the ceiling. It keeps bedbugs down and nowhere to go but stay on the floor, where the bedbug traps are! It’s like a bedbug magnet, nowhere to go and lured by that CO2 that comes straight from under the bed and that attracts them so much.
For a bed with wheels, the caster serve as bedbug barriers. Look at them closely and you will see that bedbugs have no other path to take but the shaft of the wheel. Brush that part with talcum powder and bedbugs will fall to the floor if they try to use it. Put a 3/4″ scotch tape arond the lowest part of the leg and no bedbugs will be able to climb it. Where will these bedbugs fall? Right next to one of your four traps.
You can use clear tape to make your bedbug barriers but I prefer 3/4″ scotch tape because it is less evident and easier to handle. On a popcorn ceiling you can first can use narrow masking tape that can be easily removed later, simply push it in the bumps and dips of the popcorn ceiling to make it adhere everywhere. Then use thick double sided tape that is very sticky and that will follow the uneven surface of the masking tape. Then you can put the clear tape (or Scotch tape) to make that upside down surface impossible for bedbugs to cross. You can go all aroundyour two very high shelves and around it. Bedbugs will not be able to go any higher and if they try to go sideways or down, they will meet another barrier and fall down to the floor like all the other bedbugs do. In no time at all (one or two feeding cycles) all the bedbugs hiding anywhere in the room will have cleared those now inacessible places they hide in to, driven by hunger and the need to feed. And now they can’t go back because of those uncrossable barriers.
The video does not lie, a simple smooth and shiny vertical surface of plasti or tape is sufficient to stop all bedbugs no matter what they try. It is precious information, it tells us how to make bedbug barriers and stop bedbugs in any situation. You can make your whole place absolutely bedbug-proof with those simple barriers. And it can be done for only a few dollars, that’s the power of DIY.
Male bedbug attck any other bedbug that is filled with blood. Bedbugs starving to death have no appeal to agressive male bedbugs starving themselves. It is blood that they need first before anything else. In the same video, you see thin hungry bedbugs of all stages walking over each other in frnzy and no bedbug even tries anything. The attack of the males is triggered only by another bedbug filled with blood. Male bedbugs do not attack other bedbug to steal the blood they took for us, but to traumatically inseminate any other bedbug filled with blood.
With regard to male bugs attacking other bugs, it is quite possible that any bug that is closer to starving to death will attack and/or kill a bug that was among the last to feed? If there are any still alive in my room (I’ve killed 4 this month, after killing 40 last month), they haven’t fed in nearly 2 months, with the exception of one that was on my shoe 5 weeks ago, full of blood, and I nailed it. There have been none on my floor since, my guess being that the DE is working.
Killing the population as you did greatly slowed down the bedbug infestation. With only one bite followed by the death of the bedbug in the last two months, no other bedbug could molt or lay eggs. Any egg that hatched produced and ofspring that could not feed. Young bedbugs are not as resistant as adults and die of hunger within a few weeks instead of the three months for a dormant adult bedbug. If you keep doing what you have done until now, meaning keeping bedbugs from feeding (or killing those who try) , in about a month from now, all the bedbugs that you might have had will be dead of starvation. And they keep saying you can’t do it by yourself when in fact you proved them wrong all along.
It does not matter how long it takes to completely get rid of bedbugs as long as they can’t feed. No bites is your measure of success. Zero bites for ninety days is the end of bedbugs. They are not immortal and can easily be starved to death while you sleep soundly without a single bite.
JulesNoise
Jules:
With a bed like this…
http://sleeprevolution.com/shop/mattresses/sleep-revolution-getaway-deluxe-folding-guest-bed
…Would clear sealing tape for the two beams (on both ends of the floor) suffice? The idea being that I will stretch the tape across the beam (which may require the tape to be cut into pieces), with the tape wrapped around the beam, covering every part from the floor right up to the bed structure itself, with the tape covered with baby powder.
As for the wheels, wrapping the caster or shaft in tape and covering them in baby powder looks simple enough, but I’m tempted to place traps (the ClimbUps kind, or something similar or homemade) under the wheels, because I have not seen a bed like this up close, and I don’t want to take the chance that there are hollow spots in the steel frame for the bugs to travel upward from the INSIDE of the frame. My instinct is to wrap every hollow spot I see with duct tape; and if it comes to that, I hope I don’t miss even the smallest hollow spot.
For a bed like this…
http://sleeprevolution.com/shop/mattresses/sleep-revolution-getaway-premier-memory-foam-folding-guest-bed
My initial plan would be to get traps for all 4 legs, and wrap the legs in clear tape with baby powder. There’s a narrower version of this bed.
For the bed structure itself (for either bed), should I consider getting a large plastic sheet to lay under the mattress, something like a plastic drop cloth, one that is slippery enough to keep the bugs from climbing up to my mattress?
My ceiling is half complete. Transparent tape on the walls above the spots where the head and foot of the bed will be positioned. Now I have to run tape across my popcorn ceiling from one end to the other, in such a way as to give myself a foot of clearance from both sides of my bed.
Am I missing anything else, besides the CO2 traps I intend to make for the corners of my bed?
@___Sean
This is a metal bed, it has very few places where bedbugs can climb and it is difficult for them. You could use clear sealing tape for the two beams, but only a small band of tape on each leg would be more than enough to stop any and all bedbugs (in red on the attached picture).
Putting the band of tape above the wheels solves all the work you plab to do on the casters, as well as the ClimbUps that do not fit under the beams. Hollow spots can be sealed with clear wapping tape, sealing the hole only instead of more difficult methods.
It is best to have a trap for each leg of the bed. The best is to make a 2L mix and separate it in four 500 ml traps that cost about 5 cents without the mixture. Four 500 ml traps cost 1,20$ and they last two weeks. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlpsDjat1KI)
You could use a large plastic sheet under the mattress but it would be of little use. This is a brand new bed and it is free of bedbugs, so all you need is a way to keep bedbugs from being able to climb in it. That’s what the barriers are for. Those eight bands of scotch tape (use clear wrapping tape if you prefer) would be enough to stop any and all bedbugs. In case of doubts, use two barriers, one above the other. No bedbug can cross a barrier, much less two of them.
You believe in the barriers to stop bedbugs from reaching the ceiling, and you are right to think that. It is your best defense against bedbugs, one that has proved to work. Place your barriers using your greatest power, your logical mind. You can see where bedbugs will be stopped and where they will not. You understand how barriers work since you completed the ceiling in spite of the difficulties of a popcorn ceiling.
You seem all set to defeat them, trust the absence of bites, it tells you that your set-up is working and that you are not feeding them anymore. Poor little bedbug with nothing to feed on, what will happen while you sleep soundly without caring about bedbugs? This is what will happen, you will starve them to death.
Adios, it is the end of the bedbug!
Enjoy life
JulesNoise
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Jules:
The good news is that I have not seen a bug in my bedroom in more than a month. Soon I will get my new bed and go to work on making my traps and making it hard for them to climb up my bed…
The bad news, though, is that, in my alternate sleeping area, the reclining chair that I have been sleeping on, for nearly 3 months, was becoming Bug City under my nose. I spent days on end spraying DE in the obvious places, with the assumption that a few (maybe as few as 2 or 3, perhaps the first 2 or 3 nights I started sleeping there) might have succeeded in hitching a ride in there. What I didn’t do was spray enough in a not-so-obvious place.
The chair looks almost like this one:
http://www.sears.com/simmons-amalfi-antique-high-leg-recliner/p-02571583000P?prdNo=14&sellerId=SEARS&blockNo=14&blockType=G14
It is green, cheaper, and the fabric is thinner. Quite a bit of foam inside. It is sitting on a carpet floor, and was on its way to being replaced because it was rocking badly from side to side. I took a look at the carpet, and whatever bugs I found there were dead (probably suffocated by the carpet or poisoned by the DE). No bugs elsewhere in the room, as far as I know. None in the drawers or the closet.
See where the fabric meets the wooden legs on the chair? I looked in the gap between the fabric and the legs, and that’s where I found bugs. Quite a few of them were dead, but some were pretty much alive. I hope I don’t have more than 20 of them, given the DE I have used on that chair and on the carpet space underneath in the last 3 months.
I sprayed in those gaps, especially wherever I saw them, and sprayed DE in the gaps as well. Several times I turned the chair over to look under it, and not one bug on the foam or on the sides, or between the arms and the seat (where I used plenty of DE). Because they found another place to hide in that chair. It was only last week that my right elbow started itching. Obviously they found a way to reach me.
As I said before, fortunately I have not seen them anywhere else in that room (I hope that remains the case). There can’t be too many of them, because I never saw any of them crawl the walls or the ceiling, like I did in my bedroom before I discovered how bad it was in my bed.
I have Scotch transparent tape on all the legs, and I have plastic Chinese food containers sitting under the legs of the chair, with DE in them. If they try to follow me to the other chair (with Scotch tape on the legs) on the other side of the room, they’ll slip and fall into the containers and be covered with DE.
I’m making a CO2 trap to place next to the chair that was invaded, just in case a few stragglers managed to leave the chair and are lurking. I might have to make another CO2 trap. Hopefully, as I have seen so far, they are confined to the chair and have not invaded any other spot in the room; which will make it easier for me to vacuum. What else should I do, to kill or starve this batch while I can still contain them?
Soon I will have my new bed inside my bedroom. I already have bug-proof cases for my mattress and pillows. The sooner I start to sleep in my bedroom again, the bugs in my recliner in the other room will realize that no one is sleeping there anymore, and will try to follow me back into my bedroom. But I will still have the Chinese food containers full of DE under the legs. Will that be enough to kill what is left of those bugs?
Jules:
One more note: It must be said that I probably brought one or two of my bedroom bugs to my recliner before I realized just how easily they could hitch a ride on me and slip past me (hatchlings on a sock, perhaps). Probably happened within the first 2 or 3 days after I started sleeping there.
Here’s another thought: I have a drop cloth big enough to wrap around the recliner. If I lay the drop cloth around the chair and cover the recliner extension (where I lay my feet), I can block every path they can imagine using to get to me, and they’ll have no place to go but either starve or get off the chair, in which case they’ll crawl down the legs (all taped up) and fall into the containers full of DE. Has anyone thought of that? I imagine some people have.
@__Sean__Yes, we usually bring bedbugs with us when we switch sleeping places and develop a second bedbug harborage. It is best to stay in the same room as you usually sleep and use the protection of a shield to keep bedbugs from being able to bite you. This activate bedbugs looking in vain for a path to reach us. Bedbugs spend whatever energy they have left and quickly die of starvation.
You can make a shield with the drop cloth you mentioned. The only precaution would be to make sure that the edge of the drop cloth hanging down all around the chair is too slippepy for bedbugs to be able to hang on to it. To make the edge too slippery and too smooth for bedbugs to be able to climb on the drop cloth, use the same technique that you used on the leg of the chair, a simple band of scotch tape or clear wrapping tape is all it takes to make bedbugs fall on the floor next to the trap.
If DE seems like a good idea, bedbugs falling into the pitfalls filled with DE will do nothing as bedbugs will be dead long before DE has any effect on them. It takes days, sometimes weeks for DE to kill bedbugs while it takes only hours for the CO2 to suffocate bedbugs in the CO2 filled pitfalls. The CO2 pushes all the oxygen away, only nearly pure CO2 remaining in the pitfall they felt into and without oxygen, the bedbug gets asphixiated like any other creature without anything to breathe.
There is an alternative to clear bedbugs out of any piece of furniture. Get a large sheet of plastic and wrap the chair in it. It must be air-tight. Leave a few needle holes at the highest point of the enclosing plastic bag, the CO2 coming from the piece of dry ice will push all the air out of the bag through these small needle holes. To insert the piece of dry ice inside the airtight plastic bag, make a small cut on the bottom side of the bag and inset a chunk of dry ice while wearing gloves to prevent frostbite, then seal this new cut tight with clear wrapping tape to make it airtight again.
The dry ice will sublimate (from solid state to gas form) in a white fog in a few hours. Bedbugs will begin to die as soon as the CO2 from the dry ice has finished filling the bag. Leave it standing for a few hours to make sure all bedbugs are dead from suffocation, and then you can remove the plastic bag, brushing dead bedbugs away and getting your chair in the same condition as before there were any bedbugs. Then all you will need are those band of tape on the legs of the chair to keep bedbugs from being to climb back in it.
For spray, would you recommend alcohol or ammonia, or a combination of both, with or without some water? Which one is strong enough to kill them AND their eggs? Or is there something else that is also strong enough that is not a pyrethroid?
Amnonia can cause damage to fabric and clothes as well as to some surfaces, Use pure 91% rubbing alcohol that kills bedbugs instantly on contact. Instead of using a spray, use a small paint brush that will bring alcohol into the joints and crevices where bedbugs usually hide. Brushing alcohol is better than spraying it as you will put alcohol directly into those joints and crevices whereas it does not go as deep with a spray. A spray emits a lot of fumes and a brush does not.
There is nothing stronger and more effective than what you are about to do. The idea is to kill bedbugs once and for all using something deadly for bedbugs and on contact. Rubbing alcohol is not a pesticide, it kills bedbugs and their eggs by drying them up as alcohol does to everythng. It will dry up your hands if you get in contact with it (without being dangerous), so you can wear gloves to protect your hands when doing that bedbug-killing operation. Some ventilation will take care of the smell that will last only a few minutes and leave a fresh scent in the room.
Pyrrhic? Maybe not, taking care of the reclining chair gave you precious information and and made you give bedbugs that you had missed, a deadly strike and a final expulsion. The more bedbugs you kill, even if you did not expect them, the less bedbugs you have. Dealing with leftover bedbugs out of the two main places where bedbugs hatch and grow will now be easier as they will have to come out of hiding to try to feed. Bedbugs in clusters are bedbug nurseries where only a few adults can lay hundreds of eggs and develop a full infestation. I count this as a win.
Finding these clusters on theright side of the recliner but near a lamp shows that bedbugs are attracted by heat as well as CO2.
What did you scrape? Dried-up eggs or small incapacitated nymphs bedbugs? There should have been nymphs of all stages along with the eggs, in fact, nymphs usually outnumber adults 50 to 1 while eggs take about two weeks to hatch, so about 20 eggs for each adult. Eighty days is more than enough for the first brood of eggs to become mature and start laying eggs themselves. If usually a bedbug infestation starts with only one bedbugs, finding more adults after 6-8 weeks shows that the first eggs have turned into adult bedbugs. You have a mature infestation, no wonder that it was starting to drive you crazy and got you on a hunt to get rid of them.
There would not be many bedbugs inside the chair. Bedbugs do not tend to go deep inside cracks or crevices. They stay in places where it is easy to come out of while protecting them by simply getting out of sight. When bedbugs hide, the are aware of the light and they shun it. As soon as they are in darkness, away from the light, they stop and stay there to digest the blood they took from their “host”. Nymphs use that blood to molt while aduts use the blood to incubate eggs. Without blood, they cannot molt and they cannot lay eggs, and yes I will repeat it, without blood, bedbugs cannot survive.
Bedbug feces can be fairly removed with normal household cleaning products, it is the same as a mother washing her baby’s diapers. We used to do that by hand in the old days and the diapers our mothers were spotless white and clean. Bedbug fecal matter is not so different, it comes from our blood. It is only psychological but I understand, psychological is real and sometimes we just can’ t use anything that had those repulsive bedbugs in it.
If you had only a few adults, it means that you had very few males. Males appear when a colony matures, meaning that the nymphs had at least six bites each, immediately followed by a molting.
That last adult bedbug you saw in full view on the back of the chair was not wondering where you went, it saw you sitting on the other chair, plain as the only warm spot in the room. It saw that you were too far away and that you still were awake and moving. Humans, their meals are very dangerous when they are active and bedbugs always wait until you are immobile (asleep) before they begin the dangerous walk and climb towards you. Bedbugs can see in the dark, they have night vision, alsp called thermal vision or infra-red vision. They see only one thing, the heat we give off with our warm body against the cooler room temperature. They can see us across the room even before they can detect the CO2 we give off.
Your cups under the legs of the green chair one of the best defense against bedbugs and most probably stopped a lot of them . Those cups can be replaced with a band of scoth tape around the legs of the bed, chairs, desks and any other piece of furniture as well as above the baseboards, in the corners of the ceiling, around the electrical switches and electrical outlets, the trims of the doors, windows and closets. Those are bedbug barriers, the same as your cups under the legs of the chair, but unlike the cups, they can be installed on anything that needs protection whereas cups can do nothing for items that do not have legs to put the cups in. An example of scotch tape barriers stopping bedbugscan be seen on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5sFz9jC-nQ. Live bedbugs completely stopped by simple scotch tape barriers. Clear wrapping tape does exactly the same thing and both can be brushed with talcum powder to make them even more slippery so that it becomes impossible for bedbugs to get a grip and cross them.
I do not know how bedbug eggs sound when they fall, but if they make a sound, they must be dried hard as bedbugs eggs are soft and sticky. I learned something new from your comment, thank you.
Moving back to your room soon is the best move you can make. You know that the main harborages are gone (bed and chair) and as you say, any escapees are now somewhere in the room, waiting for a chance to get back in your new bed and new chair. Barriers will keep them from being able to do that and you will be able to use the bed and chair without being bothered by bedbugs. Those bedbugs are hiding and nobody can find them. We have to wait until the bedbugs come out all by themselves from all these hiding places and it is when they move that we can catch them.
The traps are on their best when there are no bedbugs already inside the bed and the chair. When they are only in the room, they have to become exposed to reach the places where they always find food. The traps work with or without a heat source, although it is preferable to have a source of heat to draw in bedbugs faster as we are the superior attractant. You can use an alternate heat source if you do not want to sleep in the bed while there still are bedbugs . An alternative heat souce can be heating pads or an infra-red lamp over the bed. Heating pads are safe but make sure that the heat of the lamp does not come in contact with anything and that there is no there is no danger of fire.
Bedbugs do not see heat through walls. Bedbugs that go deep into a wall or hide too far away from they host cannot detect the heat anymore and become dormant. Dormant bedbugs that do not wake up, end up dying of starvation, hidden in a place where they cannot detect heat. A wall will not become hot, only slightly diffused warm as happened to your green chair where bedbugs went to the wamer side to make their clusters.
You know Sean, at this rate and having eliminated the largest part of the infestation, it will not take you long to eliminate the other ones, especially since they are out of the two main places where they can feed. Escapees are very vulnerable and they own hunger drives them towards the traps that are strategically placed near the legs that bedbugs must use to climb up and get to you. With a shield (or barriers to stop them and traps where bedbugs have to go, and no bedbug will ever be able to get to you. Your bedbug nightmareis almost over, soon you will be bedbug-proof .
And what will happen if ever any bedbug come back? The barriers and the traps will block and catch the very first bedbug before it even has a chance to get a bite. Keeping that lone single bedbug from feeding will also keep it from laying eggs and a situiation like the one you are now getting rid of will never happen again.
Keep up the good work, you are winning.
In solidarity
JulesNoise
My triumph-turned-Pyrrhic. Spraying the bugs that were in the gaps was no problem. But again, under my nose, on the right side of the recliner (located near a lamp), I saw nasty bunch of eggs, many in perhaps as many as 3 or 4 clusters, some scattered on the right side of the chair, and a ripped seam being used as a nest.
I easily scraped at least 100 of them (after spraying lots of alcohol), maybe as many as 200, and there were still more. I slept there for 80 days, and correct me if I’m wrong, but if there were still more eggs INSIDE the chair, I would think I was sleeping on a ticking time bomb of around 500 of them. My bed in late-September had to have had more than 1,000 waiting to hatch. They were not so easily visible because of the white mattress. The chair was green.
I say “was”, because the nest and the fecal matter left behind were the straws that broke the camel’s back. I would have been left with still-noticeable stains and streaks after trying to wipe the feces from the fabric. I had to commit this bug island to the trash heap.
I’ve been checking the drawers in the same room and even the tracks within. So far, all clean. My guess is that the male bugs weren’t fighting much over blood, and hardly any bug left this island or was forced off, because I was such an incredibly reliable snack for any of them to feast.
On the 82nd and 83rd day (the last day), I didn’t sit there, and on that last day a full-grown adult bug (one of maybe 4 that I saw in the chair) showed itself in full view on the back of the chair, probably wondering, “Where did he go?” I was sitting in the other chair, but I still had my cups under the legs of the green chair and the CO2 trap pumping.
Do bedbug eggs always sound like dried or hard rice when they hit the bottom of a glass/plastic cup or plate? Or is it because I sprayed alcohol on them and dried them up?
Soon I will be moving back into my bedroom with a new bed. Suppose there are a few escapees from the island (my now-discarded recliner) in the other room, will my CO2 traps still do the job of luring them in, or do the traps always require a stationary heat source? What would be a good substitute for a human who is not present?
One more question: Can bedbugs see body heat through walls and doors?
By this time next week, I hope to have my new bed set up. But not before I take care of a few stragglers that left the recliner (or fell off of it) before I dumped it.
I popped 3 of them (the only ones I saw on the whole chair, one probably in its 1st stage and 2 entering 2nd stage) on the red chair. Stupid of me to move to the other chair without putting the drop cloth between me and the cushion. Fortunately the chair is a simple long red cushion held to a varnished wooden frame by Velcro, with no obstacles between the cushion and the frame and no cushion on the arms of the chair. I had very little trouble locating them on the cushion.
Obviously I will have to vacuum the floor, and work fast with the CO2 traps and the monitoring of that room, lest any one of them escape and invade another room.
Are 1st- and 2nd-stage bugs capable of crawling the ceiling? Their pincers have to be very small and probably too small to hang on.
That type of chair is relatively easy to clear out of bedbugs. A varnished wooden frame might be smooth enough to keep most bedbugs from being able to climb on it. It is also simple to clear the wooden frame with 91% rubbing alcohol. To make the varnished wooden frame even more slippery, a very light coat of talcum powder will make it slippery enough to deter all bedbugs from being able to climb on it. The cushion can also easily be taken care of. If it can fit in a dryer, 150°F for 20 minutes will kill all bedbugs and eggs in it, bedbugs stat to die at 113°F. As additional security, you can add the scotch tape bands (bedbug barriers) on the legs of the chair once it is cleared out of bedbugs.
You have good eyes to see 1st and 2nd stage bedbugs, most people have never seen one and are not able to recognize them. The first time I saw those near transparent 1 mm instar bedbugs that look like a tiny drop od dew with legs, was in the pitfall of my traps. At first I was sure they were another species of insects that got caught by the trap. You can see those tiny baby bedbugs in a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4mZdgB_vG0 Note that in this video, bedbugs are covered in talcum powder and are white.
First stage hatchlings are capable of climbing anywhere the nymphs and the adults can, even upside down on the ceiling, but they never do because the females lay their eggs close to the source of their first meal, the further away first stage instars are from their food, the more difficult it is for them to reach their blood meal. Bedbugs have developped the ability to walk upside down in caves where bats sleep suspended upside down, so bedbugs have to get to the ceiling of the cave to reach them, but in a bedbroom, we sleep on beds and bedbugs are not attracted by the ceiling but by the warmth we give off when we sleep. So bedbugs of any stage will try to go as directly as possible towards their warm meal without going all the way around by using the ceiling.
Climbing up is an instinct for bedbugs and they climb up either to follow the CO2 we exhale and the warmth of our body. It is the key how to make a bedbug trap and why we need a shield over the places where we rest.
You will end up doing this with knowledge about bedbugs and that knowledge will not only get you rid of all bedbugs but it will stay with you so that no bedbug in the future will be able to attack you without you destroying the very first bedbugs if they ever dare come to close to you. That is the end of the bedbugs, good ridance.
I prefer letting bedbugs die in long painful agony rather that asphiate them with CO2 in a few short hours. I like to make bedbug suffer, dying of starvation is the worst thing that can happen to a bedbug. I have pictures of bedbugs getting hunger bubbles and getting dried up from the inside, it got to be as painful as it can get. To get you smiling, see https://julesnoise.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/bedbug-hunge-bubbles.jpg
Sadistic JulesNoise
I don’t remember ever seeing a bedbug on the ceiling in my bedroom until I got rid of the bed in late-September. It was only after I got rid of it that they started crawling on the ceiling. I figured it was because they had a lousy view of me whenever I was sitting or standing, or just couldn’t see me at all when I was out of the room, and needed to go higher to get a better view.
For the red chair, I’ve got drop cloth on top, just in case there are still stragglers around, and I’ll be sleeping on it until my bed arrives,; and I repositioned my CO2 traps to be UNDER the chair.
That picture of the bug with gas bubbles in his belly must be the worst case of constipation as any creature can get. I found a bug on the ceiling 48 days after I got rid of my bed, with my room generally above 80 Fahrenheit for most of those 48 days. It had to be at the breaking point. :-) I’m astonished that it can still climb under that much pain from starvation.
@__Sean
You’re good, bedbugs do not go to the ceiling unless they have to. When you got rid of the bed, you scared them shitless with all that intense activity disturbing their habitat and their life, and while most of them tried to hide as deep as they ccould in the bed frame, box spring (if you had one) and mattress, while some others escaped and fled for their lives. As I stated earlier, their instincts got those escaping bedbugs climbing as high as they could to get away and also as you rightly mentioned, to get a better view of where the warm feeding spot went. That warm spot appears and disappears while bedbugs can do nothing but wait. It is also possible that some tried to get to you using the smooth varnished legs of the chair and being unsuccessfully then tried another path to get in line-of-sight and waited until you were not moving at last (sleeping)to get to you. Few succeeded, because we also can see them and the ceiling is a very dangerous place for a bedbug, and it does not always work. Bedbugs are nearly weightless, flat and oblong. When they let themselves drop, they do not fall in straight down in direct line but like a flake twirling and spiraling in the air, bedbugs have poor aim, often miss the bed and end up on the floor.
Drop Cloth is crafted from woven cotton and polyester canvas and bedbugs might be able to hang on to its vertical inner side but it does not matter. All bedbug shields must be cut about one inch above the floor. Of course it allows bedbugs that might be anywhere in the room to come out of hiding and crawl underneath it to be blocked by the shieldover the frame of the bed but under the mattress. But that edge has a very important fonction, at the edge of the drop cloth that you cut about one inch above the floor, any bedbugs that succeeds on getting down right up to the edge will not be able to swing and cross to the outer side. Bedbugs can’t can’t fly, can’t jump and they can’t swing. Their body simply do not bend that way and there is nothing to hang on to at the edge of the hanging vertical drop cloth. Imagine a climber trying to hang upside down on to the slippery edge of a large vertical thick panel of glass blocking its way, he will fall every time and it is the same for bedbugs.
We can add a strip of clear wrapping tape at the edge of the drop cloth to make sure that bedbugs will lose their grip when they try to hang on to its smooth slippery surface. That strip of clear wrapping tape will make the the edge too slick for bedbugs to hang on to while the drop cloth itself will stop all and every bedbug from being able to go through it. Bedbugs can’t dig and they can’t chew.
CO2 traps do go under the chair (or bed) because the legs of the chair is the main path bedbugs will use, and also near where bedbugs will fall when they try to get around the edge of the drop cloth. The shield and the traps work together as the most efficient bedbug trap ever. Together they get unbeatable perfect results, eliminating bedbugs one by one until there are none left and without spreading a single one as it attracts bedbugs instead of repelling them as poison does. You avoid getting poisoned and all the problems caused by bedbugs You also avoid all the worries and all the work that fighting bedbugs with the actual “professional” methods obliges us to do. You do not have to bag everything and wash sheets and clothes everyday, chase bedbugs with inefficient pesticide product that only cause bedbugs to spread. You do not have to throw away the furniture if bedbugs come out of them all by themselves and we get rid of bedbugs only. We change our furniture because it is rickety, not because of a few insignificant bedbugs. I’ll change my furniture when I’m ready if you don’t mind, stupid bedbugs! And what can we say about social issues about bedbugs? Did you experience the emotional distress caused by bedbugs? The blames and the arguments coming from them, the fighting with a landlord that does not want to pay because one of his tenants got bedbugs coming from nobody knows where. It is the whole bedbug nightmare that stops as soon as you set up your shield and your traps. Barriers make the shield and traps system even more impregnable to bedbugs, you become bedbug-proof.
I like your description of their ordeal but it is not constipation but abdominal gases that they cannot expel, bedbugs cannot control their urges and only feeding will make them get rid of their feces, in simpler words, a bedbug that cannot feed cannot shit or fart, so gas bubbles grow in their abdomen and internally pressurize them on empty.
Bedbugs will try until the end to get to feed, their life depends on it. When they hunger like that they act as any other creature will do and give it all in last do or die attempts, that’s when the shield becomes so important to make them spend their last ergs of energy and finally die of exhaustion and starvation. If bedbugs remain inactive in that starving period, they become dormant and then it takes months instead of weeks to die as they do when they are active (in vain)and hungry.
WE could see bedbugs like small batteries, if you use them, batteries will last only so long and once their energy is spent, the battery will not power anything anymore, the battery is dead. If we do not use the battery, it will last so much longer, ready to be used when you need it. Bedbugs do not last as long as unused batteries, from the drop of blood they took, they can last around 90 days without feeding when dormant, a few weeks if they remain active as in the proximity of the warm source of their food when stuck under the shield and unable to get through it or around it. The shield is desined to block them from feeding and also to send them towards the traps when they fall or crawl on the floor.
I’m not sure I mentionned bedbug barriers, a long strip of scotch tape above the baseboards of the walls and at the upper corner of the walls and the ceiling to keep bedbugs from climbing up the walls and of course upside down on the ceiling. Just in case here is the video where we see live bedbugs unable to get across such scotch tape barriers. Why use narrow scotch tape instead of regular 2″ wrapping tape? Because adult bedbugs are 1/4″ long and a 1/2 scotch tape is sufficient to stop them completely. Narrow scotch tape is also easier to install than 2″ clear wrapping tape and does not show as much on legs of the bed, furniture and the walls, more discreet thana large tape advertising that says you have bedbugs. We do not want a constant reminder that there are still bedbugs around.
Once you are done, you will forget about bedbugs and the great free entertaiment (?) they provide. But I hope you will remember what you did when you will see someone else caught in your bedbug dilemna and pass it on so another one will be bedbug-free as you soon will be.
Life is good
JulesNoise
When I first saw the bugs in my mattress and on the corners of my pillows (bottom side), I thought to myself that it probably started with a train ride (there was news all over NYC about people finding bedbugs in the subway system), and I was astonished by how quickly they multiplied over the summer and how well they hid themselves. I went straight to the Web to find out what makes them tick, what they eat, when they usually like to eat, how quickly they procreate, how quickly they starve and how to get rid of them. When I found out that the few that I may have tracked into my alternate room grew into another brood, I was disgusted with myself for not checking my night clothes and slippers a lot more closely than I thought I did (the babies are indeed easy to miss if you don’t check even the most not-so-obvious of seams, and even the socks can be a 1st-stage nymph’s best friend), and I also thought to myself that I should have put a drop cloth over the recliner (to sleep on) right from DAY ONE of my exile. I use clear plastic drop cloth.