I do not sell traps and nobody makes a profit from it.
No commerce of any kind is done on this site, I am not trying to make money and I do not try to benefit from the disgusting bedbug. I only want to eliminate it. Only poison pushers see bedbug victims as customers, I do not ride the bedbug cash cow.
The trap is built by people, if you learn how to build your own trap, you will never be bothered by bedbugs again.
Use common sense
Stop them from feeding on you. Use a shield between you and them. You control their only source of food: if parasites try to feed on you, make it impossible for them to reach you and starve them to death!
I can’t tell you how great it was to stumble across your bed bug videos an YouTube, and then your site. This is the most comprehensive and logical way to battle these creatures. Thanks so much for giving people confidence.
Ditto!!
Hi Jules I have researched everything there is to know about bed bugs. I finally stumbled upon your site and all your great information. November 2014 my husband and I discovered we had bed bugs. Luckily it was a very small problem we had exterminators come in. This was before I understood anything about these annoying bugs. We were not bitten or did not notice any other traces of them until a week and half ago. I work in a medical office and one of my patients who is elderly and neglected came to us for a procedure in which I was responsible for doing. I immediately spotted her pants and belongings covered in several large adult bugs. Long story short two days later after being on high alert I found one adult on the front of my mattress. This time we did not want to pay for exterminators figuring we could manage the problem on our own. We began laundering and steaming using a professional grade steamer as well as bug proofing our bedroom. I read your site I made the traps and it has been a week and nothing has been caught. My question is, I set up the barrier around our box spring using clear plastic like your video instructs. We also set up home made interceptors even using the scotch tape along our ceilings and walls. My husband works nights so I climbed into bed alone and I noticed 3 small specks of blood one speck was black and smeared a little red. I called my husband. He said he noticed his barber nicked the back of his scalp a little yesterday and he thinks from napping that is what it could be. I am very very unsure and because of our past experiences I feel like this is too coincidental. I did a search of the whole room checked the traps checked my sheets I do not see any other signs of them. I just want to get a good night sleep without feeling like I have to wake up every 3 hours to look for these bugs. How can I know for sure if my husband is right or my paranoia is right? Also we never have reacted to any bites ever even the first time. I just happen to spot them back in november because I change my sheets regularly and I wake up so early to get to work I spotted two in my bed
@__Dzbylut86
Oh the dreaded bedbug, how could a simple insect causes such worries? It is a parasite that feeds on blood and that it seems we cannot get rid of.
We forgot how to deal with bedbugs when pesticide companies calling themselves stewards of the planet took control and promised us to eradicate them. Forty years later, everybody has the lucrative poison reflex and the bedbug populations have never stopped increasing since then, to reach the near pandemic situation we now have. Business has never been better.
Bedbugs do not transmit diseases and are even less harmlfull than mosquito bites. It is not their bite which causes problems but their annoyance and our reaction to bedbugs. Nobody tolerate bedbugs except a few persons that are helpless like the elderly and neglected persons you helped and that could not do anything about it. Those persons need our help and we are the ones to give it to them. But first I will give it to you.
Fighting bedbugs never works, we spend lots of time chasing them and some bedbugs always manage to escape our efforts, coming back with a vengeance. It is hopeless and emotional distress drives people insane, some of us just wants to throw away everything we have and even burn the house down. We accept to live in poison, a cancerigenous neuro-toxin that is a worst problem than bedbugs themselves.
We do not have to fight bedbugs, we only have to use our greatest weapon, our mind. Since bedbugs are blood-suckers and have nothing else to feed on, all we have to do is to keep our precious warm blood away from them. Bedbugs are totally dependent on blood. Without blood to feed on, bedbugs cannot molt and grow to reach adulthood. Without any blood to feed on, adult bedbugs cannot incubate and lay eggs, without blood, bedbugs cannot multiply. But most importantly, without blood to feed on, bedbugs simply cannot survive. And that’s all there is to bedbugs, to completely and permanently get rid of bedbugs, do not feed bedbugs and bedbugs die of starvation. There is not a single creature on this planet that can live without feeding, and bedbugs are no exception.
So the question is how do we keep bedbugs from feeding. Actually it is very simple. Bedbugs are climbers, they absolutely need something to hang on to be able to climb and reach us. You already have all you need to stop them. Something incredible like simple sheets of plastic covering the bed and completely blocking bedbugs from being able to reach you. You have traps to monitor bedbug presence and catch them if they ever come out of hiding. And you have bedbug barriers to keep bedbugs down and keep them from being able to reach you by using the legs of the furniture, the walls and the ceiling.
Let’s look at your defenses one by one. First you have a bedbug shield. It is that clear plastic barrier you have set up around your box spring. A bedbug shield is a cover that is placed over the whole bed and that keeps bedbugs from being able to reach you. The shield takes care of bedbugs already in the bed. In your case it might not be enough to stop them if the clear plastic protects only the box spring, the shield must be placed directly on the mattress where there could be bedbugs. Extend your clear plastic up to the sides of the mattress and cover the mattress with one of your regular contour sheets that you will seal with white duct tape to the extension of the clear plastic. The top of the mattress could be protected just as well with clear plastic only, but a fabric contour sheet will stop bedbugs just as effectively as plastic and will be much more comfortable to sleep on as plastic can be sweaty and slippery. This cover of a combination of fabric top cover and a clear plastic skirt all around the bed will keep bedbugs stuck under the shield without any possibility of ever being able to reach you and bite you. Bedbugs that cannot feed always die of starvation.
The shield is nearly unnoticeable when the bed is made and only a trained eye can tell if you have a bedbug shield or not. It can even be made to look nice if you cover the outside of the clear plastic with materials that will blend and fit with your decor. Once the bed is made, all we can see is a bit of clear plastic hanging down to about one inch above the floor and behind the bed sheets . Any and every bedbug get stuck undertheah the shield without any possibility of biting and feeding. With a bedbug shield, all bedbug bites stop at once and you are never bothered by bedbugs again. No more bites, ever!
It does more than that, it is permanent bedbug prevention. That’s what you are looking for. Something that will catch and starve the very first bedbug that we inadvertently bring home. That’s how it happens, we bring one home, out of nowhere, a single one that can and will feed of our blood, and that mother-of-all-bedbugs uses that blood to lays eggs that become the nightmarish bedbug infestation. Nobody can detect a lone hitchhiking bedbug and it can reach you when you sleep and feed of your warm blood at will. Nobody and nothing can stop them, but the shield can! And it does. If you do not have bedbugs but bring one home because of your professional duties, that lone bedbug will go by itself under the shield and will not be able to bite. No blood for the very first bedbug because of that shield. That bedbug will never turn into an infestation, there will be only one dead bedbug under the shield next time you routinely clean up. Best part is that you will not even be aware that there was a bedbug, it died in silence. And it will be the same thing for any future or possible bedbug, it will not matter anymore if a patient might have bedbugs or not. Bedbugs are easy, you catch and kill the very first one and you prevent them all.
Prevention. It does wonders for our peace of mind. I admire people who help people and bedbugs should not be one of their worries. You have a shield now, you are protected. If you have any bedbug whatsoever, most probably only a few, all those bedbugs will somewhere under the shield. Do not worry about bedbugs anywhere in the room, at this stage, bedbugs do exactly the opposite and go towords the bed at night when you sleep. This cold scientific fact makes them go all by themselves under the shield and they stay there, so hungry and yet unable to feed; isn’t that the most predictable insect of all? That is why you will not find any in the traps, they are in the bed, their are stuck under the shield and can’t do nothing about it. Traps catch bedbugs in the room but if bedbugs are already in the bed, they do not go back down towards the traps. The shield stops all bedbugs no matter if they come from the room or if they are already in the bed. The shield stops them all and keeps them gathered together to die of starvation. Any bedbug situation can be controlled with a shield, and eliminating the very first bedbug also eliminates all the bedbug problems, including the exterminator.
About those three small specks of blood or black and smeared a little red. It looks like bedbugs got squished there but their shells are missing. Bedbugs cannot walk away after bursting out their abdomen. Three dead bedbugs should have been seen close to these red smears. But it is better to be on high alert than ignoring a problem that can only get worst. The sooner we become aware of bedbugs, the more chance we have to eliminate them quickly.
You are on your way to be forever bedbug-free. Let it be for a while and put an “X” on a calender to count the absence of bites or any bedbug trace. Once you will be confident that you found the solution, tell others what you did. It will be a pleasure to hear from you again.
With all my respect,
JulesNoise
Gladys… The solution makes carbon dioxide (CO2) which keeps expanding. So the tube only needs to go through a few millimeters into the cap. The CO2 keeps expanding, then goes down the tube, and then fills up the container that the bottle sits in. Since it is heavier than air, it sits in the container like water, and since it keeps having CO2 added, it overflows onto the floor and spreads out, attracting the bugs. That’s why Jules Noise shows the photo of that stuff being poured onto a spoon on the site, and shows how’s it’s falling. I don’t know what that is in the photo (CO2 is invisible), but it gives you the idea. I suggest buying an awl from the hardware store. It’s a tool like a screwdriver, but with a point at the end like an ice pick. Good for making holes in caps. And, you can buy fish tank air hose to use as tubing, and a small tube of pure silicone to seal around where the tube pokes into the hole on the cap. I hope this helps!
@ Charles Charpentier ___ Thank you. I have successfully eliminated bedbugs in my neighbourhood here in Québec City and I have also started to do it long distance via the Internet. I have done it in other parts of Canada and in many States, Nebraska, Arizona and New-York. I have traps going in England, France, Switzerland and Singapour and they all work.
I am only starting and I need help to make the website better with comments like Gladys and yours and available to anyone who needs it. I have designed it so it can be made with the most common and cheapest materials that can be found anywhere in this planet so that anybody can make one without buying anything from companies. The Co2 bedbug trap is for the people and bring no profit to anyone. It’s only purpose is to eliminate bedbugs out of our lives. It is only an insect and should be stopped to be treated like a cash cow. The trap is for everyone.
Your generosity, detailed videos and explanations are amazing! THANK YOU! We’ve not seen any bed bugs, but after a week of my husband complaining of what I thought was a random mosquito in our home in which he received 6 bites; I received 10 bites in a matter of 3 hours while taking a nap. We set our first trap last night. How would we modify the shield and or trap as we have a platform bed, no box spring and our mattress rests on wooden slats that lay on a low bed frame (not posts) approx. 5.5 inches from the floor. We placed the trap to the side of one corner of our bed. Thank you!
@__Lee
Bedbugs are no big deal if you know how to deal with them, but bedbugs are blood-sucking parasites and nobody can tolerate them for long. You want them out and you want them out now and rightly so. You discovered bedbugs only a short while ago, six bedbug bites about a week before you got ten bedbug bites yourself.
But you had bedbugs for weeks before that, an infestation usually starts with only one bedbug that could feed and lay eggs, leaving very few traces and not being noticed at first. A bedbug infestation typically grows like this: http://julesnoise.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/bedbug-life-cycle.jpg.
From your description I estimate that you could be at the early stages of an infestation with only one adult female bedbug and nymphs up to the third or fourth stage of growth. It would explain how you got ten bites within a three hour nap: http://julesnoise.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/bedbug-infestation-graph-1664×2200-copie.jpg.
It would also mean that all bedbugs are still in the bed, natural scattering occuring only when a colony matures and agressive male bedbug appear. It is only then that bedbugs leave the bed and flee to other parts of the room (usually within a few feet from the bed) to be safe from these agressive males that stab any other blood-filled bedbugs, no matter if they are female or male, adults or nymphs. Once the colony reaches that stage, other adult female also appear, the rate of growth of the colony accelerates and the bedbug nightmare begins.
Do not try to fight them, it never works and only spreads them further. That is human scattering that only makes the problem worse. Human activities, heavy clean-ups and commercial poison applications spread bedbugs and the situation gets out of control. That is when “professionals” make their money and you end up with all the problems, including some danger to your health.
You must do exactly the opposite and keep bedbugs gathered in a place where they will not scatter and will not be able to bite.
That’s the solution. To put an impenetrable barrier between the bedbugs and yourself just as you do about mosquitoes by putting a screen in the window. It is the same logic for any type of insect or pest of any kind, you place a barrier, a fence, a screen or a shield between them and yourself and stop them completely. In the case of bedbugs since they can’t fly and go away, they hide nearby in the bed, the box spring or any part of the bed. So that is where you place that barrier, the shield that bedbug can’t get through directly over the bed and put a lid on bedbugs so they cannot bite anymore.
The shield is the perfect defense against bedbugs. Since bedbugs are blood-suckers and have nothing else to feed on, when you deny them any food by blocking them from reaching you, bedbugs begin to starve and depending if they are active or dormant, the first ones die of starvation in a few weeks while the dormant bedbugs die within 90 days.
Bedbugs in the bed can’t go dormant since they are too close to the warmth of the well protected sleeper in the bed.
A bedbug shield is made with a simple sheet of plastic draped over the bed, but a loose sheet of plastic can slip and must be repositioned often. A better way to make a bedbug shield is to place a regular contour sheet directly on the mattress and fix a long sheet of plastic about 2 feet wide by 25 feet long hanging down like a skirt all around the mattress, leaving a small space of about one inch above the floor. This plastic skirt is fixed and sealed to the contour sheet using duct tape that adheres well to both fabric and plastic. Once completed, this conbination of the contour sheet and plastic skirt forms a cover that no bedbug can get through either at the top through the contour sheet or sideways through the plastic skirt, keepeing all and any bedbug from being able to reach you while you can sleep soundly without getting a single bite. An example how to make a bedbug shield can be seen at:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wy-ry66A7U. Other ways to make a bedbug shield for different types of beds can be seen at: http://julesnoise.com/2013/06/20/50/
In the case of a platform bed like yours, place and fit a plastic sheet directly on the support boards and tape-seal it to the inner side of the frame of the platform. The plastic skirt is the same as the one described above, a skirt going all arounr the exterior of the bed frame and hanging down almost to the floor. The mattress needs a homemade encasement made with two contour sheets sealed together with duct tape, preferably white to make it look better than the usual grey one.
The first thing that will happen is that all bedbug bites will stop at once. From the moment you will put the shield on, you will not receive another bedbug bite again. Next, you will not see another bedbug again except the occasional one in the traps. Within a few weeks the bed and the room will be cleared out of bedbus. The bedbug nightmare stops with the shield and the traps and you will never be bothered by bedbugs again.
CO2 bedbug traps work with the shield. Traps catch bedbugs hiding anywhere in the room when they come out of hiding and going towards the bed to feed. Traps work on the floor and clears the room out of bedbugs. Traps are placed behind each leg of the bed. If you leave a small space between the bed and the walls, including any furniture that might touch the bed sheets, bedbugs have no other path to climb up and reach you. Bedbugs will be attracted to the CO2 produced by the traps and will fall into small glass pitfalls in which they will fall and will die of CO2 suffocation within hours.
Traps are made with inexpensive materials that you will easily find in local stores or at home, even using recycled materials. Here are some CO2 bedbug traps that you can make by yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlpsDjat1KI, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWd5dBdyqVc and http://julesnoise.com/2014/10/27/a-simple-bedbug-trap/. Some traps are really discret and creative like using a flower vase to hold the mixture that produce CO2 while the bottom serves as the pitfall bedbugs fall into: http://julesnoise.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/very-creative-bedbug-trap.jpg
To complete your set-up once the shield and the traps are in place, you can use bedbug barriers to keep bedbugs from being to climb uo on the legs of the bed, the legs of the furniture, the desks and chairs, the closets, the light switches and electrical outlets, frames on the wall or any other place where you do not want bedbugs to get into. Bedbug barriers are made with simple common scotch tape that you place above the baseboards of the walls, at the top of the walls near the ceiling around the legs of the furniture or again any other place where bedbugs will not be able to go. This scotch tape barriers are too smooth and too slick for bedbugs to be able to hang on to and make them slip and fall to the floor where the traps are. To see live bedbugs unable to cross these barriers, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5sFz9jC-nQ and http://julesnoise.com/2014/05/21/bedbug-barriers/
Hundreds of thousands of people have made their own shields and traps and it always worked. Some write to me to praise the shield and the traps, it is my reward to do the things I do.
Peace of mind and you will soon forget about bedbugs.
JulesNoise.
Hi Jules, thanks for the helpful website. Can’t figure out where to post comments here.
I only found one bed bug 3 weeks ago, same day I noticed my first bite. I captured him in a ziplock and haven’t been bit since, but still taking every precaution. I think he came from a neighbor that was heat treated about 2 months ago – they had an infestation. PTO came out to examine and couldn’t find anything else in my apartment.
My question is that I’m a hot sleeper and can’t sleep on plastic. Could I drape the plastic over the bed frame and box spring…..but then place my mattress on TOP of the plastic? (It now has a bed bug protector on it.)
Also I’m concerned about the CO2 trap – my building obviously has bed bugs….is it possible the trap would make me attract more of them from surrounding apartments?
Thank you
Hello Julie,
That’s interesting, it is unusual to catch the the very first bedbug after it had its first bite. Being full of blood slows them slow and being red and round make them easier to see. It’s a new place and it did not know where to hide, and if you caught it daytime it was half-blinded by the light.
Not getting any more bites for the next three weeks does not mean there are not other bedbugs, I know you are aware of that and you are taking precautions, but you want to make sure you will be protected if there are other bedbugs around or any probable bedbugs from the outside.
A little something about heat treatments. If it is true that heat will kill bedbugs, it is also true that it pushes them to the neighbors. A heat treatment must be done very fast and raise the temperature of the whole appartment including the walls within minutes, and to do that you need a very powerful heater. If the temperature rises too slowly, bedbugs will feel the heat build up and flee deeper in the walls and in the structure to escape the heat. Lots of bedbug survive a heat treatment and the application of pesticide by a PTO after the heat treatment and since poison is a repellent, it keeps those bedbugs in the walls and the structure from coming back, if most bedbugs remain stuck in the walls where they will die of starvation, some other bedbugs always make it out and search and find a way to healthier places which are the neighbors. Displaced bedbugs are not found at first as it take 6-8 weeks for a bedbug to multiply into a noticeable infestation. The growth of an infestation ___ http://julesnoise.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/bedbug-infestation-graph-1664×2200-copie.jpg ___ That heat treatment was two months ago…
I do not like to sleep on plastic. It creaks and squeaks, it is sweaty and slippery, it is excellent to stop bedbugs but it is not the most comfortable to sleep on.. The most comfortable is to encase the mattress in a fabric encasement of your own making. Simply get two contour sheets, those bed sheets with an elastic, place them on each side of the mattress and seal them together with duct tape. Voilà, a perfect non-sweaty, non slippery and silent bedbug encasement. Remove the actual bedbug protector for real comfort. Bedbugs cannot chew or dig and they cannot bite through fabric and clothes.
Then, of course it is also perfect to put on top of the plastic covering the box sping and frame of the bed, including head and foot board if any.
Or you could tape a long piece of plastic, about 2 feet by 25 feet and tape it to the sides of you brand new fabric encasement like a skirt all around the bed and hanging down to about one inch above the floor. Something similar as in the Bedbug Shield video ___ http://julesnoise.com/2013/06/20/50/ ___
CO2 traps have a short range of attraction, 2-3 feet at the most before the CO2 dissipate. Bedbugs in other appartment do not detect it because the trap give up no heat, but you do. That’s how bedbugs always find us, by the heat we give off in a room temperature background. When they are close to the source of that heat, then they follow the CO2 we give off in our respiration. Our CO2 mixes with the CO2 of the trap and bedbugs will go to the first source of CO2 on their way, the CO2 coming from the trap.
CO2 traps are meant to catch bedbugs which might be in the room, anywhere in the room. The trap catches them when they come out of hiding and go towards the bed to feed. The shield is meant to completely stop bedbugs which might be already in the bed. All bedbugs end up in the traps and under the shield where they have nothing to feed and never will feed again. Within a few weeks, all bedbugs die of starvation since they cannot go dormant under a shield, too close to their blood meal but unable to get to it. With a shield on your bed you have full protection against bedbugs and with the traps placed behind the legs of the bed, you control bedbug presence, no matter if they already are in or if they come from the outside.
Also have a look at bedbug barriers. It is only a simple band of scotch tape that we can use on the legs of the bed, the legs of the furniture, above the basebords of the walls, inside closet, around windows and door frames, light switches and outlets, picture frames or anywhere you wnat to keep bedbugs out of. The shiny clear side of scotch tape is too slippery for bedbugs to be able to grip in it. They slip, they slide and they fall to the floor where the traps are. This simple scotch tape can clear a whole room out of bedbugs and keep them from ever be able to go back up again. New bedbugs will be equally unable to climb anywhere in a place where those bedbug barriers are. Here is the video ___ Bedbug Barriers – Stop All Bedbugs and Eliminate Them! ___ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5sFz9jC-nQ. Isn’t it amazing that a one dollar roll of scotch tape can make your whole place bedbug-proof?
Try it like that and it will prevention against bedbug, any bedbug, present or future. If you need more information, the website is there for anybody who needs it and I am also here for specific questions and solutions.
Life is good when we are free of bedbug worries, there will not be any bedbug nightmare for you Julie.
JulesNoise
Hi,
In one of your videos one song is in Romanian,
It is somebody in your group who speaks Romanian??
I found one bug today on my bed and now i Start some research online,if their is somebody who speaks Romanian it will be very helpful for me
Thanks
A young talented artist called Cleopatra Stratan singing on the music of her father, Pavel Stratan. I do have a good friend in Romania but she never had bedbugs. It would be difficult to ask her to translate. Can we find a way, maybe using an universal translator such as this.
Un tânăr artist talentat numit Cleopatra Stratan canta pe muzica de tatal ei, Pavel Stratan. Eu am un prieten bun în România, dar ea nu a avut ploşniţe. Ar fi dificil să-i ceară să traducă. Putem găsi o cale, folosind poate un traducator universal, cum ar fi acest lucru.
I am not sure if the translation is good enough, can you tell me by comparing the two if we can use it?
Eu nu sunt sigur dacă traducerea este destul de bun, poate să-mi spuneţi, prin compararea celor două, dacă putem folosi?
Hi Jules
I really appreciate the information you provided. We have a tenant that inadvertently brought in bedbugs with her new (refurbished mattress). They seem to be concentrated in her bedroom. They are noticed anywhere else in the apartment. We got an estimate from an exterminator and its like $1000 with a 4 month guarantee. There is no way we nor she can afford this. My question is: will these traps eventually completely eliminate the bedbugs? And how long do the co2 yeast traps last?
Thanks so much for your help.
Hi Vanda.
Yes, these traps will eliminate all the bedbugs in your new tenant bedroom and will also take care of any bedbug which might have migrated to the other rooms. It works by attracting them to their source of food and catching them before they can bite. The trap can last forever if we want by replacing the yeast/sugar mix every three weeks. The first thing your tenant must do is to cover the bed with a sheet of plastic to stop all the bites at once. The trap does not scatter bedbugs and draws them in towards the bed where they are waiting to catch them. Bedbugs cannot bite and are incapable to either molt or lay eggs. Their numbers keep going down until there are none left. Ask her to contact me so she can start before her unlucky infestation gets into adjacent rooms or other apartment.
I need help! I made these traps by following the directions carefully. Everything went great. I left and came back home after a few hours and noticed all my traps where the bugs are suppose to go are full of foam. Idk what went wrong. Can you help?
Yes, what happened is a reaction of the yeast that went too fast. Yeast is a living organism, edible micro-mushrooms that feed on sugar. It has been used for centuries to make bread and wine. It is also good to make bedbug traps because it produces CO2. The CO2 it makes comes from the yeast eating the sugar in the water.
Yeast is not constant like a chemical reaction. Some yeasts are fresh and potent, reacting too fast and foaming out within a few hours instead of the 2-3 weeks it usually takes, while some other yeast are weak and old. and remain flat without any fermentation. We do not make our own bread anymore and we forgot how to use yeast but we can learn again with a few tries and use our results to find out how to use it. Foaming is produced by too much yeast and too much sugar in not enough water. Cut the amount of yeast by half and it will slow down the fermentetation reaction. Leave more space in the bottle or container so that if some foaming occurs, it will not overflow in the traps (pitfalls) where the bugs are supposed to go.
Yeast works 99% of the time, but there are reasons why yeast fails. Check the Top 10 Reasons For Fermentation Failure ___ http://www.eckraus.com/wine-making-failure.
Yeast and sugar is not expensive, so try again. This is not about learning about yeast but about making a trap that will catch bedbugs. You will quickly find out how yeast works and it will give you one of your best defense against bedbugs.
Here is the recipe for the yeast and sugar mixture and a working CO2 bedbug trap without foaming.
The Recipe ___ http://julesnoise.com/2014/02/11/30/
A simple bedbug trap ___ http://julesnoise.com/2014/10/27/a-simple-bedbug-trap/
Also more information about where bedbugs come from and how to stop them
The Life Cycle of a Bedbug ___ http://julesnoise.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/bedbug-life-cycle.jpg
The growth of an infestation ___ http://julesnoise.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/bedbug-infestation-graph-1664×2200-copie.jpg
The Bedbug Shield ___ http://julesnoise.com/2013/06/20/50/
Bedbug Barriers – Stop All Bedbugs and Eliminate Them! ___ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5sFz9jC-nQ
Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any difficulty, I will do whatever I can to help you.
JulesNoise
correction, they are NOT noticed anywhere else in the apartment.
Dear Jules
thank you for your incredibly generous website, you are an amazing person, I will let you know how I get on. Have just spent 3 nights on the settee down stairs and alot of time looking for a solution on the internet and came across your utube videos. Just wanted to let you know how much I appreciate all the effort you have made in sharing your knowledge with everyone. You are a star.
Best wishes
Elaine
hi Jules
I have put a trap upstairs and down, but tried the match test to see if they are working, but flame does not go out. Have used 8g of dried active yeast to 2 litres of warm water with 2 cups of sugar. The upstairs trap, 4 x 500mls bottles in a container with a skirt, was slight frothing down the bottles this morning, that should be c02? Have that one on the bed hoping they think it is me. Am sleeping downstairs at the moment. Anyway have yet to see any sign of them, just bites that are driving me nuts. Am not even sure what is biting me.
Thanks again for efforts
Signs that the bottles are producing Co2 are cloudy brew and only a few tiny bubbles slowly rising to the top and forming a thin ring of tiny bubbles on top of the liquid. A spent mixture becomes clear like lemonade.
The basket or bowl might not be filling up. It could be a draft in the room or a bowl that is too big or too large
Do you use a plastic over the bottles? If you could replace them with tubing or straws as an alternative, they give better results and also allow using a smaller bowl using a cup or a glass.
A trap on top of the bed catches few bedbugs. To make a simili-human a lamp over the bed appears to bedbugs as the heat from our body and makes the trap more efficient. The bottle should be protected from the light as fermentation is impaired by light.
To be able to use your bed, a plastic sheet over the whole bed including the headboard becomes a shield that no bedbug can get through. It is preferable to not change your sleeping habits as bedbugs will find you and follow you to your new sleeping place making a second place where there will be bedbugs. The idea of a trap is to bring them towards the traps and making them fall into it.
The best set-up is a shield over the whole bed and four traps underneath it. Bedbugs in the room will come out of hiding and go to the traps where they will fall into them, eliminating them one by one until there are none left in the room while you can sleep safely and soundly on the bed without a bite.
Once the traps have caught all the stray bedbugs, we then encase the whole bed by closing the plastic airtight and using dry ice kills them by suffocating them with Co2. After that, the plastic can be removed and the whole room is bedbug free
You then keep two traps running as sentinels under the bed to prevent any future infestation and that way you become bedbug proof.
That’s the way to get rid of bedbugs forever.
Solidarity from oversea
Julien
Hello again friend Julien … I did not know a thing about you back in May of this year 2012 .. I had a very aggravating new strange problem , the tenants who moved out of 1 side of my double left bed bugs .. I didn’t have 1,000 – 1,200 extra dollars to pay Orkin exterminators for 3 – 4 hours of their treatment ,and I doubted them …I searched for an alternative … The large local newspaper had just published an article titled (close to) “Most DIY Bed Bug Treatments Don’t Work” ( = none work ) , I saw it retweeted all around Twitter too … I was referred to that column by 2 different well meaning people …I searched m o r e ..By luck , I stumbled upon the most useful 48 second long video on all of YouTube , ” CO2 Bedbug Trap – The Recipe” made by You . sounded logical , so I followed your plain instructions .. My successful journey , because of Your guidance by answering my questions , is chronicled from start to finish in the comments under that video in my ‘funny’ YouTube name ~ DonaldTrump . . . So , I’ve had new tenants ( whom I told of the bb removal ) living there for going on a month , Confidently , because of the bb slow percolating co2 sentinel / trap that you advised me to make and leave in a BR there . I told them what it is for … looking back , I believe that we could possibly cut the extraction time by 50 % or more with earlier aggressive use of dry ice , co2 ‘Freaking’ … that drove them nuts / killed them from exhaustion / into the traps where they expired … I learned .. 1lb of dry ice , when melted ( sublimated ) = 250 liters of co2 gas ….. I meant it the first time I said it Jn .. I can’t thank you enough …. The Donald ……… Steve O
Thank you Steve :) I am preparing a new part of this and will need your help in a new section of this website for landlords who are also bedbug victims. We should work with them to fight bedbugs and stop pushing the problem and costs to them. They never asked for bedbugs and If we collaborate with them could be our best allies in eliminating all the aggravation caused by this disgusting insect.Do not push the bedbugs to the neighbors and do not push them to your landlord. You know it is possible to eliminate them al litte costs. This new section will tell that to landlords. There is a simple solution to a common problem, catch them by collabotating. It makes excellent tenant-landlord relations.
Thank you Steve
Thank you for your reply
today have actually found proof of them, not in traps though, but am making more later as not made enough possibly to make a difference. Still being bitten at night so will wash everything again and check plastic sheets are properly in place. The dry ice is next on my list, but £25 for a brick of dry ice seems alot to me, have asked at supermarket but they dont use it. Will buy if cant find another source, it is alot cheaper than the professionals though! Was wondering if anyone in Merseyside knew of a supplier or is that the going rate? Sorry if I am sounding cheapskate.
Have ordered diatomaceous earth as this has been recommended for around the house as insect killer. Is it suitable for bed bugs do you think?
ps
you dont look anywhere near 67years of age, a friend said you looked about 55years old. Hope I haven’t offended you in anyway.
Have just read about the barriers, so that needs to be sorted next. Thank you again
Dear Elaine, I just stumbled on your you tube video and will try this immediately and thank you for your kindness. Exterminators wanted 3 -5 thousand dollars with little guarentee! This should be printed in the newspaper and I will call them myself to get this out! Thank you again, from Long Island, NY
hello i seem to have brought the bugs back with me from a flight returning from visiting my daughter in the the second week of June. I stumbled across Jules u tube video with the 4 bottles trap in the basket. Revised it a little and used the bottom of a plastic 1 gallon milk carton. I glued a piece of t-shirt to the carton for them to climb on. Success! I think i caught them early but was devestated for about 3 weeks. The plastic on the bed saved me. Can’t stress this enough!!! Since then i have made 4 different batches of co2 and only caught a couple of bugs. I am currently Dry Icing today and hope this will be the end of bedbugs. Just follow his instructions. I also put out the Diateateous Earth and put the tape around all the legs of my bed and headboard. Have ordered encasements online but will continue to keep the plastic between the mattress and box spring to keep off bites. Good luck to all and will post periodically.
Hi. I posted a comment on youtube but posted a better one here. I used Red Star Quick Rise Dry Yeast, hot water(208F) from a japanese hot water pot and stirred with a portable hand blender in an 8oz glass but no bubbles formed like on your YouTube video during the kickstart process. Is this because it was “Quick Rise”?
Hot water (208F) will kill yeast. Dissolve yeast in lukewarm water (99F) to activate. Please carefully read the instructions in the steps. Best of luck.
jules i have a few questions. thanks for all youor work on this site, it is very helpful.
1. the tubing i can find does not hold a shape like your videos, with right angles and curves. it is either stiff plastic that tries to statay curved like the roll it came in, oor it is soft and still does not hold any shape. what kind of tubing are you using?
2. does the co2 in the traps suffocate the bugs? or do they stay alive in those cups and bowlsand etc.?
3.the plastic sheet i put over my bed. i cut the bottom edbe all around so it is a few inches off ghe floor. but the bugs are getting in the bed anyway. are they climbing up that plastic sheet? i’m using the 2 mil painter’s “drop cloth” type of plastic sheet and it seems smooth and shiny surface. or maybe they are dropping from the ceiling i guess is possible. i put the celiing barrier up tooday, maybe that will work.
paul
Robin: Using a fitted mattress pad over the top of the plastic should provide an adequate base to then place a sheet atop.
A contour sheet usually is enough to keep both the plastic and the sheet itself from sliding off.
As an alternative, you can tape Velcro strips at the corners on the plastic and the matching Velcro strip to the sheet to hold it firmly in place.
Another comfortable way is toput a comforter or a thick wool sheet directly on top of the plastic and tie it around the middle of the mattress with a small rope or a twine. You then can use your regular sheet on tor of the comforter or wool sheet and it will not slide off while being very comfortable sleeping with a plastic shieldthat will protect you from bedbugs.
Also, if bubbles are present floating on top of the cloudy mixture, it indicates CO2 is being produced.
Paul, try taping the plastic tubing to the bottle of CO2 mix so that the tubing is directed toward the center of the container the bottle sits in. Bed bugs do climb and drop from the ceiling. I agree, placing tape barriers on the ceiling around the entire perimeter of your bedroom is wise.
See “Bedbug Barriers” for detailled explanations and pictures
Tubing can be softened over the flame of a candle to bend it into 90 degree angles. Do not melt it by putting it directly on the flame but turn it slightly over it to shape it in the form you desire.
i left out one comment: i have seen and caught bedbugs that do have wings. and i read one bedbug-studying entomologist saying that there are species of bedbugs that do have wings. they cant fly far but he has poked them from behind and seen them fly a few feet. i forget the reference by you may come across it. if i do i will post the reference. if true, and the critters i caught that have wings are bedbi\ugs – and they did have that nasty head shape, it changes the game in those situatoins where that is a breed on the scene. however the co2 traps are still a great strategy.
there is that machine on bedbugsupply site that costs about 379 and it has the heat, the climbup trap, and the co2 from paint ball game refill cartridges, so that is an option. i cant affort\d it right now, but some peole who can shoujld know about htat.
paul
Paul, I have heard of bed bugs that fly; however, to my knowledge they are not present in North America. Please verify that the bug you poked was a bed bug. I find it doubtful that it is. The machine you’re referencing is the Nightwatch Bed Bug Monitor. It is expensive and is designed to run only during certain parts of the day. The CO2 canister has to be replaced also. It works if you have the funds.
Bed bug
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bed_bug
Adult bed bugs are light brown to reddish-brown, flattened, oval-shaped and have no hind wings, but front wings are vestigial and reduced to pad-like structures. Bed bugs may be mistaken for other insects, such as carpet beetles aka bedbugs with wings.
Scientific American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=top-10-myths-about-bed-bugs
Myth 1: Bedbugs can fly
Bedbugs lack wings, and therefore cannot fly. That is unless you put a blow dryer behind them, says Stephen Kells, a bedbug researcher at the University of Minnesota. Then they’ll “fly” about 1.2 meters. On their own, bedbugs crawl about a meter a minute.
Paul:
Ah, the infamous NightWatch Monitor. It is a gadget with major design flaws. It is based on the only two things that attract bedbugs:
• Bedbug are attracted to Co2, so it has a compressed Co2 bottle that gives off Co2 when you turn it on. You must turn it off in the morning if you do not want to run out of Co2. It has a timer to do that.
• Bedbugs are attracted to heat, so it has a heating element built in it to mimic body heat. It is also turned off in the morning to save batteries.
A trap that is not on all the time will fail to catch bedbugs.
• It pretends to use pheromones without knowing what pheromones is only a form of communication between bedbugs as is the case of most insects, especially social ones like ants and that bedbugs are indifferent to squished bedbugs which is the pate they use to baffle people into thinking that the monitor uses all three bedbug attractants. It is a marketing word similar to Col Sanders eleven spices and fine herbs, nobody knows what they are and they are supposed to make chicken taste better. Maybe they do but chicken is still good without them.
Because it uses Co2 which is heavier than air, it can only catch bedbugs on the floor. That is the reason Co2 Bedbug Trap are placed under the bed and on the floor. They do not warn users about that and many people think that you can use them on the bed and many do. It is very difficult to sleep with a trap with you on the bed, it gets regularly tipped over and the heating element has often started fires. There has been two major recalls because of that. No trap can work in the presence of a superior attractant, bedbugs detect the human and prefer it to the weaker source of heat and Co2 and will bypass it. The monitor does not keep bedbugs from biting you.
Is the Co2 Bedbug trap any better? It does not use artificial heat but the real thing, someone sleeping on the bed. There is no way to stop bedbugs from being attracted to us; our only hope is to block them from doing it. That is the reason why we put a shield over the bed, to stop them from reaching us. And the shield must be absolutely foolproof, no way whatsoever that bedbugs can cross over to the other side and to the human on top. Not even a mattress encasement does that, bedbugs which are not encased can go around it using the bed frame, the sheets the headboard or anything that touches it, bedbugs can also let themselves drop from the ceiling.
We need a skirt taped to a mattress encasement to make a full barrier. If there is no mattress encasement then you must use a single sheet of plastic with its sides hanging down almost to the floor if you want to be protected. It is open at the bottom but bedbugs cannot make the 180 degree turn from the inside to the outside.
The only danger left are bedbugs dropping from the ceiling and this is why we use bedbug barriers, (Scotch tape brushed with talcum powder) so that when bedbugs try, they fall to the floor.
As for Co2, the Co2 coming from the human sleeping on the bed flows down from the edges of the bed and mixes with the Co2 from the traps on the floor.
Since most beds have legs and if nothing touches the bed anywhere else, no sheets touching the walls, you have four pathways where bedbugs can still climb up and is the reason why you need four traps, one in each corner under the bed and on the floor. Using NightWatch Monitors instead of Co2 bottles would cost four Nightnatch monitors at 379$ each or 1516$ per bed.
I followed the instructions on the traps, but there is no difference when I drop the match in the cup to see if there is any CO2 in it. I can’t figure out how to make the plastic skirt on the bed work, either. I can’t sleep on the plastic and if I put a sheet on it, it slides off the corner of the bed as soon as move.
Robin, please browse above. There I have answered your question. Still new to answering on this blog. Best to you.
Robin __ A lit match is only one of the ways to see if there is Co2 in the cup. Another sign of Co2 is the odor of fermentation which is similar to baking bread and a slight scent of alcohol.
If your mixture is cloudy and making a few tiny bubbles then there is Co2 going into the cup.
Hot water (208F) will kill yeast. This is why you saw no bubbles. Dissolve the yeast in lukewarm (no higher than 100F) to activate the yeast. This information is in the directions of this blog. Please follow the directions carefully. Best of luck.
hello
no one answered my question abouto how jules made his tubing – the black tubing in his videos – retain its shape. he bends it intoo right angles and curves that hoold the shape. all the plastic tubing i can get at aquarium supply or home depot or loowes stoores, is plastic that dooes not retain its shape. what kind oof tubing is jules using and where can i buy it, and how do you bend it into those shapes? the only way i found to do that is to get 1/4 inch copper tubing, and special spring you put into the tube to keep it froom crimping up at the point of the bend, during the bending process. then you pull the spring out. so did jules do that, then paint the tubing black? or what?
paul
Tubing can be softened over the flame of a candle to bend it into 90 degree angles. Do not melt it by putting it directly on the flame but turn it slightly over it to shape it in the form you desire. The tubing used is air tubing for aquarium use found in pet stores. The color of the tubing makes no difference. You can also use tubing which is soft and tape it to the bottle toward the bottom to direct it into the talc container.
hello again. about the plastic sheet. i understand that the bugs cant make that turn of 180 degrees at the bottom edge of the sheet. if they are climbing down the inside, they cant reach the bottom edge and swing around to the outside to climb back up the outside side of the plastic sheet. but i guess they can climb down the inside so the sheet is not smooth enough to prevent them from getting a grip. also, if they can somehow get to the outside of the sheet, i guess they can also grip it again to climb back up. so is this correct, that they can grip the plastic sheet? is there a particular kind of sheeting plastic that is more slippery to them? i used the standard 2 mil home depot – called plastic drop cloth, costs about $3 foor 9ftx12ft. i think it'[s polyethyleyne. is it better to use the thinner stiff? even the 2 mil can get holes easily so i would prefer that.
but at the corners, it tends too stick out at an angle, so you have to kind of fold that flap of extra material to the side, unless you have lots of room arund the bed. and maybe they are able to climb down the inside of the sheet, and then move across to the outside of the sheet at the corner where the flap that was sticking out is taped flat against the side of the bed? i still have some bites so i think that there are still bugs under the sheet but somehow crossing over and climbinb back up the plastic sheet.
no bugs have been in either trap on the floor, one at each end of the bed. i guess i have to put one cup near each leg? bit i think the bugs IN the bed dont smell the co2 from the floor traps becase it does not float up to them.
my bed has wheels at each corner, and two supporters under the center cross bars of the steel frame, so there are 6 legs really. do i need 6 traps?
also i have those climbup detectors – the white ones that are like big coasters that have a double moat effect, , and they never caught a single bug. they are so cheap they crack from the legs pushing into the carpet, that makes thecheap thin plastic form ashallow cup and then crack. the other two legs of the bed under the dcenterof the frame about 2 feet in from the head and foot ends of the bed, those are just post legs, no wheels, and they sit in smaller climbup trap coaster shae]ped things, andnone of them caught any bugs either. .
so i put new climbup double oat traps with steel disks in them to spread the wieght oof the wheels over a wider area of the inside circle of the double moats, but now the bed slides a bit in there. so i have the bed wheels in the white plastic traps, and the co2 traps nearby with cups. never caught a single bug in the moats or the co2 traps made like yours. the co2 is generating, but i think the bugs never comedown and fidnd the traps because the coo2 does not float up to them. i keep getting bitten. i can re-do the plastic sheet barrier over agin maybe, with less chance of them getting up via the corners where it folds over.
i put the sheet of plastic over the mattress and box spring, both of which are encased,and the cottono bed sheet ofer the plastic. i tie a tringaround the mattress to hold the sheet and plastic from moving around too much.
we need more closeup pictures of exactly how to do the plastic cover over the matress, how the corners of the plastic sheet should look, . there is one picture, but you cant make out the detail of the plastic sheet and the floor,and the mattress and box spring are i guess encased and on top of the bed fframe. but there could be pictures and explanations of the different situations – where you have it like mine, with a string around to hold the bedsheet and plastic sheet steady, or like yours there with the only the bedframe having a plastic sheet over it, and explain the ideas about the encasements vs the plastic sheet alone…
paul
Paul: bed bugs can crawl on the plastic. They cannot bend at the edge to make it to the outside of the plastic that leads to you. If both your mattress and box springs are encased, you might consider placing the plastic sheeting over only the box springs. This should eliminate the bunching of the plastic due to the “thing” being wrapped around your bed to hold the plastic in place. The top mattress will hold it in place. If the corners flare too much, pull the sheeting from both sides of the corner and cut a triangle piece out of the plastic…then tape it together with clear packaging tape. The corners will then have a rounded smooth appearance. By placing the plastic sheeting over just the box springs and making sure there is no overlapping of plastic, you will eliminate any bridges or ways for the bugs to grasp and make it around the edge of the plastic. The encasements simply keep the bugs from getting into the mattress or box springs. They do not stop the bugs from managing to find and bite you. I wish we could show individual ways of applying plastic to all different sizes and shapes of beds; however, it would be nearly endless. Hope this helps to answer your question.
Paul: You need no more than 4 traps under your bed. The CO2 does not float up, it is heavier than air and flows down. Bed bugs do not smell the CO2, they see it. It would be wise to place interceptors that work without cracking under every foot of your bed. This will prevent the bugs from climbing into and nesting in the frame of your bed. Be sure to wash and dry on high heat all your bedding once you’ve made the suggested corrections. Hopefully, you have also taped the perimeter of your bedroom to stop the bugs from climbing the walls and dropping from the ceiling.
Paul: I have a serious question. Have you verified that you actually have bed bugs. If what you’ve caught is a winged insect, it’s very likely you aren’t being bitten by bed bugs. I ask this because you may be going to a lot of hard work for a bug that isn’t a bed bug. thanks.
rebecca i have seen two types of bugs, one type with no wings, and a couple with wings. the ones with wings possibly are not bedbugs. the others definitely are. as i said, i read a piece by a university bug scientist recently who said he had some that can fly short distances. but yes most of them do not have wings. so maybe i have two types, but the majority i’ve foud – trapped in a spider web near the window where i think they came in, did not have wings.
i think you may be wrong about them “seeing” co2. i think they see heat, with their eyes, the same eyes that dot like visible light. heat is just infrared or invisible light i am prety sure they would sense or smell co2 with another organ. that’s just a guess.
you didnt say how jules gets his tubing to hold those nice right angle bends. what kind of tubing is that and how do youo put the bends in that stay bent?
paul
how high off the floor should the bottom edge of the plastic sheet be?
Paul: Tubing can be softened over the flame of a candle to bend it into 90 degree angles. Do not melt it by putting it directly on the flame but turn it slightly over it to shape it in the form you desire. Bottom line on CO2 attracting bed bugs…..it just does.
The bottom edge of the plastic should be a toe width or 1 to 2 inches off the floor.
rebecca,
what kind of glue can glue that black tubing to that soft plastid bottletips or the tupperware type cotainers?
also, since the co2 does not flooat up, it will not atract the bugs down from the bed. i know you can dry ice the whold bed in a bab made of sheets taped,with holes pinhones to let the air out. but is there any way to force the bugs down onto the floorfrom the bed, into the traps.
also why 4 traps under bed – near each leg?
also when they crlimg into the cup and get stuck, does the co2 siffocate them to death or do they just die of old age in there?
Paul: Use tape of any sort to attach the tubing to the bottle or tupperware. The CO2 generating traps will attract the bed bugs. They will come out of hiding and go toward the CO2. Bed bugs originally were attracted to bats in caves. The CO2 expelled by a bat is very similar to the CO2 generated from a trap. Placing 4 traps under the bed is optimal. The traps will also lure bed bugs from hiding places other than your bed. They are efficient at finding it. Once bed bugs enter the container dusted with talc, they go into hyper excitement due to the CO2 and suffocate. The talc ensures they cannot escape. You can dry ice your bed according to the blog’s instructions, but we suggest you do this when you are certain no other bugs are present anywhere else in the room.
This blog saved my sanity in Toronto!
Thank you!
@ Mike from Toronto __ Excellent! If it worked so far, it will keep working until you have none left; trust the trap by your own results. The trap is not a gun and will not kill all the bedbugs at once. You will still see bedbugs once in a while. These will be the ones who are hiding and will come out to try to feed.
Your job is to keep them from doing that with a shield over the bed and barriers that will defeat bedbugs. It is the key to success: To keep them from going wherever they want and send them towards the traps. Your main weapon is to keep them from feeding. It is only common sense; if they cannot feed they will die.
You control their food and take it away from them, you control where they can go and there is nothing they can do about it. Once in a while some of them will find a way to get around; it will be only a sign of what you have to do at that moment. If it happens, look into the blog to find the solution. We use feedback from people like you to get the answers you need.
It takes many weeks to win the bedbug war but with traps you cannot lose it, nobody does.
You eliminate them and do not push them to the neighbors, traps do not spread bedbugs but does the opposite.
Keep up the good work, you will be the first one to gain from it and you will give a service to society by eliminating the ones who dared attack you.
With respect
JulesNoise
M: Please relate your story for others’ benefit. Thank you.
Jules great, amazing, espose. I just dragged (probably spread) my infested king mattress to the balcony and enclosed it in vapor barrior and duck tape. I am sleeping in the front room (single bed) and thought while I get the anti bug program going I would try DE as a barrier to them coming out of the bedroom and where ever else I can think they might be. Thanks from William in Vancouver
Hello Jules,
Do you have instructions in French?
________________________
Submitted on 2012/09/26 at 14:24 | In reply to Frederick Bardega.
@ __ Frederick Bardega
Noua avons peu d’instructions en français actuellement, seulement ce qui a été écrit pour quelqu’un en Suisse. Le site web en est à ses débuts seulement mais sera bientôt traduit en Espagnol, en Chinois et en Français.
Entretemps, je pourrais vous répondre directement et vous guider pour la fabrication de vos trappes. Je pourrai vous faire parvenir une copie des conversations que nous avons eu avec ce Monsieur de la Suisse et qui donne toute la procédure à suivre. Ce serait un bon début pour la traduction du site en Français
Merci
Julien
Thank you, Julien. The concierge of the apartment building I live in doesn’t speak much English. I told him I would check to see if you had anything in French. Several apartments were recently fumigated because of the presence of bed bugs and he wants to place a CO2 trap in his apartment as a preventative measure. I will let him know. Thank you for all you have done and continue to do. You have a good heart. May God bless you. I would have responded in French, however, my written French is poor and I wanted to spare you the anguish :)
Paul: All stages of bed bugs, including eggs, require oxygen to sustain life. CO2 depletes oxygen in an enclosed plastic encasement…hence all stages suffocate and die. I cannot speak on the action Vikane has on the eggs. Bed bugs infrequently infest cars. I also cannot speak on treatment for vehicles. Note: Once bed bugs are eliminated, precautions must still be taken to stop a future infestation.
Hi Julien, Would you please forward a copy of the conversations you had with the Swiss gentleman to my email address. I will print it out and give it to my concierge. Thank you so much.
salut ! j aimerais savoir des trucks pour détruire les punaises. J’ai été référée par un ami, je te remercie d’avance.
Thank you for your comments on my Youtube “Bed Bug Terminator”. You illustrate good methods. However, even people know it works, most people will not follow the instruction because they don’t have time to read the detail and prefer let professionals do the job. The best way to make your contribution to drop bed bug population in America to the level of 20 years within a few years is to produce cheap and efficient product and sell the product. When people use it, they spend less time than what exterminors required before service and the product achieves better result than professional service. If you are interested in joining the patent pending bed sized bed bug trap business, please let me know.
Best Regards
instead of crabs my boyfriend gave me bed bugs from meeting anotherr woman at the hotel. im not going to go on i have no questions i have followed everything you said word for word. i have not found any bugs dead or alive, but i have no bites either, how do i relax and know they arent waiting for me… this makes me more scared. i have actually been having bites for two months could not ever find them, the bugs or signs,but i knew. found nothing but hotels in his gps so i put everything together… so anyway according to step three bed bug infestaion i would have 161 bugs have only found five total. 10 days ago. are they else where? so i guess i do have a ?
@ ___ Hollie Coleman
Oh, if only it would have been crabs it would have been easier to get rid of them than bedbugs. One thing that is intriguing is the fact that you got bites for two months and still have not seen or found a single bedbug. When did you put the plastic over the bed? What happens when you do is trap all the bedbugs (if they still all are in the bed) underneath the plastic and being too stupid to come out at the bottom, stay under the plastic where you do not see them while they slowly starve to death.
That’s the purpose of the plastic over the bed, to stop all bites at once and allow you to sleep soundly without getting a bite while the traps catch bedbugs from elsewhere in the room when they go on the floor to get to the bed.
In a normal procedure, run the traps for a while until they catch no more bedbugs and then, seal the plastic over the bed completely airtight to insert a quantity of dry ice (3-5 pounds) inside the now sealed plastic to kill all bedbugs that are in the bed and make it bedbug free.
Once the bed is cleared out of its bedbugs, run one or two traps but using only half the amount of yeast to make it last longer, as a sentinel to prevent re-infestation.
If you followed the procedure and there are no bedbugs or signs of bedbugs as well as no bites, any bedbugs you might still have are under the plastic where they cannot reach you and bite you. If that is the case, you can kill them all in a single action or you can wait for then to slowly die of starvation.
It would be nice if we could find bedbugs with a gps…
Julien
Well i did find 4 bugs and a huge blood splat on the wall on october 17th thats when it was confirmed, even though i knew they were here from my bites. Which i was only getting bites like once every 2 weeks and about 9 bites at a time. my brother got bit laying on the bed in broad day light and found 2, i came home from work found 2 more on the box spring and blood splat, i noticed bites aug 23rd, first ones. was looking for them since. i had search parties with up to 5 friends every other day, they thought id become crazy. on oct 17th i did the plastic andbed traps. i evenn double sided taped my whole too cute apartment they also are empty. can it be just 5 demon bugs? my clothes have been done. its now been 16 days of no bites for me, my brother who was just visiting for a couple hours its been 12 days and nothing. i find this very bizzare, everyone keeps telling me there just somewhere else. i am lost and still terrified to sleep.
@ ___ Hollie
No more bites? That’s the idea of the trap. To stop all bites and block bedbugs no matter where they are.
Thank you for the brief resume of your bedbug infestation. It is time to analyse what happened.
• First, you were getting about nine bites every two weeks since Aug 23rd. This says that you did not have many bedbugs. Adult bedbugs generally bite every 7-10 days in a series of three bites. So nine bites could be 3-4 adult bedbugs.
• You found 4 bedbugs on Oct 17th, two that bit your brother and also two that you found on the box spring? Could it be all the bedbugs that you have? I doubt it. If they were adults, after their blood meal, they went in hiding nearby (usually the mattress to incubate some eggs and lay them 7-10 days later. The bedbug hatchlings are less than 1mm long and almost transparent, very difficult to see. Those hatchlings have to feed within a few days, a week at the most, or they die.
• That huge blood splatter on the wall can hardly be bedbugs. A blood smear from a bedbug is never huge as bedbugs cannot contain more than one or two drops of blood.
• Bedbugs hate search parties that generally give few results. Bedbugs hide deeper into cracks and crevices and are impossible to find even for the trained eye of a specialist. But a search party always give temporary relief as bedbugs become too scared to come out for a while.
On Oct 17th, you installed barriers (double sided tape) and a plastic over the bed to shield you from bedbugs. You did not have a bite since then.
• The double sided tape could have been replaced with clear transparent Scotch tape which is not as bad looking as the double sided tape. Bedbugs cannot hook into Scotch tape and it becomes like ice for bedbugs when you brush it with talcum powder. Almost any smooth hard surface brushed with talcum powder can become a barrier for bedbugs. If you can make them fall to the floor, they cannot go up the walls and ceiling, they cannot climb up into the furniture and into your belongings. Scotch tape with talcum powder is the best defense against bedbugs as it keeps them from being able to go into places where you do not want them to be in.
• The plastic over the bed is a shield that stops all and any bedbugs (adults, nymphs and also hatchlings) from reaching and biting you. It is the most important part of the trap. Even without CO2 traps on the floor and without barriers (double sided tape or Scotch tape) or any other means to stop or control bedbugs, a plastic shield will get rid of bedbugs without getting a bite within a few months by making them die of starvation. The CO2 traps and the barriers will only speed up the elimination process but the plastic shield can and does stop them before they can get a bite. Trust the plastic; it is a impenetrable physical shield that stops all bedbugs. Bedbugs are stuck and starving one side while you are protected and safe on the other side. (Bedbugs are too stupid to figure out that the plastic is open at the bottom and they do not even try to get out, trying to go up all the time towards their out of reach meal.)
• If you find nothing in spite of the fact that there might be bedbugs somewhere else, it might be that they are in the bed but under the plastic (in the beginning of an infestation, bedbugs are always in the bed). If that is the case, and it probably is, do not worry about those bedbugs, they cannot reach you, they cannot bite and they cannot feed, (they need a blood meal for nymphs to molt or for adults to lay eggs).
The key to control and get rid of bedbugs is through their hunger, it is when they come out to feed that we can catch them. Do not feed the bedbugs and they cannot grow and they cannot multiply, eventually they will die of starvation or they will end up into a trap.
Your fear of going to sleep will go away as you continue to have no bites Time is on your side as bedbugs slowly die of starvation.
Tell me about your CO2 traps, how you made them and if they are working. Keep me informed of your progress and worries if you have any, which can be fixed too.
On your way to be bedbug free
Julien
Well its been 29 days and no bites, feel much better. I went straight to the dry ice, was kinda hard to find, but i got it. Still didnt find anymore. i removed the plastic and searched again, nothing, i put the covers on box spring and mattress. I also did use scotch tape, and double sided tape. I went a little crazy, still sprinkling DE ones a week. Put all my furniture back, now have a mouse, any ideas? But I saw above you want to know why are we terrified… I hate bugs all of them but i will not usually kill them just dont want them by me. And these bugs take advantage of us while we are sleeping. I dont want them drinking blood from this body ick. And the media says you cant get rid of them without spending a million dollars throwing out everything. And it felt like it was the bed bugs house not mine. Just creepy, but if i run into this problem ever again i will know what to to do thank god for you.
Hi Hollie,
Excellent! You skipped the bedbug nightmare. It seems like you stopped the infestation at it very beginning. No bites means that no bug will survive. No bedbug can live without our blood; lets take it away from them! How do we do that? Just like you did, Hollie. It works? Keep doing it!
Going a little crazy carries its own rewards. By applying many measures at once, you took control of the situation and it pays, 29 days without a bite will become from now on. Bedbugs can survive 70-90 days without a blood meal, so all you have to do is maintain the system and wait for bedbugs to die. It will happen before that as the traps and DE will catch and kill the ones who dare to make a move while the other ones are dying of starvation.
I just love the trap. I do not kill insects either, they are essential to life, part of the food chain. Without bugs, we would not have the little birds to sing in the morning. It is their job to eat insects, but the bedbugs are in the beds and birds do not go there, so because they are disgusting insects that feed on my blood and s**t in my bed, I like to kill bedbugs and I like it when someone else kills them too.
We are terrified of bedbugs because we feel helpless, the bedbug causes emotional distress, but as soon as we get control of the situation with traps and other bedbug killing products (DE), that scare goes away and the bedbug become a mere insect again that we can eliminate from our home for good.
Medias only repeat what the exterminators tell them. It is in their interest to say that people are not able to get rid of bedbugs. What would happen to them if everybody did like you did and gets rid of their bedbugs by themselves? They do not care how miserable bedbugs make us, how much it costs us and how much we lose. So, why should I care if the exterminator loses money? They are part of the nightmare and spread the bedbugs with a repellent that does not kill bedbugs anymore. They now use an illegal product which is harmful to children (Propoxur) and still claim it is safe.
What you did is the best, as you say, if you ever run into this problem again, you will know what to do. If you want to feed someone for a day, give him a fish, if you want to feed him for life, show him how to fish. Pass it on.
Im very happy about this, thank you Hollie
Julien
(A mouse is like a bedbug. If you want to get rid of any pest or vermin, take away their food. Seal all the food in inaccessible containers and set up traps. If they are hungry, they will go for the bait because that is the only thing that they can find. Wear gloves to set up the mouse trap, leave no scent on it, taking care to wash it and rinse it thoroughly before setting it up. Use a bait that they will like and rodents go for peanut butter which has a nice odor. Set up many mouse traps in the area where you have last seen them or detected their presence, preferably near a wall or in corners.)
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Thank you so much for this site. You are the first real hope and ray of encouragement I have found in weeks. My son has BB, and we are moving him out of an apartment the LL refuses to treat – and I’m so sad for him that he is losing a good portion of his belongings. I’m going to attempt to seal his video games and CD in the plastic with the dry ice as you suggested, and put the traps in his new place in case any stow-aways show up.
My question is about the traps – will they get moisture in them from the CO2? Enough that we should worry about the BB swimming their way to the side and out? I thought about buying the Packtite, but frankly – it’s pretty far out of our budget…and should we just trash the refrigerator? It’s just overwhelming.
@ __ Diana Greenlee
Hi Diana, what a mess, your son is feeding bedbugs with his blood, the landlord does not want to pay, you are stuck with moving out your son to a new place, your son will lose a good portion of his belongings and you still are not sure that he will not the bedbugs with him and you are at risk of getting them yourself in the process. The irony is that the actual apartment will stay bedbug infested for the next tenant. Count them, three places infested by bedbugs while everybody argue and suffer from the situation, real good relations…
What if you get rid of the bedbug and only the bedbug? Would that solve all the problems? No need to move, no need to throw away anything, no need to fear a dispersion of the bedbugs, no need for the landlord to pay, no need for poison, no need for the nightmare that bedbugs bring.
Everybody is helpless in front of the bedbug, well, I am not! I eliminate bedbugs worldwide. There are traps in 45 countries so far and it keeps getting better all the time. The undefeatable bedbug? I don’t think so!
The trap is free Diana, anybody can make one. The only costs are the materials which are the most available and the least expensive that anyone can get.
• A plastic shield over the whole bed ____________ To stop all bites at once
• 2” clear wrapping tape ______________________ To seal and hold the plastic in place
• Scotch tape and talcum powder _______________ To make bedbug barriers on the walls and on the legs of the bed and the furniture
• 5 cents 2L bottles _________________________ To make CO2 generators
• Air line tubing (or flexible drinking straws ______ To bring CO2 into the drinking glasses
• Drinking glasses ____________________________ To catch bedbugs in a pit that they cannot get out of
• Sugar and yeast ___________________________ To produce the perfect bedbug lure which is CO2
That’s it, all you need to get rid of bedbugs and all bedbugs. If you wish, you can add dry ice as a bedbug killer.
• Dry ice ___________________________________ To kill bedbugs in any item inside a sealed plastic bag in 48 hours.
Here it is:
• A large (10’ x 15’) sheet of plastic draped over the whole bed (including the headboard) will stop all bedbugs from reaching and biting your son while he sleeps soundly without a bite. When you take their food away, bedbugs like any creature will die of starvation, the bedbug is no exception. No bite is the key to eliminate bedbugs. If the bedbug cannot feed, it cannot molt and it cannot lay eggs. This simple sheet of plastic not only stops all bites but also stops the growth of the infestation. That sheet of plastic can be bought in most hardware stores as a painter’s plastic. Or you can make your own with inexpensive shower curtains or out of common plastic bags taped together as a single sheet
• Scotch tape brushed with talcum powder make the best bedbug barriers. A bedbug barrier is a vertical smooth surface that bedbugs cannot hook into and cross. Scotch tape by itself is smooth enough to make bedbugs lose their grip and fall down to the floor when they try to climb, but when you brush it with talcum powder, it becomes even more slippery and no bedbug can get across a strip of Scotch tape brushed with talcum powder. It is something that has been known for decades and the secret of the overpriced commercial ClimbUp Interceptors (a box of 12 for 79.99$, but manufacturer’s cost at less than a dollar). Those Scotch tape barriers are a major defense against a bedbug infestation. A strip goes above the baseboard at the lower part of the walls to keep bedbugs from being able to climb up on the walls. Another strip goes at the upper part of the wall where it meets with the ceiling to keep bedbugs from crawling upside down and drop on the person sleeping on the bed. More barriers can be installed around the cover of the light switches and electrical outlets, as well as around thermostats and heating or A/C units. Bedbug barriers should also be installed around the trims of the windows and the doors to prevent bedbugs from being able to crawl and hide behind them. Of course, there should be such Scotch tape barriers on the legs of the bed and of the furniture to keep bedbugs from being able to climb into them. The idea is simple; bedbugs can go down and on to the floor but cannot go back up anywhere in the furniture or anywhere else in the room. Scotch tape barriers make any place bedbug-proof. The beauty of that perfect bedbug barrier is that it costs next to nothing and is available to anybody anywhere for less than a dollar. That Scotch tape is nearly invisible and not a sore to the eye, we quickly forget about it while it is doing its job in making bedbugs fall to the floor where traps are waiting for them.
• Last but not least, CO2 bedbug traps under the bed, one in each corner to catch any and all bedbugs on the floor trying to find a way up into the bed. We use their hunger against them. Every time a bedbug forages, coming out of hiding where it is impossible to find them, it gets lured into a trap and bedbugs are eliminated one by one until there are none left.
On a hand you have the actual bedbug nightmare and all the inconveniences of the lame blame game that you are facing now and on the other you have traps. A shield over the bed to stop all bites, barriers to control where bedbugs can and cannot go and the wonderful traps that catch the bedbugs while you sleep soundly in your own bed without a bite.
Turning your son’s apartment bedbug free at no cost to the landlord will save all the other costs of moving out and throwing away any of its belongings. It will also give you peace of mind as you will not get infested by bedbugs which are trapped in a bedbug-proof apartment and whose only option is to go and die in the traps.
The whole trap is a shield over the bed, bedbug barriers on the walls and legs of the bed and the furniture and four bottles generating Co2, with tubing (or straws) and glasses to catch bedbugs.
I suggest that you take charge of the installation of traps instead of moving out and losing a lot of your son’s belongings. You will find out that it is a much better solution to get rid of only the bedbugs instead of getting rid of everything else.
Keep me informed of your progress and contact me if you have any difficulties or questions.
With solidarity
Julien
@ __ Diana Greenlee
Hi Diana,
I was reviewing our correspondence and saw that I did not answer one of your questions and it is an important one: Video games and CD’s can be cleared of bedbugs with dry ice inside a sealed plastic bag without any damage to the electronic equipment and the CD’s. There is absolutely no moisture from the dry ice as dry ice is CO2 in its solid state and it goes directly into its gas form without becoming liquid. Dry ice leaves no residue and no moisture. The only precaution to take is to keep the electronics and CD’s a few inches away from the intense cold of the dry ice. This is done simply with a thick folded towel between the dry ice and the equipment to insulate it from the cold. Never handle dry ice with your bare hands as you will get frostbites. Dry ice is at minus 110F and you should always wear gloves to handle it.
Ah, the infamous Packtite. It is a bag with a heating element into it. It raises the temperature to 120F or more, killing bedbugs which start to die at 113F. It is an overpriced gadget that you do not need since you can do the same thing with your clothes dryer ( anything that can stand heat can be put in a dryer at high heat for 20-25 minutes to kill all and any bedbugs in it. It is used worldwide to kill bedbugs at no cost other than the electricity to run the drier. Items that cannot stand the heat (plastic, CD’s, electronics… etc) can be cleared of bedbugs using dry ice.
Another method to kill bedbugs with heat is your oven. In that case since an oven can reach very high temperature, the control must be set at no higher than 150F and carefully supervise the heat with a thermometer. If it will kill bedbugs, it is not the best method since we can easily forget that we have items in the oven and ruin them.
Packtite, dryer, oven are three ways to use heat to kill bedbugs. It is because heat does kill bedbugs that they all work.An even more drastic measure is to heat up the whole room and/or the whole apartment to 120F or more to kill all bedbugs anywhere in the room. It is a procedure used by “professionals” and that clears a place of all its bedbugs within a few hours. Unfortunately, that method is expensive (2000$) and may cause damage to fragile items (plastic, CD’s, electronics… etc).
As if my previous message was not long enough, I added this information to it. It cannot be helped as to fight and win the bedbug war, knowledge is the key.
Julien
Hi, Just a quick question, If you have 2 beds in one room, should you then use 8 traps? Will it be safe CO2 levels, with 2 kids and 2 adults sleeping in the room?
Thank You,
Gene
@__Gene__The trap is totally harmless, except for bedbugs.
It produces very small quantities of CO2, the equivalent of a small animal, like a hamster. It would take 600 bottles like the one you use (or 150 hamsters) to produce as much CO2 as an adult and it would still be totally safe as it would be the equivalent of only one more person in the room. We do not need a lot of CO2 to attract bedbugs, only faint wisps and trails on the floor; it is a lure that guides hungry bedbugs towards and into a slippery glass pit from which they cannot get escape.
If bedbugs are irresistibly attracted to CO2 (from our breathing), they are also attracted to the heat of our body when we sleep (they wait until we have stopped moving to get on us), they follow CO2 only to get to the source of that heat, which for them is the source of their food. The only way to defeat bedbugs is to stop feeding them. That is the reason of the plastic over the bed, to keep them from feeding and starve them to death.
Each occupied bed should have a glass to catch bedbugs at each corner, under the bed and out of the way behind the leg of the bed. Two beds, eight catch glasses
• Common drinking glasses are perfect to catch bedbugs. The inside is already too slippery for them to get out and when you brush it with talcum powder it becomes like snow on ice for bedbugs, they slip and fall endlessly until they die of exhaustion and CO2 suffocation. (trapped inside a glass full of CO2, bedbugs die in 24 to 48 hours). A piece of cloth, paper towel or anything bedbugs can climb up on should be taped/glued to the outside of the glass, a bedbug ladder into a pit of hell for bedbugs.
The traps on the floor catch bedbugs in the room when they come out of hiding and walk/crawl towards the bed, to climb up in it and try to feed. Barriers on the legs of the bed keep bedbugs from climbing up (Scotch tape brushed with talcum powder) while wisps and trails of CO2 on the floor attract them towards the glasses behind each leg of the bed, overflowing with CO2.
Keep bedbugs from feeding and they will starve to death. They have only one source of food and that’s our blood, so we must take it away from them:
• Shields on the bed, a plastic to keep any and all bedbugs from reaching you, to stop all bites.
• Traps on the floor to catch bedbugs when they come out of hiding. Catch them through their hunger.
• Bedbug barriers (Scotch tape brushed with talcum powder) on the furniture, ceiling and walls, to keep bedbugs out of our belongings and out of the room.
If you have any difficulty, do not hesitate to contact me.
Julien
Dear Jules, What would you recommend to someone who panicked and threw out their mattress, box spring, and couch..? If this has scattered the bed bugs is it possible to catch & kill them with the method you describe above? I would really appreciate your response as soon as possible. I’ve made arrangements with an exterminator who has agreed to caulk up the crevices in the floorboards, and radiators after spraying chemicals tomorrow but i’m wondering if, after reading your site, I should cancel the appointment.
Desperately yours,
Bonnie
p.s. I am purchasing a new mattress tomorrow and it will be on the floor, without a frame. This is all I can afford for now. I do intend to encase it in a shield.
@ __ Bonnie Harrison.
Stop all expenses. You might not have to buy a new mattress. Get one from the same place where you discarded yours, there are nice mattresses that are thrown away only because there are bedbugs in them, yours is one of them. Look at it for what it is, many of these mattresses are still in excellent conditions and if there would be no bedbugs in them, they would be just fine for someone who is willing and able to kill all the bedbugs in it before taking it inside and once being thoroughly brushed and cleaned, used it as fine and safe bed to sleep. A new mattress can be around 800$ and if you want to save that, consider being able to kill bedbugs in any mattress that you can get for free. If you are uncomfortable picking up a mattress from the curb, there are excellent ones in second-hand stores. I paid 60$ for both the mattress and box spring I am using and my bed is the best with its foam cover like sleeping on a cloud.
Any piece of furniture can be cleared out of all its bedbugs by killing them with dry ice. It takes a few hours to suffocate and kill bedbugs with pure CO2 inside a sealed plastic or encasement. No bedbug ever survived a full day immersed in pure CO2. Like any other creature, bedbugs need oxygen to breathe and pure CO2 asphyxiates and suffocates bedbugs to death. Looking for furniture? Anything can be cleared out of bedbugs.
No matter what, you need a mattress to sleep on tonight and it should be immediately be put on a single large plastic sheet directly on the floor. That sheet of plastic can be made by taping garbage bags together to form a single sheet. (Use the thickest you can find to resist wear and tear)
• Lift up the sides of the plastic and tape them up around the mattress. Use 2” clear wrapping tape to strap the plastic to the sides of the mattress by making many turns around the mattress and smooth out any folds or bends of the plastic, especially around the corners. It should form a low flat bag under and around the mattress to keep bedbugs from being able to climb onto it.
• Mattresses are usually 6-8 inches high. With scissors, cut the excess of the plastic sides about two inches below the top of the mattress.
• Make a long plastic strip 4 inches wide by over 22 feet long. Tape the top of that strip onto the side of the plastic around the mattress and hanging down one inch above the floor. That strip of plastic will block any and all bedbugs from being able to climb up on the sides of the plastic and reach the top. Bedbugs getting behind that hanging strip of plastic will get struck and unable to make the 180 turn to go down and around the strip of plastic. It is one of the most effective bedbug barriers.
If you set up the mattress on a sheet of plastic that way, it will stop and keep all bedbugs from reaching you and will stop all bites at once.
There are two other ways that bedbugs can reach the top of the mattress where you will sleep:
• One is by letting themselves drop from the ceiling over the bed. To keep them from doing so, four simple strip of Scotch tape on the ceiling in a rectangle larger than the bed will make bedbugs lose their grip ind fall to the floor before they can reach the part of the ceiling over the bed.
• Another way that bedbug use to reach us on top of the bed (or mattress) is by using the bed sheets and any other part of the bedding when it touches the floor. A mattress directly on the floor is not high enough to have bed sheets hanging down on its sides without touching the floor. Until the bed can be elevated with a box spring and a frame, you will need to take special precautions to keep the sheets from touching the floor either when you are sleeping or when the bed is not used.
That will put a shield between you and the bedbugs. The next step is to make CO2 generators with glass pits to catch the bedbugs trying to get to your bed. At least one on each side of the bed, but best to have one at each corner of the bed.
Lastly, put bedbug barriers everywhere you do not want bedbugs to go:
• A strip of Scotch tape brushed with talcum powder above the baseboards and heaters to keep bedbugs from climbing on the walls.
• A strip of Scotch tape brushed with talcum powder at the top corner of the walls to keep bedbugs from crawling upside down on the ceiling.
• Strips of Scotch tape brushed with talcum powder around the windows and door trims.
• Strips of Scotch tape brushed with talcum powder around the electric outlets, electric switches and thermostats.
• Bands of Scotch tape brushed with talcum powder on the legs of the bed and on the legs of the furniture.
• Bands of Scotch tape brushed with talcum powder anywhere else you want to keep bedbugs out of.
At this point, since you have thrown out the mattress, box spring and couch, you probably have very few bedbugs left (most bedbugs are in the beds) and with a plastic shield under the mattress and traps, along with bedbug barriers should be able to get the remaining bedbugs out of your place and become bedbug free.
As for the exterminator, there is no need for him and his useless and messy caulking of the floorboards. It is up to you to allow him to treat your place or not, depending on who pays for his services. If you want to save a few more hundred of dollars, you can cancel him, knowing that you can take care of bedbugs all by yourself and do it better than anything he can do with a toxic product that will always fail to kill all bedbugs.
Keep me informed of your progress.
Sincerely
Julien
Thank you so much for your comments Julien. Very helpful. I really appreciate it and will follow your guidelines. But you do not recommend caulking the crevices? A lot of sites on line recommend this and thought it could be a good measure for keeping them out – future tense. I would be doing this myself and would appreciate any recommendations you have.
Many thanks once again on your kind blog.
Bonnie
*Hi Bonnie*
*We forgot how to deal with bedbugs and people rely on poison to do it for them but there are major problems with using pesticides to get rid of bedbugs. One is the fact that the toxic method always waits until there is a fully mature infestation before the exterminator is called in. Another is the fact that poison is toxic and can create health problems, especially from children, young babies, elderly people and especially pregnant women. But the worse aspect of using pesticides is the fact that bedbugs always become resistant to poison and bedbugs do escape to the outside and into public places where they are picked up by innocent people who bring them home where they start a new infestation. Most of the bedbug problems are not caused by travellers, immigrants or poor people but by the Industry that is supposed to eliminate them. When poison does not kill bedbugs, it scatters them. Bedbugs became resistant to DDT and also became resistant to Permethrin and its Pyrethroid derivatives (the only legal pesticide exterminator should currently use). Those poisons do not kill bedbugs anymore from overexposure and overuse and the Industry is not pushing to re-introduce a banned poison called Propoxur (highly toxic for children) because it is the only one left that still kill bedbugs. Bedbugs will become resistant to Propoxur too as they do for all poison, bar none.*
*So the solution is to do as you do and eliminate bedbugs all by ourselves without any poison and without any help from exterminators that only make the problem worse.*
*Filling cracks and crevices with caulking helps very little to stop bedbugs. If they do not find a crack in between boards, they simply continue and find another hiding place nearby. Bedbugs do not tend to hide in broad daylight and in the middle of traffic. Very few bedbugs if any will hide in floorboard cracks where they will be in constant danger of being squished. Bedbugs hide in and around the bed, always in corners and away from the light. Typically, they will go in seams of the mattress but not on top, in the box spring where they will be out of sight, in the headboard where they will be close by for their next meal but still away from the light, behind pictures frames on the wall, behind windows and door trims, baseboards near the floor, and of course into nearby furniture if they can climb up onto them. We take care of those bedbugs with a shield over the bed and with bedbug barriers to keep them from going anywhere in the room but down to the floor where traps are waiting for them. *
*Bedbug sites that recommend caulking do not know how to catch bedbugs. Caulking does not stop bedbugs, if it takes away a few hiding places, there still are a huge number of other places where bedbugs can go and that is exactly what they do when the cracks are filled with caulking.*
* So, if you want to fill the cracks with caulking, it is okay and you can but do it to make the floor look good and with materials which will be resistant to wear and will not make a mess. *
*Do not worry about giving future bedbugs a place to hide or not. With your bedbug barriers left in place and a trap running as a sentinel, there is no possibility of a future infestation. The traps will not only make you bedbug free but it will make your place bedbug proof and catch any future bedbug as soon as it gets into your place. When you catch the first bedbug, you catch and eliminate the whole infestation before it can happen. Forever bedbug free, thats how good the CO2 bedbug trap is.*
*It is easy to win the bedbug war, stop feeding the bedbug and make any present or future bedbug starve to death. You probably understand why I have a Bedbug RIP logo on the website.*
*Best regards*
*Julien*
Thank you Julien!!!!!
Kind regards,
Bonnie
Greetings Julien
I share a duplex and the family that just moved in came from a place infested with BB’s. Unfortunately they brought them in. Also they didn’t move any beds or furniture and for the last 2 months have been sleeping on the floor. We had the first of three professional treatments yesterday however I’m wondering if this will work given the fact that they sleep on the floor. Does this make it harder/impossible to get rid of BB’s ? one more question, how long does the CO2 in the DIY traps last?
@__Max Weyker,
Typical bedbug story. Someone gets bedbugs out of nowhere, gets infested to the point where it becomes intolerable, runs into problems with the neighbors and the landlord, break the lease or get evicted, throw his furniture away before moving to another place, brings bedbugs with him and the new place gets infested too. And now you are at risk of getting some too even if an exterminator made a pesticide treatment. The reason is simple, poison is a repellent and since bedbugs are increasingly resistant to poison, some bedbugs always survive, so the exterminator has to do three successive treatments if not more and as long as he find bedbugs. The fourth treatment if required is always laced with a stronger but illegal poison called Propoxur which is the only one that still kills bedbugs. Don’t worry, the exterminator will kill them all, the last product Propoxur really kills bedbugs. The thing with bedbugs is that they are all in and around the bed, so they have to spray it mostly there and that is when it comes in contact with the skin. It is toxic and harmful for children, pregnant women and elderly people, Adults in good health have only minor reactions.
Imagine that poor guy who went through a full infestation, a total bedbug nightmare, hoped to get rid of the parasites by losing his furniture, sleeps on the floor only to get infested again, re-lives the bedbug nightmare and now will sleep in poison on the floor for the next two to three months. If I had enemies, that is what I would wish on them. The best protection against bedbugs is to catch the very first one before it can bite and once well fed on our blood, start a new colony in a new place free of poison, usually the neighbor’s. Did you get a treatment too? No matter if you did or not, it is in your interest to catch and get rid of any bedbug that might survive and migrate to your own place.
The CO2 bedbug trap is a sentinel that is waiting under the bed for any bedbug to come its way. Put bedbug barriers between you and the bedbugs. A bedbug barrier is something that bedbug cannot cross; it is made with inexpensive common Scotch tape brushed with talcum powder, applied on vertical surfaces. It is too slippery and talcum powder makes bedbugs lose their grip, and they keep falling down to the floor where the sentinel is waiting for them. You can put these barriers on the legs of the bed, on the legs of the furniture, above the baseboards of the walls and at the corner where the walls meet the ceiling. You can also put it around the trims of the windows and the doors, as well as around the electric outlets, light switches, thermostats and heaters or any heating or A/C outlet. It is a do-it-all barrier that keeps bedbugs from going onto any place in the room you do not want them to go. And bedbugs keep falling on the floor where the trap (sentinel) will catch them.
Make two traps for yourself, one on each side of your bed and then make four more that you will give to your neighbor with a few rolls of Scotch tape and a bottle of talcum powder. I know it is not your responsibility to help him get rid of its bedbugs but it is a small service that will protect yourself from bedbugs which are too close to ignore, with or without a pesticide treatment. In the case of your neighbor, he will also need a large sheet of plastic to keep bedbugs from biting them while they sleep even if it is on the floor.
You are right in thinking that the situation makes it harder to get rid of bedbugs since their diner is always served and with such easy access that the bedbugs can’t resist. It is called bedbug- prone, but we can get them free of bedbugs with a little help. One unsuspected side of the trap is the solidarity between people; it makes nice relations when you are fighting a common enemy with someone else. With your new neighbor, you can turn the whole duplex bedbug free and impervious to bedbugs, present and future.
How long does the CO2 in the DIY trap lasts? A normal mixture, one full envelope of yeast (7-8 grams) and two cups of sugar in 2 liters (or quarts) of lukewarm water (body temperature, 98F-100F) will last between 2 to 3 weeks. Later, when the bedbugs will be gone, to run the trap as a sentinel, simply cut the amount of yeast by half to make a weaker CO2 production that will last much longer. 4-6 weeks.
Greetings Julien
I wanted to thank you for responding to my inquires. Getting educated on BB’s through your web page here and your tutorial videos on you tube has brought me much peace.
Cheers
Max
@__Max Weyker__Peace comes from knowledge of the enemy, neutralize it and trap it into an inescapable pit. Impossible to find, let it come out and catch it through its hunger. Put an impenetrable shield between yourself and the bugs, a simple sheet of plastic over the bed. Keep the bedbug from feeding on your blood, make it die of starvation. Set up obstacles and barriers to keep the bedbug from being able to invade your home, simple strips of Scotch tape brushed with talcum powder on the legs of the furniture and on the walls.
Stop the bedbug nightmare, don’t push bedbugs to the neighbors.
My two cents about bedbugs. I have peace, I’m bedbug free and will always be.
Julien
Hi Julian, I was wondering if you would advise using the Co2 traps, in conjunction with a food grade Diatomaceous Earth lining the walls, after a professional extermination is done. I know the chemicals sprayed by the professional exterminator may not work, but it’s already been paid for. He arrives Friday for his 2nd treatment. The first treatment lasted for about 8/9 days and I have a few new bites. I have a new mattress, boxspring and metal frame arriving on Friday after the exterminator leaves, and am excited to lay down your traps then, but I just wanted to make sure that they would not cause any harm if they mix in the air with the chemicals the exterminator is using. I suppose I will give it a day or two before laying down the Diatomaceous Earth
to make sure the chemicals are dry, as the DE (I’m told) will be rendered useless if it gets wet.
Thank you so much in advance for the wonderful and valuable service you are providing.
Many regards,
Bonnie
p.s. I know I took the expensive route to ridding my home of bed bugs but the wheels were already in motion before discovering your valuable site. I just want to be sure that I am being safe and effective moving forward. Thank you again, a million times.
Hi Julian, pls disregard my earlier post. I’ve decided to use talcum powder in place of DE. Very best regards,
Bonnie
*Hi Bonnie,*
*DE is a fine non-poisonous powder that makes scratches on the bedbug exo-skeleton and make it lose its moisture. It dehydrates the bedbug which dies in a few days, sometimes weeks. It must be spread where the bedbugs are so that they cover themselves with it. It is ineffective if bedbugs simply walk in it. It does not stop bedbugs from feeding off you while it very slowly dehydrate them. When bedbug molt, any damage done by DE is simply discarded along the empty shell bedbugs leave behind. Since it is not an attractant, DE has to be spread everywhere there might be bedbugs, mostly in the bed (mattress, box spring, bed frame and headboard) as well as on and in the furniture, un every drawer and in every closet and storing area that bedbugs can get into. Since bedbugs also get into couches, they have to be covered with DE too. It is messy as you cannot sweep or vacuum it as long as there are bedbugs around. Its main use is in agriculture where it is efficient to keep any crawling insect out of fields and gardens as well out of food grain. Inside a house or an apartment it is a weak bedbug killer because people do not use enough and in the wrong places.*
*DE can be used along with traps as they do not affect each other. Using DE along with traps will only give you more assurance that you will eliminate bedbugs even if the traps can do it very well all by themselves. Traps are meant to catch 100% of all bedbugs but if you prefer to eliminate some of them with DE, there is no objection from the trap. The only thing that cannot be used with traps is poison which is a repellent and pushes bedbugs away from the traps under the bed. *
*The trap is 100% harmless. It produces CO2 as in the breathing of a small animal like a little hamster. It uses the same principle as home wine-making. We have done it for centuries, brewing our own alcoholic beverages at home. Not a single casualty has ever come out of making home wine in all that time. The only other ingredient used by the trap is talcum powder and we have been using that on babies for decades. It is also totally harmless. There are no other products except for bottles, glass, tape and plastic and the trap can do no harm except for bedbugs for which it is deadly. (The trap can also catch any other crawling insects)*
*Your experience with the exterminator show you that bedbugs do survive pesticide treatments and it take weeks if not months to get rid of bedbugs using poison. Bedbugs always become resistant to poison and they have to increase its toxicity all the time. The problem is that if bedbugs can adapt to poison, as humans, we cant and the product that exterminator now use is a combination of a mildly toxic pesticide named Permethrin and a banned product named Propoxur which is highly toxic for children, pregnant women and elderly people.*
*Taking the expensive route to get rid of bedbugs is a natural reaction. There is zero tolerance for the bedbug and rightly so, and we trust the Industry to take care of it without realizing that they are the ones causing the problem by using a repellent on an insect which is resistant and that can easily find harborage and food next door. Poison is effective if used only once but constant exposure to poison make the bedbug adapt to it like a vaccine does by giving us a weaker dose of the sickness and makes us develop antibodies that will protect us when the real disease will affect us.*
*There is only one way to get rid of bedbugs and it is to stop feeding them. They do not get resistant to hunger and die of starvation. Their hunger also make them come out of hiding where in their search for food they are attracted to the CO2 given off by the traps and fall into then to die of CO2 suffocation.*
*Bedbug barriers, Scotch tape brushed with talcum powder keep bedbugs out of the furniture, off the walls and the ceiling. Barriers make bedbugs fall to the floor where traps are waiting for them. So even if you go through a pesticide treatment, make your home impossible for bedbugs to invade and prepare sentinels that will catch the first bedbugs whenever they come out of hiding or hitchhike on us or our luggage and belongings from the outside to start an infestation.*
*Make your home impervious to bedbugs and tell the others about it. The bedbug trap is free.*
*With respect*
*Julien*
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Hi Julesnoise
I came to know that I have bed bugsss in my bed over a week ago. Got well bitten for over a week : [ I did not do any research and directly utilized the pesticide hoping to exterminate them all, which later, I came to know, was a big mistake.
I then started to search and thus came across your website which I really appreciate, all your
hard work to help all those suffering from this insect.
My case is different as I have my mattress on the wooden parquet floor. I just got it wrapped in plastic, an hour ago, with a bed sheet covering the mattress but not letting the sheet touch the floor (appr. 3″ above the floor) . I do not know if its going to work. I am planning to edge all around the bottom part of the mattress with 3″ scotch tape tomorrow. I will also see if I could wrap the pillows in plastic as well. Then I will plant the trap.
I was wondering if the CO2 would affect my sleep, as the mattress and the trap would both be on the floor.
My war begins tonight
Suggestions would be very helpful
Thanks
Micky
@__Micky
Hi Julesnoise
Micky _____ I came to know that I have bed bugsss in my bed over a week ago. Got well bitten for over a week : [ I did not do any research and directly utilized the pesticide hoping to exterminate them all, which later, I came to know, was a big mistake.
Don’t feel bad about using pesticides, it is a reflex. One discovers it has bugs and wants to get rid of them with what is commonly offered on the market. Manufacturers do not tell you the negative sides of their products. It is not a mistake on your part, only suppliers have to be blamed for their failed products. They make you waste your time and your money and let you live with and spread bedbugs until it becomes intolerable and that you have to call an exterminator. The same companies supply the exterminators. Your “mistake” of using pesticide is good business for pesticide companies which can sell more poison when people spread bedbugs with failed pesticide products. You will avoid that scam with your own home-made bedbug traps.
Micky _____ I then started to search and thus came across your website which I really appreciate, all yourhard work to help all those suffering from this insect.
The website is for the people, for everybody who gets stuck with the bedbug ad its misery. The bedbug is a business, an Industry that preys on people. When people will be able to take care of bedbugs themselves, we will stop to give them money to poison us. When you start catching bedbugs, the suffering stops.
I have a pet, a little hamster and I gave it a nice place to sleep and I feed it every day, I want to keep it happy and healthy. I had bedbugs and did not want to keep them, so I took away their place to sleep and took away their food. My hamster lives, the bedbugs are dead.
Micky _____ case is different as I have my mattress on the wooden parquet floor. I just got it wrapped in plastic, an hour ago, with a bed sheet covering the mattress but not letting the sheet touch the floor (appr. 3″ above the floor) . I do not know if its going to work. I am planning to edge all around the bottom part of the mattress with 3″ scotch tape tomorrow. I will also see if I could wrap the pillows in plastic as well. Then I will plant the trap.
Sleeping on a mattress directly on the floor is nothing to be ashamed of. Extravagant bedroom furniture is for vain people, I have something else to do in life, I also sleep on a mattress and box spring directly on the floor and it is the best bed of all.
But we live in a bedbug infested world and mattresses directly on the floor is a too easy access for bedbugs, they can climb in from any angle and feast on our blood at will. So we will simply stop them from being able to do that.
When you have wrapped the mattress in plastic, you entombed all the bedbugs that might be in it and those bedbugs will not be able to bite. Usually it is where most of the bedbugs are. You have put a huge dent in the bedbug population.
Now, to protect you from the others. The edge should be a skirt all around the mattress hanging down almost to the floor. A mattress is between 6 to 8 inches high. Make long 12 inches wide strips of plastic to be taped horizontally to the top of the plastic encasement. This strip of plastic will bend over the edge of the mattress and hang down almost to the floor, leave about ½ inch. It should flare out a bit, especially at the corners. Any bedbug that will come from anywhere in the room will crawl underneath it and onto the outside bottom corner of the plastic encasement. From there, if it succeeds into climbing on the plastic of the encasement, it will climb up behind that plastic skirt and will get trapped underneath it. The bedbugs will not be able to go any further than where that plastic skirt is taped to the top of the mattress encasement. It is a dead end for bedbugs.
That will keep bedbugs from being able to reach you and bite you if you are prudent. A mattress on the floor, encased in plastic and with a skirt is fragile protection against bedbugs. Bed sheets can move and sometimes touch the floor, creating a passage for bedbugs. Bedbugs that do not succeed to climb up behind the skirt will try to hide in the nearest crack or crevice and that is directly under the mattress where they will gather to wait for a next opportunity. Every time you will lift the mattress, you will see bedbugs flee and scatter. Do not lift the mattress without a running vacuum cleaner and good reflexes.
On the other hand, a mattress on the floor, encased and with a plastic skirt can get rid of bedbugs with frequent vacuuming even without traps. You are the superior attractant, more powerful than any trap. That is why it so important that you do not get any bites. Since bedbugs will not leave you alone, we have to block them from being able to do that. They will try to get as close as possible and stay there in hiding. There are no other place than between the parquet floor and the plastic wrapped around the mattress. Some will get squished and the other, as long as they cannot bite will die of starvation if you do not vacuum them out first.
Note: To vacuum out bedbugs, it is best to insert a nylon stocking in the hose of the vacuum, holding it by folding the open end on the outside and putting the nozzle of the vacuum over it. It will collect bedbugs in the nylon and keep the vacuum bag free of bedbugs, you will also know if you caught bedbugs with the vacuum cleaner. The nylon stocking can be reused many times.
Micky _____ I was wondering if the CO2 would affect my sleep, as the mattress and the trap would both be on the floor.
No. A 2L CO2 bottle does not produces moe CO2 than the breath of a small animal like a hamster. It would need 150 hamsters to be the equivalent of the breathing of a human and that would still have no effect at all on you. The trap are 100% harmless except for bedbugs.
Micky _____ war begins tonight
Suggestions would be very helpful
Thanks
Micky
Here is a copy of something I wrote for someone who was in the same situation as yours and with difficulties to keep the bed shhets from not touching the floor. She made a platform to put under her mattress and lattice in her case. That platform is a shield against bedbugs and can be successfully used with a mattress directly on the floor. It is not as fragile as a simple encasement with a skirt but needs to buy some materials to make it.
@__ Ann Onimus
I understand. You need a shield, a barrier, an obstacle that will stop all and any bedbug from ever getting into your bed. You have enough hardships and worries without having to suffer bedbugs on top of it.
In your present situation and with an uncertain future, you do not want to spend money or as little as possible to be protected from bedbugs.
I agree that getting a bed frame would be best but it would not guarantee that it would stop bedbugs from getting into it, The best bed frame are made of metal on which bedbugs have a hard time to climb, they are also expensive. So I suggest that you make a low platform on which you can put your actual bed, lattice and mattress, and that will keep all and any bedbugs from getting to it.
It is a shield that you need to put under your bed. It will isolate you from any pathway bedbugs use to get to us, including the bed sheets which touch the floor. A simple piece of plywood elevated from the floor by common floor protectors is enough to keep bedbugs from being able to climb up. Once that platform rests on the floor, it creates a small space (10 to 25 mm) underneath it but too high for bedbugs to reach up with their 7mm long bodies.
• Sand all the sharp edges and corners and place the plywood on the floor with its best side down and spread a shower curtain on top of it to measure its size. If the shower curtain is not large enough, use a second curtain and tape them together on both sides as a single sheet with 2” clear wrapping tape. Cut the plastic about 150 mm all around the plywood and then remove it.
• Apply and spread some glue on the entire perimeter of the board and also in diagonals to form an X in the middle of the board, but the best is to apply glue to the whole board.
• Put the plastic back on the plywood board and press it on the glue to make it stick. The X in the middle will keep the plastic from sagging.
• Once the plastic is in place, locate the position and nail the floor protectors to the plywood. You will need one in each corner and one in the middle of the board lengthwise and on each side. You can add more floor protectors in the middle of the board if you feel you will need additional support in the center.
• Then, turn the plywood right side up, supported on the floor protectors and plastic side facing the floor.
• Apply more glue to the edges of the plywood. Then pull up the 150 mm plastic side overlaps onto the glue to make them stick to the edges of the plywood. Tape the pulled up plastic sides to the flat top of the plywood to hold it in place while the glue sets and hardens. Fold the corners to form a neat square around the corner of the board and tape the plastic tightly in place on it. Cover any and every fold of the plastic in the corner with tape to make it as smooth as possible.
• Once the glue is strong enough, fold down the top part of the plastic sides towards the floor, it will not hang down directly but should flare out at an angle. Fix the folds at the corners to have the same angle an tape the plastic to make it keep that shape and again making the folds of the plastic as smooth as possible.
• Finally, cut the plastic about 10 mm above the floor. It will look like a little plastic skirt all around the board.
It works like this: Bedbugs on the floor trying to reach the bed (detecting the heat of your body) will not find any way up other than the points of contacts which are the floor protectors. You can use any model you want; even if bedbugs can climb on them or not, since when they will get at the top they will have nothing to hang to upside down on slippery plastic covering the underside of the plywood board. The little plastic skirt all around the plywood is only a safety that if any bedbug could get up to that point it would be either stuck in the fold of the plastic or fall off at the edge of the flared out little plastic skirt (bedbugs cannot negotiate a 180 degree turn about at the edge of the plastic, they lose their grip and fall down).
This description may seem like a lot of work but it is simpler to do it than to describe it. It involves getting a piece of plywood cut to you size specifications and the other materials at a local hardware store. Check for prices, 12 mm thick plywood might be strong enough and can be strengthened with additional floor protectors if needed.
• One piece of plywood larger and longer than your lattice by at least 150 mm all around it. The bed sheets will be able to touch it without being a passage for bedbugs and you will stop worrying about that.
• One or two shower curtains, the least expensive will do just fine.
• Six to eight floor protectors. Any model will do as long as they are over 10 mm high and the less expensive possible.
• A small amount (250ml) of glue and a cheap throw away spatula to apply it. (Glue that will stick to plastic)
• A roll of Scotch tape
• A roll of 2” clear wrapping tape
• Sanding paper (fine to medium grain)
• Good scissors
Consider it like a platform on the floor that belongs to you and that is inaccessible to bedbugs or any other crawler. You can put that platform anywhere, even in a bedbug infested place and you will be able to sleep on it soundly on it without getting a bite. It will stop all bedbugs.
Better than any bed frame you can get and for a fraction of the price. If we are careful in our selection, I estimate the costs of the materials below 40 Euros. It will keep any and all bedbugs from feeding, unable to reach you; unable to molt and unable to lay eggs, they will slowly die of starvation in 70-90 days, even without traps.
It is less risky and faster when we use traps and bedbug barriers to clear out the bedbugs which might be dormant somewhere in the room.
• The traps catch bedbugs which are not in the bed and come out of hiding to feed.
• The barriers keep the bedbugs from being able to climb up into the bed and the furniture as well as on the walls and the ceiling, bedbugs fall down to the floor where the traps are waiting for them.
You will be able to move if need be and keep with you a permanent bedbug protection that this little platform under your lattice and bed will give you. You will be able to sleep out of reach of any bedbug. It is a permanent bedbug shield. If it is a chore, it will not be in vain as you will be able the take a break after that and get some much needed rest.
You made great contribution to let people know that it is easy to get rid of bed bugs with right methods!
Mr. julesnoise What can I use for the forth step, if i can’t get my hands on dry ice? It is looking very grim.Would I Be able to make the co2 trap and place it in the plastic that is covering my bed from top to bottom and poke 20 to 30 hole in the highest part? one last thing for the bedbug plastic barrier you say to use rope or string to tie it off. I have none, What could I use that I may Have in my Home? Thank You!
@ __ Asia __ Yes, dry ice could be difficult to find in some places. But usually dry ice is used in refrigeration and transport to keep perishable content, most often meat or fish in deep freeze. The best way to find dry ice is to type “dry ice” and the name of your town on Google to find a supplier.
If it is impossible to find a supplier, you can make your own dry ice at home with compressed CO2 cylinders found in welding supplies. It is relatively easy and safe to do, but it is the handling of the cylinder and the cost of the CO2 which is its drawback.
It does not sound any better, does it? Don’t worry, we do not need dry ice to get rid of bedbugs. Dry ice only helps to speed up the elimination of the bedbug and remove plastic off the couches and the beds faster. It is part of Step Four only for those who have the means and the availability to get it. It helps but is not required.
The trap is only three things:
• A plastic over the bed (or couch) to stop all bedbugs bites at once.
• Traps on the floor to catch bedbugs on the move in the room.
• Bedbug barriers on the legs of the bed and of furniture, and on the walls to keep bedbugs from being to climb up onto them.
Dry ice is not needed in any of these parts which are what stops, catches and controls bedbugs. Dry ice is like a bedbug gun to kill any bedbugs in a bag. Put dry ice in a sealed plastic bag to kill all bedbugs inside. It is a great bedbug clean-up tool. Anything can be cleared of its bedbugs with dry ice but it involves a lot of work. The plastic must be totally sealed around the item to be treated, a few hours of preparation and taping up leaks and holes and securing the plastic in place. Up to 48 hours waiting time while bedbugs soak and suffocate in CO2, the open the plastic and brush clean out the item. It is very handy when you put an end to the bedbug infestation.
The most important part of the trap is the plastic that you have covered your bed from top to bottom with. This plastic is what will stop bedbugs and make them starve to death. The plastic all by itself, no traps, no barriers, no dry ice is enough to stop all bedbugs from being able to reach you and bite you. When bedbugs cannot feed, they cannot molt and they cannot lay eggs. They get stuck underneath the plastic and slowly die of starvation. In two to three months, all bedbugs under the plastic are dead.You can get rid of bedbugs with only a plastic sheet draped over the bed.
The second most important part of the traps are the CO2 generators and small glass pitfalls to be placed on the floor under the bed to lure and catch any scattered moving bedbugs in the room going towards the bed to feed. The plastic over the bed stops bedbugs already in the bed, the traps on the floor catch bedbugs in the room.
The third part of the trap is the bedbug barriers. Bedbug barriers are vertical surfaces too smooth and too slippery for bedbugs to be able to hook into and climb up on them. Barriers make bedbug lose their grip and fall back down to the floor where traps are waiting for them. The most inexpensive and most efficient bedbug barriers are simple common hard clear Scotch tape such as found in stationeries. When brushed with talcum powder, that Scotch tape becomes an impassable barrier for bedbugs that keeps them down and away from our clothes and belongings.
Dry ice comes last when all the three parts above have done their work and the traps do not catch any more loose bedbugs in the room.
So, start with the plastic on the bed. Set it so that it will cover all the bed and hold it down by using 2” clear wrapping tape all around the mattress instead of a rope or a string. Secure it around the headboard with 2”clear wrapping tape again. Once the plastic is in place and will not move again, cut the hanging sides about an inch above the floor. Any bedbugs that will be under the plastic will not be able to bite again and will remain trapped underneath the plastic until they die of starvation. Bedbugs are too stupid to figure out that the bottom of the plastic is open and will keep trying to get up higher towards the heat of our body. They will be blocked by the impenetrable plastic and there is no other way out but down to the floor here the traps are. With a plastic sheet over thebed and traps on the floor, bedbugs do not stand a chance and will die. All you will need to do is to maintain the traps while being able to sleep without a bite.
When the plastic will be completed, then we make traps. The fastest and easiest traps are CO2 bottles with flexible straws to bring the CO2 into small shot (1 oz) glasses with material on the outside to help bedbugs to climb up on them and fall into its slippery inside, never to get out again and dipped in a pool of CO2 that suffocates then in 12-24 hours.
Once the traps will be working, it will be time to tape the bedbug barriers to the legs of the furniture and on the walls.
All bites will stop as soon as the plastic will be on the bed. Bedbugs will start going and falling into traps. You will catch most bedbugs in the first weeks and go down until there are no more bedbugs anywhere in the room. Any surviving bedbug could be under the plastic dying of starvation.
Bedbugs can survive two to three months without feeding (the year old bedbug is a myth) and if you keep the plastic in place longer than that period without getting a bite, all the bedbugs in the bed will be dead.
How to get rid of bedbugs? Simple, do not feed them and catch them through their hunger. Bedbugs are weak and vulnerable because they have only one source of food. When we take it away from them, they die.
Learn well how to make traps Asia, they will not only get rid of the actual bedbugs but of all future possible bedbugs. The traps are the ultimate defense against bedbugs and that knowledge will last you for life.
Keep me informed of your progress or need to fix details.
Regards
Julien
Thank you for sharing yiur knowledge. I discovered bedbugs on my sofa a week ago and was ready to call the pest control company but I really hate the idea of them using a chemical spray. There will always be residues, on walls, books, tables etc.
I have wrapped my sofa with plastic sheet, almost down to the floor. Left the bottom unwrapped, and the plastic sheet is about 2 inches off the floor.
Next I want to try wrapping my bed and sofa with plastic sheet and putting dry ice inside to kill the bedbugs with CO2. However, I believe the when the dry ice sublimate, air around the dry ice will condense on the dry ice itself and in the container holding the dry ice. This means that I will get my bed and sofa wet. (wife just found an adult bed bug crawling on the playpen. Yucks!,
What is the best way to use dry ice to kill the bed bugs?
Thanks!
From the Far East
Hi Patrick,
Get or make a large plastic sheet and drape it over the bed so you can sleep without a bite tonight. I was answering you about the sofa and dry ice and so on, but this second message is more important. The very first thing to do is to get a place where you will be able to sleep without getting any bites. That is what the plastic is for. More important than the traps, more important than dry ice.
Do only that first. If you can get an 8’ x 12’ sheet of plastic (approximate) and cover the whole bed, including the headboard if you have one. The best is to separate the bed and have a space between the bed and the wall.
The plastic will keep all bedbugs already in the bed from reaching you as well as any bedbug anywhere else in the room. The plastic stops all bites at once. Simply drape it over the bed and secure it in place around the mattress with clear wrapping tape, with its sides hanging down almost all the way down to the floor and cut it a toe space above the floor.
You will be able to use normal clean bedding on top of it to sleep normally and soundly without a bite. Add an additional thick sheet or comforter on top of the plastic to make it more comfortable, nice and soft.
First thing to do is stop bites, and then we will make traps and turn your place bedbug-proof.
Bedbug will follow you to the sofa.
I’m sending you the full dry ice procedure for later use
More to come, hope you do not mind. Talk to you later
Julien
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Hi
Okay, your information is good. Beds with post can be wrapped differently. Place the plastic directly on top of the mattress and fit the sides to hang down on each four sides. Cut the plastic to fit tight around the bed posts and tape it back together so that any bedbug climbing up on the bottom part will be stopped by the plastic like all the others. Tape the plastic to the posts if you have to. (You can use painter’s removable masking tape to protect the paint or finish of the bed posts and tape the plastic on top of that masking tape, so you can lift it off more easily than clear wrapping tape used to tape the plastic together but could leave glue or residue on the posts)
Make sure that there are no possible passage bedbugs can use to get to the top of the plastic. It will give you the same protection as a single sheet covering the whole bed but the posts will go through it. The top part of the posts can be cleared out of any possible bedbug or eggs using rubbing alcohol (70% or more) applied in the cracks, interstices and corners with a brush (not sprayed) to kill any bedbug or egg in them. Further protection on the top part of the bed posts can be done with a light coat of wax to seal all those cracks and interstices. Wax is better than stretch film on which bedbugs can climb because it is a soft plastic. The same alcohol/wax technique will be needed later to treat the playpen and possibly the bed of your child.
Any bedbug already in the bed (I suspect that is where most of the bedbugs are) as well as any bedbug anywhere in the room will not be able to get pass the plastic and will not be able to bite you or any member of your family. The key to stop a bedbug infestation and to eliminate them is by keeping them from feeding. No blood from us means no possibility of molting and/or to lay eggs for the bedbugs. With only the plastic over the bed, you stop the growth of the infestation and bedbugs get stuck underneath the plastic where they cannot bite. In time those bedbugs will die of starvation. Later, we will take measures (traps and barriers) to speed up their elimination, but at the beginning it is most important to stop all bites with simply the plastic shield on the bed.
Once the plastics will be on the beds, you will be able to use them normally and sleep soundly without receiving a bite.
The trap works in three ways:
1. The plastic stops and neutralizes bedbugs in the bed.
2. Traps on the floor catch and suffocate bedbugs in the room.
3. Bedbug barriers keep bedbugs from roaming around and send them down to the floor where traps are waiting for them.
Their importance follows their order. Complete the plastic shields on the beds as soon as you can to stop all bites. We might need to exchange more about the bed of your child and the playpen.
Once the plastic will be in place, we will start making traps and take care of the sofa and any other item suspected of harboring bedbugs. There is a lot of work to do at the beginning but it does not last, it is only the time to set up the traps and make your place impervious to bedbugs. In a few days everything will slow down and the waiting period will begin where the traps catch bedbugs one by one while you go back to normal life.
Please proceed to do that and you will be rewarded with a X-Mas without bites and without worries about bedbugs. I’ll be here waiting for your questions and helping you out.
Help is on the way, Patrick is taking care of that!
With respect
Julien
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Patrick,
From the last one to the first one.
Mover’s plastic (stretch film) is excellent to make a bedbug barrier. It can be used to wrap the bed frame, the posts, the box spring and the mattress or anything you can think of. The idea is to make a barrier (I like to call it a shield) that will keep all bedbugs from being able to reach and bite you. There is no ideal or perfect way to do it, it is more a matter of convenience and ease for you than having to follow a method that you might find hard to follow. It is having something that will stop bedbugs that is important. Information is only to let you know what works and what does not.
Upside: all your points are valid, I agree.
Downside: Not a down side, bedbugs cannot crawl between two tight overlapping layers of plastic, especially movers plastic which is tight and sticks to itself.
If your aim is to kill them, you just teamed up with the guy who should be in the Guinness Book of Records for killing the most bedbugs without any poison. My bedbug count is in the hundred of thousands. I do enjoy beating bedbugs at their own game, making them starve to death and suffocating them. I have names for some of the procedures I use, To wake up dormant bedbugs I use the bedbug Whip and the dry ice is my bedbug gun.
The mattress cover that you found can be used to improve the bed cover. Instead of draping the plastic sheet over the bed, you can only add the hanging sides all around it by taping a band of plastic to the sides of the encasement and use the top for protection instead of the plastic. Any bedbugs caught inside the encasement will die of starvation.
Do not use mover’s plastic to make the sides hanging down almost to the floor but a plastic that will keep its shape and will fall down like a skirt all around the bed. With an encasement over the mattress and the hanging added sides (the skirt) you do not need to cover the box spring and the bed frame. All bedbugs underneath the plastic are effectively trapped and cannot get out except at the bottom where traps will be waiting for them. Bedbugs under the plastic will still tend to crawl upwards attracted by the body heat of the sleeper without being able to reach him or her.
Using the mattress encasement with its skirt attached to it makes the bed safe and sound to use with regular bedding without getting a bite. To make the use of the bed even more comfortable, you can add an extra thick sheet on top of the plastic and held in place by the contour sheet, you can also use a comforter and then the bed becomes really nice and soft. Ah, sleeping on a cloud without getting a bite, that is the part that I really liked. I have been bedbug free for over two years and I have kept the foam mattress that I had put on my bed then only because it is so comfortable. Ha!
The sofa.
You did everything right
• 1-2 inch off the floor is good.
• Traps using straws are the bed since they can be put out of the way and nearly out of sight. Straws give a better handling and maintenance of the traps, the CO2 can be more easily verified and the cups are impossible for bedbugs to get out.
• Wrapping the cushions is okay but could have been avoided by taking off the covers and running them in the dryer at high heat fo 20-25 minutes.
• A bed sheet over the sofa does make it more comfortable and less sweaty
An example of a couch covered with plastic can be found on Google or Youtube by typing “CO2 Bedbug Trap ___ Bedbug Shield on the Couch”
No bedbugs caught near the sofa in three days could mean a light infestation where bedbugs are already in the sofa and waiting for their next meal. Those bedbugs will not come out of the sofa or roam around since they are already close by to their source of food. Bedbugs end up in the room only when a colony matures and near adults are chased out of the bed (or the sofa) by aggressive males. That is natural scattering. The other form of scattering is caused by human activities. But at the beginning of an infestation, bedbugs have not yet matured and few are chased around, so the y tend to stay close to their last place of feeding to digest and wait for their next meal. Of course, with your plastic sealing off any pathway the bedbug can use , you made sure that the bedbugs are not able to do that. You have condemned them to die of starvation.
We accelerate their death by keeping them active and keeping them from going dormant. They spend all their energy trying to find a way to get to the source of their food and unable to reach us they get exhausted and they die. Bedbugs are really stupid insects, even if the bottom of the plastic is open, very few go down to the floor. They prefer to go up against the plastic and wait for a chance to feed that never comes.
Dry ice does not wet the sofa. It cannot condensate any more moisture than what is contained in the air inside the sealed plastic. That very little moisture returns into the air as soon as the dry ice is gone. Dry ice leaves no residue and does not cause any damage except a temporary frost bite in close proximity of the dry ice.
To prevent bedbugs from going from a room to another, do not disturb them and do not change your sleeping habits. Bedbugs will naturally tend to go towards a bed and stay close to that bed in hope of getting a meal. If bedbugs are everywhere it is because we push them out of the place where they prefer to be, near or in the bed.
Bedbugs do not hitch on our clothes much. They walk on the floor or on the walls to locate their victim by detecting the heat of their body and the Co2 emitted by their respiration. That is why the CO2 trap is so efficient, it uses a natural instinct, hunger, to attract bedbugs and lure them into traps.
Sending you this reply to your last message. I guess your place is buzzing with bedbug trap activity. I’ll go to your previous messages to answer other questions. Meanwhile, if anything else come to mind, feel free to ask, I want to give you all the information you need to make your set up right and turn your whole place into a bedbug trap. What you are learning now will last you for life and you will never be bothered by bedbugs again.
More to come in a little while.
Julien
Hi Julesnoise
One more thing. I like the idea of the sticky tape as a barrier on the walls etc. so this post is about tapes.
(1) Which tape?
I have the following:
– 3M magic tape. These are a little opaque, easy to tear with your fingers, removes easily and feels very smooth. Stick them on papers and they won’t appear on duplicate copies printed on the copier machine.
http://www.scotchbrand.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/ScotchBrand/Scotch/Products/Catalog/~/Scotch-Magic-Tape-Refill-Rolls?N=6604280&rt=rud
– Clear plastic 3M scotch tape. These are relatively more difficult to tear with fingers. Feels plasticky and are almost impossible to remove from paper without tearing the paper. Unlike the magic tape, they will appear as a mark on duplicate copies made on the copier machine.
http://www.scotchbrand.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/ScotchBrand/Scotch/Products/Catalog/~/Scotch-Transparent-Tape-Refill-Rolls?N=6603922&rt=rud
Which should I use as a barrier?
What do you use?
(2) Double sided tape
Another site suggested the use of doubler sided tape at strategic places (e.g. Around the box spring) to catch any bed bugs going up to the bed. What do you ink of this idea?
I’m going to try sleeping on the sofa tonight to see if I get bitten.
Thanks
From the Far East (Patrick)
Hi Julien
What do you think of using movers plastic (ie. stretch plastic that comes in a roll. Usually 1-2 feet wide) to wrap the bed frame? Roll them around the frame and overlap the last section by an inch or two. They will stick together at the overlapping section.
Upside:
(1) no need to join plastic sheet together using sticky tape to get it big enough
(2) no sticky residue after removing the movers plastic
(3) can easily wrap odd shape objects
Downside?
(1) can the bed bugs get out in between the overlapping sheets? This is my only concern.
Aim is to kill them all. Muahahahaha…….
Also found mattress cover made from clear heavy duty polythene.
Thinking of wrapping bed frame with the movers plastic, leaving it 2 inches of the floor. Then using the mattress cover to seal the mattress. Put the sheets over the mattress and sleep in relative comfort. How does this sound to you?
Noted your suggestion has been to wrap the box springs and mattress together. Tried wrapping my sofa as mentioned in another post above and found it difficult to use painters plastic sheet to wrap both cushions and sofa frame together.
Heres what I did for my sofa:
(1) wrapped the frame using painters plastic leaving the plastic hanging down about 1-2 inches off the floor
(2) CO2 trap using bottles, straws, cup with talcum powder brushed on the inside below the sofa
(3) wrapped the cushions separately using trash bags and painters plastic (depending on size of cushion).
(4) sealed the plastic wrap over the cushion.
(5) throw a bed sheet over the sofa to make it comfy.
Did the above on Monday and it’s 3 days on, no bites when at the sofa. They will die a slow death.
Questions:
(1) how to accelerate their death? I have access to dry ice but as mentioned above, am concerned about the condensation making the bed/sofa wet
(2) how to prevent them from migrating to another room? Seems like they have gone from sofa to one bedroom.
(3) do they hitch a ride on our clothes without us knowing? Nasty!
thanks
From the Far East (Patrick)
Hi Julien
Thanks for the very detailed and quick replies!i appreciate you sharing your knowledge.
About the sofa….
You mentioned that I won’t have to wrap the cushion if I were to take out the covers and put them in a dryer at high heat for 20-25 mins. I assume you meant putting the covers in the dryer.
Say I do that and kill the bugs in the covers….. There would still be bugs in the cushion (sponge?) itself right? These won’t die as the cushions are not put in to the dryer.
Please elaborate.
About dry ice…..
If I put my pillows in to a big trash bag, put dry ice inside the trash bag and tie up the trash bag…… CO2 will be release when the dry ice sublimate. This will probable cause e trash bag to inflate. Should I create/poke a few holes before I seal the bag to let the dry ice do is job?
About humidity and moisture….
I am staying near the equator in a tropical climate. High humidity. Wonder how longs to keep the sofa and bed wrapped. Afraid mold will start to grow if I wrapped the sofa and Bedford too long.
Thanks
From The Far East
Hi Patrick,
Yes, you are right about the cushion covers. I should have mentioned that only the covers are to go in the dryer. Do not worry about the inner sponge cushion, bedbugs do not dig and go inside the cushion covers. Bedbugs cant go through fabric and are always on the surface to find a seam, a fold or a crevice to hide, especially in the corners but always on the outside. The inner sponge cushion only has to be visually inspected and brushed if needed but does not need to go into the dryer.
Bedbugs that go too deep into hiding are not exposed to body heat and CO2, they go dormant and never wake up again. That is where bedbugs that are not killed by exterminators go, deep into walls and deep into the structure, never to come out again. That can be easily verified after the passage of an exterminator, people wonder where the dead bedbugs are. They are not dead but stuck in the walls and they do not dare come out until the smell of the pesticide that acts as a repellent keeps them there has worn off. Even if they easily survive poison, they still die of old age and starvation inside the walls. Bedbugs are not super insects; their only real power is hiding. How do they do it? They detect light and shun it, always going in the darkest part, away from the light. Daytime, bedbugs are blind.
You do not need to put your pillow in a trash bag. Pillow follow the same logic as the sofa cushion covers. No bedbug can go inside a pillow unless there is a hole for them to get in. It the fabric of the pillow is intact, there are no bedbugs inside. But if you want to test how dry ice works, you can try it.
Why do we use dry ice to produce CO2 to kill bedbugs instead of any other way to get CO2? Couldnt we use compressed CO2 from pressurized bottles? Co2 from compressed bottles is released to quickly and will create a turbulence that will keep mixing the air with the CO2 and it will not be possible to attain high CO2 concentration levels. Tests made by Changlu Wang of University of Kentucky, a world-wide renowned entomologist expert, to kill bedbugs in a plastic bag shows that bedbugs start to die at concentration levels of 20% and all bedbugs are dead within 24 hours at concentrations of 30%. He does not have any figures at higher levels because he uses compressed CO2 to get high CO2 levels. I told him to use dry ice to release CO2 instead of compressed CO2 and attain levels of nearly 100%. The reason is simple, dry ice release CO2 slowly over 8-10 hours and does not create turbulence within the sealed plastic bag. Since CO2 is heavier than air, it accumulates at the bottom and air literally floats on top of the CO2. As the dry ice sublimates and releases CO2 in it gas form, air is pushed up and the plastic bag as you state inflates. Your insight is excellent, you do need a few small holes at the highest points to let the air out so that the CO2 will fill the inside of the bag from the bottom up, thus creating a high Co2 concentration level. Using more dry ice than what is required (one pound of dry ice fills 8 cubic feet of space with gaseous CO2), eventually all the air will get pushed out through the small holes in the top part of the plastic and the inside of the bag will be filled with nearly pure CO2. That level of CO2 kills bedbugs on contact , not only by suffocation but by direct CO2 poisoning. To do a dry ice procedure, the plastic bag has to be totally air tight, the dry ice has to be at the bottom of the plastic and you need to poke 3-5 small needle holes at the highest point of the plastic bag. As soon as the dry ice is gone, all bedbugs will be dead. I let them soak in it for an extra 24 hours before opening the bag.
I repeat, even if the CO2 inside the bag is lethal, as soon as the bag is opened, the CO2, again being heavier than air will flow out and down to the floor, mixing with the air in the room and harmful CO2 concentration levels immediately go down, there is no danger whatsoever for the person opening the bag. I did it countless times without being bothered not even once.Of course, I always did it in a well ventilated room as a precaution.
CO2 to kill bugs is a widely used technique in agriculture. The most advanced country to uses CO2 as a bug killer is Thaland. Their food is one of the most healthy since CO2 is non-poisonous and does not leave any trace or residues. We also use it here in Canada but not as much and as well as in Thailand.
Yes, I was wondering where the Far East is. To us in the western world, the Far East is almost all of the Asian continent I get a lot of visitors from Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Singapore, some from Viet Nam, Thailand and Indonesia. You must be in a big city where bedbug can thrive. The bigger the town, the more bedbugs there are. Small towns have much less bedbugs and some places do not have any.
I never had a mold problem, but again, I never had a bedbug trap set in high humidity tropical settings. However, the solution is the same as for those who have a hard time to deal with the sweaty condition created by the impermeable plastic to sleep on. To keep humidity from building inside or underneath the plastic, a modification can be made to the sofa and bed covers. Fabric will stop bedbugs just as easily as plastic. The same as above for the sofa cushions and the pillows, bedbugs cannot walk (or bite) through fabric, their stylet fascicule is not long enough, bedbugs can only bite on bare or exposed skin. So we can replace part of the covers with a simple permeable bed sheet As an example, the mattress can be covered with a regular fitted (or contour) sheet to which we attach a long band of plastic on the sides to form a skirt hanging down almost to the floor around the bed. This band of plastic (2 feet wide by 22 feet long) can be simply taped to the sides of the fitted sheet to keep bedbugs from being able to cross over and get to the top of the bed. The sleeper never touches the plastic and air can get through the fabric sheet, eliminating the possibility of humidity accumulation and the mold problem.
It is very interesting to give you all that information Patrick. Once you will have successfully took care of your bedbugs, my hope is that you will pass the knowledge to other people around you and create other places where bedbugs cannot live and get rid of them forever. In my little corner of the world, I will have the deep satisfaction of fighting bedbugs and winning all over the world. That and making friends is all I want from the bedbug war. With you and me on opposite sides of the planet, we got them surrounded! Hahaha!
Best regards from Qubec City
Julien
Hi Julien
Once again thanks for your quick reply. Sorry for my spelling errors… was writing that post in wee hours of the morning and not thinking straight.
You have given me lots of new information here. I have always thought that the bedbugs can go through cloth (i.e. clothes, bedsheets, cushion covers etc.). Thought they can squeeze themselves throught.
Wonder how they “follow” us into our house.
From the Far East (Singapore)
Patrick
Hi Patrick, this is nice, I like it. We have 11 hours difference. Your 07;30 pm is my 06;30 am! That is so cool!
Do not wrory about typos, I prefer people who make some so I can get away with some of mine. Im a French Canadian and English just like you is a second language.
Information is power! Know thy enemy and use its strengths and weaknesses against him. The bedbug is the enemy, so it best to know what is real and what is not. It is a domain full of myths, most people have never seen a bedbug but the scare of the bug is so real that it brings a nightmare for those who get stuck with it.
Bedbugs are classified as crawlers but they are not. In real life, bedbugs are climbers. They evolved in caves feeding on bats suspended on the ceiling. Ever since the dawn of time, bedbugs had to climb up and not to crawl. That is why they travel at the speed of only four feet a minute on a flat surface.
They have a double filament hook at the end of their legs to climb and they are very successful on any material which offers any tiny crevices or asperities. Anything fibrous, most clothing (except silk), fabric, paper, wood, non-oil paints, wall and ceilings gives an excellent grip to bedbugs. The opposite, any material without crevices and asperities, hard and smooth like glass, porcelain, polished metal are impossible for the bedbug to hook into and succeed to climb up.
Bedbugs are physically incapable of digging, chewing or making holes. Neither do bedbugs have the strength to lift anything other than their own weight (less than the weight of a drop of water when fed, less than a flake of paper when unfed or dead)
Bedbugs cannot squeeze in between layers or things. There has to be a space of at least their own height (1/16) for the bedbug to move, its legs do not allow the bedbug to squat or to crawl on their bellies. They get into crevices sideways, like crabs to test how deep it is and become immobile as soon as they get away from light. When bedbugs go too deep into interstices and into the walls, unable to detect human presence, they become dormant and if they are not waken by body heat and/or CO2, they could stay dormant until they die.
Bedbugs can only bite on exposed or bare skin. Again, they have evolved feeding on the hairless wings of bats. Their stylet fascicule to draw blood with is not long enough to reach skin through clothes or fabric. One can sleep soundly in a bedbug infested place by covering his whole body, including his face.
How do they follow us into our house? You mean the first bedbug out of nowhere, the one that start the infestation, the mother of all bedbugs. How and where did I pick up that lone bedbug and brought it home?
You went about your business, mostly at work and in public places, and did not see anything suspicious. One day you saw a bug or signs of a bug (mostly bites but also fecal stains, blood spots, or shells). It is already too late, signs or presence of bedbugs is usually detected weeks after you picked that lone bedbug. There is no way to tell where it could have come from. There is a list of theories that is used to explain the unexplainable. Here, exterminators and bigots blame the travelers and the immigrants. Only one thing is for sure, you picked it up in a public place which is not the natural bedbug habitat. That is the most dangerous place for bedbugs they can easily get squished and not be able to hitch a ride, get lost in transit, starve and die. The natural habitat for bedbugs is in and around beds. Left on their own, that is where bedbugs are and always go in it. Bedbugs only leave the bed and the room where the bed is under pressure. Something has to make them move out.
There are two form of scattering. Natural scattering, caused by the extremely aggressive males which chase females and other bedbugs away, and human scattering caused by our actions and that makes bedbugs flee for their lives out of the apartment and on to the neighbors. The most vicious form of scattering is caused by poison. Bedbugs always have and always will become resistant to pesticides. Exterminators are lead to believe that their product is the ultimate answer to all insect problems. It has been proven times and times again that all insects can become resistant to poison, especially when it is overused and successive generations of bugs can pass it down to their descendants. Using a product to which bedbugs are resistant does not kill bedbugs but chase them away. Exterminators can still clear out an apartment with the actually allowed pesticides (Permethrin and its derivatives) but not all bedbugs get stuck deep in the walls and the structure and some make it to the outside, end up in public places where an innocent passer-by will inadvertently pick it up and bring it home. The use of repellents in crowded areas pushes bedbugs in public places and causes the actual bedbug epidemic. It should be illegal to use repelling pesticide on the bedbug. Pesticide includes mostly the poisons used by exterminators.
How do bedbugs follow us into our home? Something or someone pushes them out of the place where they thrive and grow and travelers pick them up without knowing to start a new infestation. Stop using poison on the bedbug and it would solve the bedbug problem.
We live in a world of myths which are profitable to an industry. The bedbug is a cash cow full of business opportunities. Singapore is probably as infiltrated by poison pushers as most major cities, although New-York is still the supreme bedbug capital of the world, that is where you find the most exterminators.
Poison is a failed product to fight bedbugs. With the failure of Permethrin and its derivatives, exterminators have stated to use a much more toxic and illegal poison called Propoxur, exposing children, elderly people and pregnant women to severe health issues. Exterminators still claim it is safe in spite of all the technical data and legislation that makes it dangerous for indoor use.
Isnt that a shame Patrick, a solution that needs a problem to make a profit and the consumer is you. They will let you live in the problem until you cant take it anymore and then call them to save you but only if you pay them generously.
That is why I give the trap for free and I want to break that circle. Learn as much as you can so that you will become bedbug free and once the traps will have helped you, you might pass it on to others. Get rid of bedbugs to get rid of the poison pusher.
Lots more can be said about bedbugs and the pesticide escalation, but for the moment, we will simply make it work for you and your little family. There are ways to make your place impervious to bedbugs and the trap is the best of them. A shield over the bed and the sofa, CO2 generators with glass pitfalls on the floor and bedbug barriers on the furniture and on the walls is the recipe to be bedbug free.
With all my respect
Julien
Thanks Jules for your great feedback.
A new situation had been developing at the place where I work as a social worker. I have a colleague whose office (which she shares with 3 other coworkers) experienced (starting in October) a major bed bug infestation.
Management’s response/strategy has been to do the following:
1. Encourage staff to use the enzyme spray (which is only effective when sprayed directly at a bug).
2. Occasionally bring in a “fogger” – which is only used in the vicinity of their desks.
3. Replacing the carpet with tile.
4. Using glue traps (which, as we know, does not attract bed bugs).
Members of management are unsympathetic when presented with further reports of bed bug bites by staff.
On January 10, they plan on using dogs in an effort to show that there are no more problems in that office.
I am thinking of building a Co2 trap (thanks to your help) to use as a way to fully determine the extent of the problem. It should be noted that I am just a worker who wants to advocate for fellow workers (whose pleas are ignored by management).
What are your recommendations for using/building such a trap in a small office space? Does it need to be placed in the room before, during, after the dogs come in?
(BTW, I agree with you with respect to fact that dogs are an ineffective way to detect bed bugs).
Thanks again for all your help! :)
Wolf
Hi
It seems that bedbugs do not take Holiday breaks.
Thank you for the helpful information, we will use that to get you and your co-workers free of the scare of the bedbug and give you the means to fight back without making a big thing out of it, disturbing as little as we can.
One of your colleagues seems to have a bedbug problem and other co-workers at risk. Well, the first thing to understand is that the bedbug is a no-fault, most people play the lame blame game, pointing fingers at whoever has the misfortune of getting bedbugs. Getting bedbug is like getting a cold, nobody knows where it gets it and nobody blames anybody else for getting it from others, bedbugs just like a cold is something that can happen to anybody and nobody should get punished for it. The only thing we should do is to help anybody who gets them. If she had a major bedbug infestation since October, then we should give her all the information she needs to get rid of the bugs and help her in any way we can. No blame and no recrimination.
1. Stop using enzyme spray immediately, it only spreads bedbugs. You can only use contact killers to clean out specific items and should be done only over a plastic that will collect debris and fleeing bedbugs. You can have the same results with rubbing alcohol at 70% or more, it also kills bedbugs when applied or sprayed directly on them. It should not be sprayed but applied with a brush. You will find it useful to clean out desks and chairs but I repeat should only be done with a plastic on the floor to keep from spreading bedbugs.
2. Foggers are even worst as they do not kill bedbugs, not even on contact. Foggers and bedbug bombs should be illegal multiplying the problem.
3. Do not replace the carpet with tiles. It is a waste of efforts and money, all you have to do is get rid of the bugs and not of the furniture and the carpeting. A carpet can be cleaned out with a steamer that can be rented in most hardware stores. Much less expensive than doing all those works.
4. Glue traps are useless, bedbugs simply go around them. Bedbugs have very poor eyesight and feel their way with their front legs; they stop at any sticky surface. Double sided tape can be used in long strips as bedbug barriers but are sticky and make a mess out of any place. They collect lint and dust and are only good to irritate people.
I understand management being unsympathetic to anything about bedbugs. Bedbugs are not good for anything, they cause loss of productivity and can only bring costs and disturbance. Nobody likes to have parasites in their place of business.
Not understanding the problem, management can only rely on the proposed solutions offered by the Industry. They want to know if there still are bedbugs in the office and some smart (unprintable) got them to believe that dogs will find the bedbugs if there are any. Dogs are no better than their human masters and will miss bedbugs which might be out of reach of their sense of smell, like hiding in high places in the ceiling light fixtures or hiding deep within the walls. Dogs are a major disturbance in an office and will stop all work being done, having to go in every corners, files, desks, drawers and chairs. And someone will have to pay for them, taking money away from your services. In the event that dogs detect bedbugs, it will only be to get an exterminator in it and that will be another unwanted waste of money as bedbugs will be back if anyone of the personnel still has bedbugs at home.
It does not matter if dogs come in or not and you can use traps at any time before, during or after dogs sniff around. Traps do not use poison or any kind of toxins; they are perfectly safe for dogs and humans as they reproduce the breathing of a small animal, like a bat or a hamster.
Management will not be convinced of the efficiency of the traps unless you have one or more going and catching bedbugs with them. I suggest that you proceed without their approval and place small CO2 bedbug traps in the most likely place where you suspect bedbugs are. On the floor, out of the way under desks or on the desk top to detect and catch bedbugs as sentinels. Traps can be made to look inconspicuous, even decorative by choosing different containers for the mixture that produces CO2 and relatively small and innocent looking pitfalls that bedbug will fall into. You can even use a pitfall as a pencil holder and the CO2 generator as a flower vase or behind a picture frame. The CO2 generator can even be placed somewhere else with only air line tubing going into the pitfall.
It is not the traps which will be difficult to make but the cleanup of the chairs where most bedbugs will hide. Bedbugs can find many hiding places in office or desk chairs. It is their favorite place in an office, the closest and most accessible for them to feed. Chairs must be cleared out of bedbugs or covered with a plastic shield.
I have been preparing videos over the Holidays to show many different bedbug traps, I will put a series of picture together and include some related for offices in a file and send them to you later. I first wanted to answer to your message. Meanwhile, if you wish, you can proceed to make a few simple inexpensive traps that can be used as monitors and detect bedbugs before January 10th. Those simple inexpensive traps will be on line tomorrow and I will send it to you then.
Your job is to help people, so I am willing to help you to help them.
Best regards
Julien
help! i’ve made your co2 trap and wondering what I did wrong. The yeast has fermented because I see bubbles when i place the tube in the water however, its been down for 5 days and i have not caught any bed bugs. I’m still getting bite. Please help
@ YG
Hi,
Fighting bedbugs is not obvious, I can understand that not getting any results can be very frustrating. Would you mind if we do this together and we get your trap working.
It seems that the bottle is working, bubbles is a sure sign of it. The trap on the floor will catch bedbugs in the room going towards the bed. If you did not catch anything and you do get bites, it means that bedbugs are already past the trap and close to you and in the bed.
The first thing to do and that is the key to get rid of bedbugs is to stop the bites. Do you have a plastic sheet over the bed? If not, please and as soon as possible get a large sheet of plastic or make your own out of plastic bags taped together as a single sheet.
Drape that sheet of plastic over the bed with its sides hanging down, cut about an inch above the floor. That will form an upside down plastic bag with an open bottom that will stop all and any bedbug from being able to reach and bite you. It does not have to be fancy, simply a plastic that will shield you from bites. As long as it does not slip off you will have total protection against all bites.
It can be secured around the mattress to hold it in place and the contour or fitted sheet and the bedding can be used on top to let you sleep soundly without a bite. To make it more comfortable, use a thick sheet or a comforter if you have one on top of the plastic and under the contour sheet.
Make sure to cover the headboard in the same way as bedbugs can use it as a pathway to get to the top of the bed. Also make sure that no part of the bed touches the wall or the nearby furniture. Sheets must not touch the floor. In fact, you must look at the bed and eliminate any pathway of bridge bedbug can use to get to you, the only way for bedbugs must be up and going under the plastic where they will be stopped completely and unable to feed.
Once the bites will stop, and that will be immediately, then they will be attracted to the traps which will catch them when they will be hungry and try to get to feed. Bedbugs that cannot feed slowly die of starvation while you sleep without a bite.
A large sheet of plastic can be found in hardware stores, it is a painter’s plastic. That is the easiest and fastest way to cover the bed and stop all bites. If it is difficult for you to get such a plastic, try to get inexpensive shower curtains from a dollar store and tape them together to form a single sheet. If shower curtains are difficult to get, go to any grocery store and get garbage bags that you can fit and tape together as again a single sheet with 2” clear wrapping tape. You can use regular garbage bags or you can use the blue or orange ones which are large. Pick the thickest ones you can find and that will resist wear and tear.
Do this, get a good night sleep and come back later and then we will get the bedbugs with the traps.
Do not hesitate to contact me if you have any difficulties or questions on how to proceed. I can help and I will if you agree.
Looking forward to your reply.
Thank you
Julien
Hi Jules, you are to be commended for this web site and the one-man war you are waging against bed bugs. I found this site when I was googling around after a bed bug hotel scare. I am armed with lots of great knowledge for prevention and for eradication if the day ever comes that I have to deal with these rotten critters.
I am just curious about a couple of things. What do you do for a full time day job, as it appears that you have spent countless hours helping people with this web site! Or are you retired and this is your new vocation? I am also curious who “Rebecca” is, the other person that seems to be helping you with replying to people’s questions.
I am hoping that the mainstream media will do a story on you and your crusade so that more people will know about the “do-it-yourself” alternatives to eradicating bed bugs. I have a relative who is a news anchor with the local national news station…I am going to suggest to him that they do a story on you. If they want to, would you be interested? It would help get your message out to an even larger audience. Email me if you are.
Just a few friendly suggestions about your videos. Why do you not speak in any of them? I imagine you are shy about not being a professional actor, but it would help with the explanations and no one will mind if your voice and audio track is not perfect.
Also, some of videos are not in focus all that well, and this sometimes makes it hard to see the details of what you are showing. Perhaps you can recruit some friends who have better quality video equipment and training to help you with your bed bug video movie making.
Regardless, I think what you have done is great and amazing. Better to have low tech videos that are not perfect than to have none at all.
Kind regards,
Kelly G (a proud fellow Canadian)
Finding your site was a great thing for me. I had noticed a rash on my sons hands… and was getting bites myself…. at first had thought them fleas, since I had seen fleas in my house. I sprayed and got some relief… but the one day I took of some coverings off my sons bed and was horrified… I am a clean person… and well I figure these got brought in by one of his friends or him from school or some place. I had never experienced bed bugs before and these little creatures are tough. I am tougher… I began cleaning right away… I have been using 91% rubbing alcohol as the bugs die instantly. I did buy food grade DE but have been afraid to use it… it says it cannot be inhaled.. am not sure if this is just when you put it down or you cant be in the room at all that it is in?! Anyway… I am seeing less and less…. I have 2 of your traps in every room with bed and/or furniture.
I just want to say thank you!! If not for you and your site I would have flash burned my place long ago.
Sincerely,
Ann B.
I draped the beds in plastic and made the traps according to specifications, even tested for gas, but this first night they have not trapped any bugs. Does it take a few days?
@ Kathy
Bedbugs are caught the first night only in large or mature infestations. In the early stages of an infestation, there are fewer bedbugs and all the bedbugs are still in the bed. Draping the beds in plastic often catches and stop all and every bedbugs you might have if they did not have the time to scatter and invade the room.
An infestation most often starts with only one bedbug that gets off its hitchhike and waits for someone to get to sleep, only then will it get in the bed and feed. The bedbug will find that sleeping person by the body heat it emits and the CO2 of its breathing. That bedbug will get off its host immediately after feeding and find a place to hide and lay eggs as close as possible to its source of food for her next meal and her hatchlings. The first place where a bedbug will hide is in the seams of the mattress, most often in the corners and in the underside.
Traps on the floor catch bedbugs trying to get onto the bed by climbing up the legs. Bedbugs already in the bed will not turn back and go towards the floor which is the reason we need a plastic over the bed. That plastic is an impenetrable shield and any bedbug trapped underneath it will not be able to feed and will eventually die of starvation. If in the rare occasion that a bedbug will actually go down towards the floor, it will then be immediately be attracted by the CO2 given off by the traps.
So, I believe that not catching any bedbugs on the first night is a good sign meaning that you reacted quickly at the first signs of bedbug presence (bites, shells, red blood spots, dark fecal spots). Although the traps can take care of large infestations, it is preferable and much more easier to eliminate bedbugs when they are only starting, if you have bedbugs only in the bed, then it will be possible to get rid of them in a single stroke instead of having to wait to attract all bedbugs in the room first.
Keep your traps running for a week or more and if you still do not catch any, then it will be possible to use dry ice to kill them all before they can do anything. Meanwhile, trust your shield, the plastic draped over the bed to stop all and any bedbug bites. It is the real key to get bedbug free, an insect that cannot feed is doomed to die just like any creature on this planet, this one, a parasite is no exception and since it has only one source of food, it becomes easy to take it away for them. Do not feed the bedbug and it will die.
Use the signs you get to analyze the situation and when you will be ready, look at the bedbug killer section of the website for the dry ice procedure or come back here to get it. You might also like to look at a new video I recently made on a Bedbug Shield that fits better on a bed than simply draping plastic on it.
Hi Julien,
Thank you for your knowledgeable reply and your helpful videos! You are my hero! It is so uncomfortable and degrading to deal with Bed bugs, and I’m very reactive to the bites. I sent for a homeopathic remedy that is actually made of dead bed bugs, I will let you know if it helps or not, because that’s yet another way to stop the expense of dealing with them.
I think it is what you suggest, that we only had a few in my daughters bed, and when she came in to sleep with me (we share a room) some got in my bed. So far, my other children are not complaining or showing bites.
I did see some very flat ones wiggling in the day time out of their hiding place in her frame which makes me think the DE is affecting them.
I’m so glad you got right back to me, it has been hard for me to concentrate, work or sleep since we realized that we had them.
What is the dry ice treatment? Can you post the link here? I think I may have watched it. I don’t understand how it kills them, if you could reply to that. Thanks!
Oh and PS, I laid down a lot of Diameticious earth and jammed it into the headboard. I saw bugs crawling out in broad daylight, and I think this is because they were not feeling well anymore. So I’m hoping I’m not seeing many because of this. I can’t tell by my bites because I’ve become so allergic that I itch all the time. Maybe after a few nights this will calm down…
@ Kathy
DE does not repel bedbugs and does not make them sick. Bedbugs have a thin coat of wax on their shell. DE scratches it and make them lose their moisture, bedbugs that crawl in DE dry out in a few days to a few weeks but they hide to die. DE is a proven bedbug killer.
Bedbugs crawling out in broad day light usually are round and red, full of blood. It is the natural scattering caused by aggressive male bedbugs. If it is the case, then you have been infested for at least 6 to 8 weeks and the first eggs had time to go through all five stages of growth At this point you could have 50-100 bedbugs starting from only one two months ago. It is very difficult to detect bedbugs in the early stages of infestation and your allergy comes from multiple bites of very small and very young bedbugs. Adults leave a noticeable red swelling but young ones cause more of a rash than a swelling.
It is of outmost importance that you shield yourself and stop all bites immediately. More important than the traps, the plastic on the bed is what will stop all bites. Give me a description of what you did or better yet, send me a picture of your set-up so I can tell you if what you did is right or if there are weaknesses in it. Fighting bedbugs and winning is possible with simple inexpensive means but you must be able to sleep first, so this is what we will do. I made the shield to stop all bites at once and then the traps catch them before they can bite.
Keep me informed of your situation and we will adjust to it so you can sleep soundly without a bite.
I duct taped 6 ml thick plastic over the head and foot board and down to the floor of her loft bed, over my mattress for mine. Both go nearly to the floor. In the case of my bed I created a little lip upwards. The plastic covers my mattress, I only put a sheet on that for myself, since I covered mine with a bed bug cover, but there still could have been bugs on top of that.
I think I followed your directions well. I then heated her mattress to 140 degrees for 20 min in a dry sauna, then covered it with a bed bug cover, and placed that back up on top of the loft bed. I also dried her bedding and Pjs again this morning (after washing them yesterday), and my own. All my bedding was washed and dried. I placed three traps in the room, and checked that they were all producing co2 (they are). I feel so handy!
My only concern is that the 6 mil plastic on the bed smells bad, and I am chemically sensitive. I woke up with a head ache and dark circles under my eyes this morning. Do you think it is safe for us to sleep on the sofa’s in the living room if our PJ’s and bedding has run through the dryer?
Two days ago I got about 10 welts while sitting at my desk in the living room. I was wearing a thick sweater that had been on the floor or bed in my bedroom before I treated everything. After I threw that in the dryer for an hour, and changed the rest of my clothes, the biting stopped. I set a trap in the living room near my desk, so far no bugs.
So, I think while a live one hitched a ride on me, that doesn’t seem to be what is happening in general.
What do you think?
Kathy
Can you add to this website a section on the actual bites that people get. I have read on other sites that there is a breakfast, lunch, and dinner bite that is three marks in a row on the body. I am curious if that is accurate information or if it is another myth.
Sorry, me again. I didn’t click the notify me box and I want to make sure I get the replies. Can you add to this website a section on the actual bites that people get. I have read on other sites that there is a breakfast, lunch, and dinner bite that is three marks in a row on the body. I am curious if that is accurate information or if it is another myth.
@__Rob
Yes, that is interesting. Bedbug bites vary a lot from one to the others and it seems very mysterious and like a myth. I will upload a variety of bedbug bites and you will be surprised to see that some of them do not look like bedbug bites at all and are generally mistaken for something else.
First, bites are different at every stage of bedbug growth and change as we become more allergic to them. One word can describe all of these variations and it is posology. The best way to understand it is by analogy. Take Tylenol as an example. Tylenol is a poison that can kill you, yet, we use it as medication to ease up pain and symptoms of various ailments. Two Tylenol will give you relief from something that bothers you, like a headache. It might work or not depending on the severity and causes of the pain. So since it can also harm you, we must follow posology, the instructions on the bottle on how many you can take daily and also over longer periods of time.
Most manufacturers will recommend taking two pills, once in the morning, two more in the middle of the day, two more in the evening and lastly two more at night, for a maximum of eight pills a day, and that quantity will cause you no harm. Of course prolonged use of even that small quantity is not recommended and if the pain or symptoms subsist after 5-7 days, you should consult a physician. There are safety factors in those instructions, usually 3 to 1, and that can be verified (not recommended) by taking 24 pills instead of 8. Twenty-four Tylenols will make you feel sick and might send you to the hospital, so don’t try it. More than 24 pills is a serious overdose and can kill you, so again just take my word for it and do not experiment it, instead, you can always check it by asking a Doctor, a Nurse or a Pharmacist.
Now, the bedbug injects saliva upon feeding to keep blood from coagulating and make your skin numb so do not feel the bite. Your reaction and swellings also depends on the quantity of bedbug saliva injected.
So at the very beginning of an infestation, you have only one bedbug that will feed once and will not bite again for a few days. Five to seven days depending on the room temperature, all insects rate of metabolism is in direct relation to temperature. Colder is slower and warmer is faster.
Bedbugs do not drill into veins, their rostrum is not long enough to reach them, and draw only some of the blood that comes from capillaries. We have blood everywhere in our bodies as cutting ourselves anywhere will make us bleed, so bedbugs bite anywhere as soon as they reach exposed or bare skin.
Bedbugs have needle-like mouth parts to drill in the skin and lap blood in that area. When it diminishes, they pull out, move sideways and bite a short distance away. Adults usually bite three times and it forms the crescent “breakfast-lunch-dinner” mark that people associate and is the bites of a single bedbug. But it is not limited to three bites, it could be more if the bedbug does not find enough blood in all three of its bites, and drill a fourth or fifth time. Or it could be less if the bedbug hit a spot where there is ample supply of blood.
———————- Bedbug mouth parts pics ———————–
So you have one lone adult bedbug leaving 2 to 5 red itchy swellings about once a week. If it is a female, she will find a place nearby, on the sides and underside of the mattress, mostly in the corner where she will not get squished by the movements of the bed. The red streaks we see on bed sheets are squished bedbugs that did not make it to a safe hiding place so it can incubate some eggs and lay them a week or so after. When the eggs hatch a week or so after, you will have +/- ten tiny near transparent 1 mm replicas of the 5 mm adult bedbug.
Their bite is much different than their mother’s. Instead of the typical 3-bite meal, you’ll see +/- 10-15 tiny bumps swelling the skin in the same area and looking and feeling like a rash, the more you touch it, the more it itches, but does not look like bedbug bites at all.
———————- Bedbug bites pics ————————
At first, we usually have a few bites spaced by days, an annoyance and questioning what it is and dismissing it as casual like maybe a mosquito bite or something of little importance. If the adult female bedbug is relatively always still the same, the bites of the nymphs keep getting more pronounced and more far apart. The size of a bedbug bite is directly in direct relation to the amount of saliva injected by bedbugs. Smaller bedbugs inject less saliva than an adult, and all bedbugs take as much blood as their abdomen can contain. A smaller bug injects less saliva, draw in less blood, producing a smaller swelling. Smaller swelling close together makes a patch of skin looks like a rash. The more saliva we get, the more reactions we have. Posology, a word that deserves reflexion.
Actually, it does not matter what type of bite you have, what matters is that you stop them. There is only one thing that can stop all bedbugs and stop all bites at once, and that is a bedbug shield. A physically impenetrable barrier to stops all and any bedbug bite. No matter if you have a single bedbug or a thousand, tiny almost indiscernible bites or major ones like most of what is on the net. At the first sign or suspicion of a bedbug, put the bedbug shield on the bed and without blood the bedbug cannot molt or lay eggs. The shield will not only stop bedbug bites but keep the infestation from growing at the same time. If you have only one bedbug, you will not get one or ten more from the hatching of eggs and nymphs will not be able to molt.
Do it yourself, it will not cost you more than a few dollars and will avoid all those different types of bedbug bites. You will never know what pain it is to have a major infestation because with a bedbug shield on the bed, the infestation will not grow and will not multiply to that point. Nobody will make profit from you, other than the few inexpensive materials you will find in a local store, the trap is free. The key to getting rid of bedbugs is to stop feeding them. Under a bedbug shield, the bedbug dies of starvation. The traps on the floor are only there to catch bedbugs in the room and on the floor. It is the shield that protects you from bites.
————————- Bedbug RIP pic ———————-
Just want to say thanks for the helpful information you have posted about getting rid of bed bugs.
We had one room under attack a few months ago, put everything outside and steamed it all, killing quite a few nests in the bed base near our heads. A couple of months later and they were back with a vengance, with the wife wanting to get rid of all the furniture and call the pest control guy.
I found your website and went out and immediately bought a mattress cover, which saved our quality mattress from being thrown out and has halted the flow of bed begs from that area of the bedroom.
The bed base was a bit of a lost cause, as it was wooden, contacted the floor all the way round, had drawers that sat on the floor with grooved panels that just begged for bed bugs to nest, and was rotting where the base boards sat giving another perfect haven for the bed bugs to re-infest. We bought a metal framed bed base, which has six, easily defensible legs where we put up scotch tape and talc barriers that are working a treat.
We had more wooden furniture in the rest of the room, some of which had larger bed bugs hiding in them but were easily cleaned out. Fortunately, all the rest of this wooden furniture was stood off from the floor by four legs a piece, which again were easy to secure with scotch tape and talc barriers.
We steamed our carpet and found a nest at the wall near our bed head in a telephone connector, which we cleaned up. I also constructed a couple of CO2 trap, per the design suggestions here, which have started catching a couple of the dormant bugs that have come out since no more easy food is coming their way. A skinny, dead bed bug is a good bed bug!
It’s been a full week now with no bed bug bites and not a sign of the in the bed (eg. blood spots), so we will keep up the CO2 traps until they don’t catch anything for at least a month.
Thanks again for your gracious help in allowing me to treat this annoying problem by myself, and so far it seems I am winning the war!
Hi I was wondering if using the dry ice on the mattress is safe if I have a cat she wouldn’t be in the room but in the house and its is a tiny place a one bedroom trailer. I am going to be away so I thought it would be perfect to try since it needs to sit for 36 hours
Hi Jules
Watched every one of your youtube videos..and loved them. As a recent victim of this scourge, I really feel for everyone. In my case one of my kids brought them home from a friends house, who totally insisted that there was no problem. As it turns out, he was one of those people that had no reaction to them. Lucky in my case that my child has a severe reaction to the bites. Large, itchy welts. I didn’t suspect bb’s until about a month into the welts, when I saw one crawling on the wall of the bathroom at 2am. Totally freaked out.
So, now we know what we have. I did not do step 1 which is “DON’T PANIC” I think everyone’s reaction is to completely ignore step 1. :O I bagged all of her stuff that was all over the floor and dryed/washed/dryed it. Done. I vacuumed her mattress/boxspring, then discovered a good sized bug crawling on her boxspring AFTER I vacuumed. Yah, that’s the part where I disturbed them, and shouldn’t have. Then I panicked and hauled the boxspring and mattress out of the house. I know. I know. We seriously could not afford losing that bed. CRAP. Then I got to the metal frame that the mattress/box was sitting on. I had wrapped a good sized dish cloth around one end of the frame that was not against the wall, as the plastic bumper had come off and just the metal would be sticking out to catch an unsuspecting shin bone. When I slowly took it off, lo and behold there was a few nymphs in there. Big enough that I could see them running around, maybe 3 or 4. Here is where another bit of craziness came in. I close up the cloth and take it outside to show some of the other kids what was in it. Got totally freaked when they started running around and just flung the stupid cloth onto the ground. Something about wrapping things in plastic THEN throwing in garbage can came into my mind AFTER THE FACT. CRAAAP!!! This is where a question comes in. First thing, this all came out at the beginning of Nov/12. When I dragged the mattress/boxspring outside, I had leaned it up against the fence about 6 feet from the back door, and that is pretty much the same distance the stupid cloth was flung on the ground. During this time it was kind of chilly/damp/raining/sleeting out. I don’t know if it gets as cold in Quebec City as here in MB, but the temp here for a lot of the winter has been anywhere from -25C to -42C. We had a good week and a half to 2 weeks of those minus 40’s. Miserable. Is it possible that those stupid bugs that were sent outdoors somehow managed to hide somewhere outside for the winter and will creep back into the house somehow when they thaw out when it gets warmer outside? Or once they are outside without having anything to hide in they are goners? If they haven’t succumbed to the cold, maybe they will thaw out the same time as the ants and spiders outside and those others insects will have at them. I really don’t know. I am totally driving myself nuts over this. What do you think?
I got diatomaceous earth from a friend who had them, used it and ended her problem. After I emptied the kids room, I vacuumed and scalding hot water washed the room from top to bottom with murphy’s oil soap one day, hot water and bleach another, and spread DE around the whole perimeter of the room…a little thicker than is recommended but did not winter wonderland it. Did the same around the perimeter of the entire house for goodness sake. I vacuumed all the couches in my living room every day for like a 2 weeks…and I have 2 couches and a loveseat in there.Took me 3 hours to do all of them. Yes, that was a chore, let me tell you. I even sprinkled it under the couch cushions to be safe. I seriously think because the problem was so new that once the bed went out the problem went with it, as the kid never had any more welts after the bed went out. Amazingly the problem only stayed in her room, even tho she would get up at night with her scratching and go and lay on the couch, and her clothes and bedding were carried up and down the stairs to the laundry room, and I dragged the mattress/boxspring outside, and she was in the basement as well. There was divine intervention there I think, as I prayed for help like I have never prayed before.
I have a question. One of my patients has bed bugs severly in his reclyner/lift chair and a few were found on his couch nearby. alcohol was sprayed a coupla times, which did kill ones we could see. Today I covered his chair in plastic, very loosely bc its a lift chair, then I made 3 Co2 traps, I didnt realize how long the prep work was and the proofing yeast was overflowing from the glasses, SO after the traps were done(I used 2lt bottles and plastic over top in slick bowl) I wasnt sure if they were putting out Co2, I saw a medium layer at the top and it was bubbling some, but I put a lighter up to it and it did not go out??? shouldnt a candle or lighter go out if put up to it??? This was a lotta work and I’m going to be ticked if they arent working!
@__Susan Louth__What you did is very honorable; fighting bedbugs for the sake and welfare of someone else is admirable, especially when that person is helpless. CO2 bedbug traps are the best to control and catch bedbugs without the use of poison and the problems and costs involved.
The method used to produce CO2 to attract bedbugs is fermentation, a mix of sugar and yeast in lukewarm water. A normal mixture will keep making CO2 for a period of 2-3 weeks. It has been successfully tried countless times and is used by thousands of people to get rid of bedbug infestations of all size, and it always work. The trap works because it waits for bedbugs to be hungry and then lures them into small pitfalls from which they cannot get out. Hunger is the weakness of bedbugs; it is what we use to defeat them.
I am aware that drawback of CO2 bedbug traps is the preparation work involved, making something which is new for most people and not sure exactly how it works, it could be frustrating at first. When I made my first traps over three years ago, I experienced the same difficulties, but quickly became proficient as I got the hang of it trying to make it a simple as possible using the most common and inexpensive materials. The trap is a container to hold and produce the CO2. Its shape and size does not matter and the choice of a 2L bottle is based only on its availability, it is the cheapest container anyone can get anywhere around the world. But it is not the only one as traps can be made using a wide variety of different containers, you can see other models on some other of my videos and on the CO2 Bedbug Trap website @ julesnoise.com. Some models are easier to make and more convenient to use, especially those using a small tubing or common drinking straws to bring the CO2 into small glass pitfalls placed under the bed or under a chair. Once you get used to it, those traps can be made in less than five minutes.
The mixture to produce CO2 is also something that we need to learn to get the best results. In your case, you mention that you the proofing yeast overflowed from the glass, this is usually due to a too large amount of sugar in the proofing glass or waiting too long to pour it into the larger volume of sweet lukewarm water of the 2L bottle. This happen often the first times we use yeast, experienced bread makers can tell you all about the reactions of yeast. Often, we have to try it a few times before we get it right even if we follow the recipe to a “t”. Yeast is a living organism and not quite predictable, but after doing it a few times, you will be able to do routinely, almost with your eyes closed. Don’t worry, your traps will work.
How can we tell if traps are producing invisible and odorless CO2? I have seen experiments where someone drops a light match into a deep bowl or glass and the flame snuffs out as soon as the match is dipped in it. But that does not seem to work in some traps, the reason is that most of the time, the flame disturbs the CO2 content and air is drawn into the bowl or glass and the flame does not get extinguished. A better way to see CO2 come out of the bottle is to make it come out in water, meaning that if you have a small tubing coming out of the 2L bottle, you can place the end of that tubing into another glass with water and you will see CO2 bubbles rising in that second glass. Of course, there are also other visual signs that the 2L bottle is producing CO2; the mixture should be cloudy with tiny bubbles rising in the brew of the 2L bottle and forming a ring at the top of the brew. There is also the smell of baked bread coming out of the tubing or the bottle. Mastering fermentation is relatively quick procedure and you should be able to do it after a few attempts.
But there is something more important than making traps. Traps are meant to catch bedbugs on the floor and in the room, foraging and roaming bedbugs. For someone like your patients, it is more important to keep bedbugs from being able to bite them than catch them with traps. Traps do not work on bedbugs which already are in their beds or in their recliner/lift chairs. Bedbugs will not go back down to the floor once they have succeeded to get into them. Those bedbugs have to be stopped and eliminated some other way.
You have tried alcohol but you cannot get them all and you have to do it repeatedly. There is better than that and it is a bedbug shield. A shield against bedbugs is an impenetrable barrier that stops all and every bedbug, totally stopping them from being able to bite and to feed. It is the equivalent of putting a screen in the window or a net over the bed for mosquitoes. Since bedbugs are crawlers, this shield or barrier has to be put over the place where bedbugs are, in this case, over the bed, couch and/or recliner/lift chair.
When you covered one of your patient’s lift chair with a loosely sheet of plastic, you made such a shield. The shield is a physical barrier that no bedbug can cross, they cannot go through plastic and they cannot get around it if the sides are hanging down. The hanging edge of the plastic makes it impossible for bedbugs to negotiate the 180 degree turn from the inner side to the top side where the person is resting, so your patient gets totally protected against bedbug bites.
This is more important than traps on the floor. The first thing that a bedbug shield does is to stop all and every bites at once! As soon as you put it on, the person using the chair is immediately protected from bedbug bites. It is the greatest blow you can give to bedbugs. Bedbugs are very vulnerable insects because they have only one source of food. Think about it, what happens to bedbugs that cannot feed? Bedbugs need blood to molt; bedbugs that cannot feed cannot molt, their growth cycle is broken. Bedbugs need blood to lay eggs; bedbugs that cannot feed cannot lay eggs, their multiplication cycle is broken. Bedbugs need blood to live; bedbugs that cannot feed cannot survive, their cycle is broken. And all those wondrous things that happen to bedbugs is done with a simple sheet of plastic that you have put on your patient’s chair. That is the first thing to do, a shield to keep bedbugs from being able to bite.
It is so simple to stop and eliminate bedbugs with a shield; you just put it on the harborage and wait for bedbugs to die of starvation. That is the key to get bedbug free, to keep them from feeding and let them die all by themselves while you can use your belongings as before without worrying about getting a bite.
Bedbugs are attracted to CO2 and they are also attracted by our body heat, under a shield they keep trying to go up and are stopped by the shield. They end up stuck underneath it and cannot reach the person on the other side of the plastic. They slowly die of starvation within a few weeks.
As traps, a shield can be made in many ways. It can be a simple sheet of plastic loosely draped over the chair, couch or bed. But it can also be fitted to hold better in place, or combined with fabric with only plastic hanging sides to make it more comfortable as plastic can be slippery and sweaty.
This is a long answer but I found it important to give you more details and insight what a bedbug trap can do and how to do it. I think that this can be a recurring position that you get into because you help others. The shield and the traps are 100% efficient to stop and get rid of bedbugs permanently without spreading them. It is something that nobody is making a profit from, a way to defend ourselves against bedbugs and for you who is a blessing for ailing people who cannot do it themselves, a relief in their bedbug nightmare.
Regards
JulesNoise
sorry this went under the reply section, but couldnt find a place to ask this question.
Dear JulesNoise,
In almost each of the trap movies, you use a mixture of yeast and water for getting CO2.
Can I simply use several bottles of carbonated water?
Best regards,
Maciej
@__Maciej
All the traps use the sugar/yeast in lukewarm water mixture to produce CO2. There are only two things that attract bedbugs, heat from our body and carbon dioxide contained in our breath. Bedbugs do not feed (bite) everyday, so to work a trap has to remain active longer than any bedbug feeding cycle. Yeast and sugar fermentation gives off CO2 in small quantities, the equivalent of a small animal like a hamster, slowly decreasing over a period of 2-3 weeks,
Carbonated water also gives off CO2. It releases most of its CO2 upon opening and will become flat within a day or two, giving off very little CO2 at the end. It would require over 20 2L bottles of carbonated water to last as long as fermentation does. Yes, you could make a bedbug trap using carbonated water but it would be much more expensive and would require daily replacement of bottles.
Curiosity is a good way to learn. Wondering if carbonated water would work show that your gears are working. Excellent.
I see the video with the yogurt containers but it doesn’t say what to put in it. I am going crazy with bedbugs and a 2L will not fit under my bed. I am not to clear on how to use the yogurt containers please help
Hi Naomi,
Going crazy with bedbugs? We can eliminate them with a bedbug shield and CO2 traps.
The first thing to do is to stop the bedbugs and keep them from being able to bite with a shield over the bed. A shield is a barrier that bedbug cannot get through or around it. Bedbugs stopped by a shield cannot bite and get stuck under the shield to die of starvation. With a shield on the bed, you can sleep soundly without a bite, no more bites, the shield stops all bedbug bites at once. Once the shield is in place, then we can make the CO2 bedbug traps that go under the bed.
It is more important than making traps. Traps are meant to catch bedbugs on the floor and in the room, foraging and roaming bedbugs. For someone like you, it is more important to keep bedbugs from being able to bite them than catch them with traps. Traps do not work on bedbugs which already are in their beds or in the couch. Bedbugs will not go back down to the floor once they have succeeded to get into them. Those bedbugs have to be stopped and eliminated some other way.
There are two ways to make a bedbug shield:
• The first one is the easiest and can be made with a simple sheet of plastic (about 9 feet by 12 feet) simply draped directly on the mattress and with its sides hanging down. The hanging sides are cut about an inch above the floor. To see how to make one, please look at the attached video “Bedbug Shield – Sheet”.
• The second way needs a little more work but is more comfortable. It uses a regular contour bed sheet on top of the mattress and only the hanging sides are made of plastic (about 2 feet by 24 feet). To see how to make this second one, please look at the attached video ” The Bedbug Shield”.
You can also find the videos on my Youtube channel or by search their names on Google.
It is simple to stop and eliminate bedbugs with a shield; you just put it on the harborage and wait for bedbugs to die of starvation. That is the key to get bedbug free, to keep them from feeding and let them die all by themselves while you can use your belongings as before without worrying about getting a bite.
Start with the shield and all bites will stop at once. Do only that at first and meanwhile I will send you another description on how to make the traps. I will follow what you did and guide you until your bedbug trap is completed. Once the set up is done, you can resume living normally without worrying about bedbugs while they get trapped and die of suffocation in the traps and of starvation under the shield. You will not be disappointed as the shield and the traps get rid of bedbugs right down to the last one.
It is much easier than it looks, but I will be here and quickly answer to any questions, problems or difficulties you might have. We will get you bedbug-free by keeping bedbugs from biting you.
Keep me informed of your progress and actions.
Best regards,
JulesNoise
This sound great, is there a place where a trap can be bought? I just don’t have the spatial ability to build one..the directions are a bit too cloudy for me..perhaps if there was a step by step diagram rather than a video I could understand it…I do appreciate you doingthis for the pulic..its badly needed.
Sweetkali,
The CO2 Bedbug Trap is not a commercial product, it is meant for everybody and anybody, anywhere in the world using the cheapest and most available materials that can be found around.
2’x24′ painter’s plastic sheets, clear wrapping tape, empty 2L bottles, flexible drinking straws, small glasses filled with CO2 from sugar and yeast in tepid water.
That’s it, you have the most efficient bedbug trap in the world. The best part is that nobody makes any money off you, the only costs are for the materials listed above and found locally.
If the trap can’t be bought, it can be made with the help of a friend. It is a mutual service where your friend learns at the same time as you do how a trap works and how to make one. Your friend will keep the knowledge and might use it later to help another friend and who knows, maybe help herself.
Asking someone to help us is a blessing for both.
I am a MOM with two children
I just found your page. I have been fighting the problem a while now. I hate them. I hate them. I hate them. We used a professional exterminator. The problem came back.
At first impression of your page, I thought it looked too hard. And I thought it looked crazy, and didn’t look like it would work on such clever vampires . Here in the US , we are trained to think and rely on the Capitalist for our everything.. !
But now that I think about it, i see the beauty of your thinking, and I am sterilizing my water as i type. As well, I have cleaned items and stored them in plastic marked “CLEAN” I have patched as many cracks and harborages as I can and wraping my bed in plastic that they can’t climb up.
THANK YOU There should be more scientific people like you in this world who are Honest people that would rather “teach people to fish, than sell them fish”.
HINT TO TAKE OUT BUGS WHEN YOU SEE THEM
to kill bugs if you see them: buy a roll of the cheap wide cellophane (clear) packaging tape. . Just cut off 3- inch pieces ahead of time… store them around where you are likely to see bugs…your bed .. stick them very lightly to your table or wall so they are easy to pick off in a hurry…where you can quickly grab a tape and STICK-LIFT your little vampire RIGHT UP. They stick to the tape rather nicely..kicking their strong little legs to no avail… Then fold the tape over so they cant squirt eggs or wriggle free . careful not to squash them in the tape… no messy smelly stuff…and they live on that tape for over a month without food or water… Maybe if there is any justice in this world, they suffer…. I hope they do.
can I use plastic tumbler cups wrapped with masking tape for the traps or is glass better at containing the co2?? or even plastic disposable cups? have 3 rooms I need to cover and not enough glass bowls that a 2 liter bottle can sit comfortably in, thank you for your help
I have done some research and actually purchased 25 ft of aquarium tubing at a local super store for 3 bucks. You can put a hole in the top of your 2 liter, insert the tubing, seal around the hole and tubing with silicone or glue, then you can just lead that tube into whatever container you have…just make sure your pitfall has a nice ramp or skirt so these vile little creatures can climb up into the container easily and make sure the inside of the container is slick enough to be escape proof. Very best of luck from someone dealing with this as well…
Kristie,
Excellent, you got the procedure of making a trap to its basic in a great way. I doubt any bedbug is a match for you now. I’m very happy, thank you.
Julien
First of all, I need to THANK you from the bottom of my heart for this web site. I have two little girls and I provide full time care for a mentally challenged adult (she lives with me) My children and I have been hyper aware of bugs this season because we camp a lot and up until 3 weeks ago, I thought having a tick was the worst thing that could ever happen to us where bugs are concerned. This is essentially how we discovered our bed bug issue as we found two little brown bugs crawling on a hat hanging on the wall and a piece of paper on a dresser. I panicked and contacted every single exterminator in this city (Indianapolis) only to be told that no one was available to come out to my home with C4, the swat team and all other forms of back up for a week or two at best. Nearing desperation, my 12 year old found one lone person who could come immediately! He charged me $750 cash (I signed a contract, which I tried to read, but was so hysterical that even the simple act of reading didn’t really register in my mind.) He calmly told me that he would get rid of these things and that I wouldn’t have to lift a finger..no clearing out closets, getting rid of clutter, throwing out beds or purchasing encasements. He also told me that it was extremely important that we stay here and basically use ourselves as bait. The woman I care for had a large infestation in her bed, and although we did not see any in our bed, my children and I were getting bit (we originally thought we were having a severe reaction to mosquitoes) I have a basement with a guest bed down there and when I questioned this man as to why he wasn’t spraying there, or our living room, he became angry with me. I have done nothing for three weeks but live and breath these things. When I am not physically cleaning and doing laundry, I am reading and reading and reading….”knowledge is power” right….I asked him what his opinion of co2 along with a heating pad was… I understand us not spending the night somewhere else so as not to drag our new, unwanted family members with us, but how about setting up something that will draw them to it, and keep them off of us as I am going insane. He actually told me that I am such a know it all that he should hire me, and that the reason he isn’t spraying the living room or the basement is because nobody is experiencing any bites in those areas. I tried to point out that the girl who sleeps in the infested bed has not shown one single bite mark and according to an entomologist, some people can be bitten and not show any reaction whatsoever. My Mother occasionally sleeps in the basement bed and has not experienced any reaction to bites. This man actually became angry started to leave. I suggested that he refund my money minus the two times he has been here to spray (the contract is for a year) and he told me there is no way I will get my money back… any of it. I told him that if he did not refund my money then he needed to spray or do whatever it is that he is supposed to be doing. I had purchased an encasement for the mattress for the girl whose bed was infested and he intentionally ripped it “to demonstrate why mattress encasements are not effective” This man is horrible..absolutely horrible! The only thing I can think of to do is deal with him.. which involves lots of medication and duct tape for my mouth lol…let it be a lesson learned and then deal with things my own way… here is the thing…I purchased very expensive encasements for my queen sized bed. I know there are bugs inside the box spring as I saw blood through the encasement where one was squished…gross…the encasements purchased are protect a bed which are very highly rated. I am so worried that he is going to intentionally tear a hole in one (I have both box spring and mattress encased and have even lined my metal frame with strips of duct taped fabric so that it does not tear) can I entomb my entire bed in plastic and drop some dry ice in the “tomb” without removing my store bought encasements, which are zippered tightly and the zipper is zip tied shut as well) or will the co2 not penetrate this material and kill anything inside my box spring and mattress? We have wrapped all other mattresses in plastic, dressers and other various pieces of furniture in plastic and hauled it out to trash. This was all done while I was in panic mode ;o) I really do believe that I have eradicated a huge giant mess of these things by ridding our home of infested furnishings. I originally took out dresser drawers and clothing, flipped the drawers and did not see any bugs…whew…but then while on a cleaning spree, I decided to flip my daughter’s dresser over to hammer in a nail that was gouging my wood floors…omg I freaked out again as these vile filthy things were under her dresser….this is when I decided to wrap shelves, dressers…u name it and haul them out to burn..which we did. I am normally a very upbeat person.. my family jokes about wanting to borrow my rose colored glasses, but this is seriously killing my mind. I itch all the time, but especially when I get in bed, I cry and I throw ridiculous tantrums (yelling that I hate my house and I hate my life and that if these things are not gone SOON, I will run away from my house completely naked, leaving everything behind.) It is completely irrational, I recognize this lol.. if I were a bystander I would probably contact the men in white coats all while laughing hysterically, but I am not a bystander… these things have invaded my brain and I want it back. I have gone to my Dr and have been prescribed ambien and xanax…which is a bit of a joke as I sit up in bed fighting sleep with a magnifying glass and a flash light. Horse tranquilizers may possibly be required for a good nights sleep. My Dr asked me why I am so upset about this situation and I just cried that I cannot handle the thought of bugs crawling on me while I sleep.. did I mention that I have bites on my face?…What I really wanted to do was shout at him that I bet if his children or his wife woke up with a freaking miniature cockroach crawling on their faces, they would be hysterical as well….These days anyone is an easy whipping post for my frustration and anger. I know that this isn’t necessarily a “dirty” thing…. but I feel dirty, I feel ashamed, I feel angry and frustrated and depressed and at times hopeless…I do not know when my baby girls can have their friends over again, or if it is really ok for me to go to visit anyone. When I do go places, I don’t take my purse in…I’m thinking about buying one of those camping showers and hauling it around with me.. when I visit someone, I can set it up and change like superman before I enter their house…ok, u are probably starting to see how disturbed this situation has made me. Your site, out of the many I have poured over, has been the most informative by far and I am sharing what I learn with friends and family. I am actually urging them to install CO2 detectors even if they are “sure they don’t have any”. I come from a family of goodwill shoppers.. always hunting for a deal…I don’t think I will ever again purchase a used item, or even walk into a used store. I think my family and friends, while sympathizing with my problem, do not really feel that they should make their own detectors. That is the other thing I wanted to note…My girls and I worked for three hours the other night filling water bottles with the CO2 mix…we carefully measured the water temperature, siliconed around the hole in the lid of the bottle where the straw comes out and led the straw to a glass wrapped in that stuff you buy to line shelves with…they are slowly bubbling, so I know they are working. The traps in my daughters room have caught three small ones… they do not look like full grown adult bugs. The traps in the bedroom that was infested are clean, but I found one on her bed that looked well fed…will be putting her bed legs in containers lined with powder. I was wondering if my central air will have a negative impact on my traps (I keep my house COLD) and is it probable that I eradicated most of the problem by removing furnishings that appeared to have bugs in or on it. I will use CO2 traps for the rest of my life, but for right now, I envision these filthy things crawling all around in my walls, under my floor on the basement ceiling…it’s just horrible what goes through my mind. So, Thank you so very very much for sharing your knowledge and for helping me in any way that you can. And I know this post is long and rambling, but I hope someone else may read it and understand that they are not the only one going through this who has suffered major emotional trauma. PS: If you lost track of my main question through all of my rambling, I am anxious to entomb my entire bed in plastic and throw some dry ice in it. Will it be alright if I just leave my store bought encasements on the box spring and mattress, will the CO2 penetrate the fabric of the protect a bed cover or is it necessary for me to remove them? Thank you so much for all of your help. Ignorance is not bliss, knowledge is power and it is so gracious of you to share your knowledge with others!!!!!
Hi Kristie,
Quite a story you have to tell, one I know well. Details vary from one person to the other but basically it is all the same, it’s the bedbug nightmare.
Knowledge is power Kristie, and it is knowledge that will make you win the war. First we have to know the enemy. We are dealing with a bug that is bigger than life because make it so, but as soon as we find out how to deal with it, it goes back to its real nature, a stupid insect that has many vulnerabilities. Sure it is a master at hiding, most methods of fighting bedbugs fail because it attacks them and makes them flee and spread out further away until the whole place is infested, and then in despair people call the poison pusher. We cannot find all bedbugs but bedbugs sure can find us. That’s what I use against them, We know where bedbugs are.°[1]° We use that too to apply measures to take and where.
First we must realize it is hopeless to go after them, it only scatters them. We must do the opposite, attract them and gather them in the principal places where they go naturally. And then stop them and catch them hungry when they try to feed. Deny them their food and let them die of starvation. Hunger kills bedbugs, let them come out of hiding and catch them when they try to feed.
°[1]° ___ 70,4% of all bedbugs are in the bed (mattress, boxspring, frame/headboard). 22,6% of all bedbugs are in the couch, armchairs, desk chairs, upholstered furniture. And only 7% of them are in the room, the famous “everywhere” where they claim bedbugs are (baseboards, nightstand, dresser, walls, ceiling, closets… etc).
So you see that in any place, bedbugs are 93% in the beds and couches, that’s what we have to take care of. Since it is letting bedbugs bite which is the problem, we simply stop them from being able to do that.
Bedbugs bite only when there is a person sleeping or resting on the bed or couch. Unoccupied beds or couches do not attract bedbugs. But in occupied beds or couches, it is the heat of our bodies and the CO2 contained in our breath that always leads them to us. There is no way to stop them except with a shield, something that bedbugs cannot get through and that will stop all and every bite at once.
To completely eliminate bedbugs permanently, you must do three things:
• First, keep bedbugs from being able to bite and feed while you sleep or rest with a bedbug shield on occupied beds and couches. A bedbug shield is an impenetrable barrier that no bedbug can cross or get around. It can be made with a simple sheet of plastic draped over the bed or couch, or with a combination of fabric and plastic sides to make this barrier that will keep bedbugs from feeding. That is the most important part of a bedbug trap as if you keep bedbugs from being able to bite, they cannot molt and grow, and they cannot lay eggs and multiply. Bedbugs cannot survive more than a few weeks under a shield because they cannot go dormant. Under a shield, bedbugs die of starvation. With a shield on the bed, you can sleep soundly without a bite the same as if there were no bedbugs. I have two videos showing how to make a shield and you can find them with the links in the description box under my videos or by simply searching for “Bedbug Shield” on Google. (the one combining a regular contour bed sheet and plastic sides is the most comfortable and easiest to take care of, the other one with a single plastic sheet is the fastest and easiest to do). Those who have mattress encasements can use them to make a shield by simply adding the vertical plastic sides and tape them directly on the sides of the encasements.
• Second, make CO2 bedbug traps that you will put under the bed to catch roaming or foraging bedbugs in the room (bedbugs left from the previous tenant). The shield on the bed (couch) stops and starves bedbugs already in the bed (couch) while the traps catch and suffocates bedbugs elsewhere in the room. I have many videos showing how to make bedbug traps, using one or the other is only a matter of convenience but the best are the ones using a tubing (or straws) bringing CO2 from a bottle into a small glass pitfall that no bedbug can get out of.
• Third, make bedbug barriers to keep bedbugs from being able to forage and get anywhere in the room. Bedbug barriers are smooth slippery vertical surfaces that bedbugs cannot climb onto and get into the bed, couch, furniture or the walls. The best and surprisingly the most amazing bedbug barriers are made of simple common scotch tape brushed with talcum powder. Scotch tape by itself makes a bedbug barrier when it is applied to a vertical surface as it is difficult and too smooth for bedbugs to use their hooks to climb up on it, but it is covered it with talcum powder it becomes virtually impossible for bedbugs to cross it. They slip, they slide and fall and always fall down to the floor. Barriers can be used on legs of the bed, legs of the couch, legs of furniture and also above the baseboard of the walls to keep bedbugs from being to climb up on any of them, as well as around light switches, thermostats or any other appliance that you would want bedbugs to be unable to get in.
The whole system goes like this; the shield on the bed (couch) keeps bedbugs from being able to bite and make them die of starvation; CO2 bedbug traps catch roaming bedbugs anywhere else in the room when they come out to try to feed and bedbug barriers keeps bedbugs from being able to get anywhere in the room except on to the floor where CO2 traps will catch them.
Shield, traps and barriers will make your new place bedbug free and most importantly bedbug proof. You will never be bothered by bedbugs again, eliminating them before they can start an infestation.
The best part is that the CO2 bedbug trap system cost next to nothing using the most common and available materials you can find and also the best tools you can ever have, a sharp mind and good hands. Make your own bedbug eradication system; you will keep that knowledge for the rest of your life. Just like me and thousands of people who used the traps, you will be and remain bedbug free.
There is a lot that could be said about exterminators and their techniques as well as where bedbugs really do come from, the bedbug is a cash cow as you recently found out. I have made the trap to eliminate bedbugs but the trap also eliminates exterminators.
Keep me informed where you are at with the home improvement project I propose and we will take care of details if need be.
Best regards
JulesNoise
Hi Kristie!
I was drinking my morning coffee and reading through the comments that others left here. I have to tell you thank you so much for your story! I was laughing and crying at the same time! Very amusing seriously! Lol But most importantly and so nice to know that someone else is going through the same thing, having same thoughts and emotions. I did get crazy myself. What a relieve to know I am one of many and we are in this fight together. Hopefully The Crazy Step 1 is over and I can fight those terrible creature with a clear mind.
Dan
PS Just wondering if you’re bb free now?
Jules, thank you once again for all the info. GREAT. Here are my questions post bed bug trap construction:
1. I made the first brew and it frothed up huge filled the whole 12oz glass almost no liquid. I then added that to the 2 l with the remaining sugar water mix and mixed together. I then distributed to 4 bottled, Ill try and attach photo. Is that correct??
2. Now in the bottles its a cloudy mix with sludge on the bottom about 3 mm of yeast, sludge sitting there. It is off gasing slightly but not a lot. Last night no bugs were caught AND I got bit again. My mattress is wrapped already and I freshly washed the sheet. Any comments are appreciated.
3. Is is super critical the straw to bottle is sealed? I used expanding foam and they are tight but not sure if its air tight?
Thank you for your feedback. Ill report back if I catch them . They are here, I caught a 5mm female yesterday on wall.
Steve
Brooklyn NY
Also I was wondering how can you confirm the bottles are giving off enough CO2? I used the 4 500ml route and I did put the straw in water but after 30 sec didnt really see any bubbles. Does that mean my ferm. solution is not potent?
Hello there
What a wonderful thing you are doing – I was so happy to find your website and am so grateful to you for sharing your knowledge in such a calm and logical way. It is good to know its possible to get rid of them with patience and attention to detail.
I hope you don’t mind but I think I should give a summary of our current position before my questions:
I have never found any physical evidence of them but now I recognise the smell I know they’ve been around in the lounge for a long while. I remember thinking a house guest must have wet themselves sleeping on the sofa and washing all the covers 8 months ago – but thinking the smell was oddly sweet.
Before the first PC company treatment I was being bitten a couple of times a night, having got worse over several months. The treatment was unsuccessful and I believe a combination of this, clearing the house and a UK heat wave scattered them and taken us to at least medium infestation level. Following this first treatment the bites steadily increased in number and on one boiling hot night I fell asleep on the sofa by mistake and got more than 80 bites of various sizes. I am still itching from all my recently accumulated bites, so I am reacting for well over a month to them, its hell and hard to hide! This is also when we have our first and only physical evidence – my housemate gets in the shower one morning only to find one busy feeding on her arm! Her skin doesn’t react to this and she has had hardly any evidence of bites to date – so she obviously isn’t allergic like me.
At the prescribed 6 weeks after the first spray the house has been treated by a new company, using a different chemical formula. In addition I now have this set up: box springs and mattresses are zip covered (and soon duvets and pillows too) all bedding boil washed and bed legs sitting in glasses. I set up two Co2 traps (Bag over bottle style) in each room but nothing so far for 8 days. I realise now I should have taken all these other measures first before treating with chemicals and that we may have aggravated the situation.
I’m guessing the chemical treatment and/ or other measures & cooler weather has had some effect as I think I’ve had very few new bites over the last week. But I find it very hard to tell now because I’m covered in hundreds of old bites that keep flaring up and my housemate’s aren’t obvious.
Here are my questions:
Are the covers, bed legs in glasses and beds away from the wall good enough or do we need to cover with plastic too?
Is the chemical spray making them hide and could that be why we’ve caught nothing in the traps yet despite keeping them away from us?
I can smell them really strongly in the sofas and as I said I think this may have been the original infestation, I wrongly thought it was my room as I was the only one that got the bites. We have stopped sitting in the lounge but now I have covered the sofas in plastic so we can sit on them again. However nothing caught in those traps or seen anything when lounge & sofa inspected. How long does that sweet smell of theirs linger after they have moved elsewhere or died? Could they now be travelling from the sofas all the way upstairs to my room and back each night?
And lastly – I have two camping holidays booked over the coming month and I really don’t want to pass this problem on to anyone, and particularly not to my friends and family. I was thinking of borrowing a tent and bedding from a clean source, laundering all my clothes and bags and isolating in plastic bags. Are these good enough measures to reduce risk or should I just face facts and not go? Already all my anxiety from this has derived from a fear of passing them on – I’ve been avoiding visiting but I work childminding and in several different offices, so it has been a source of constant worry that my little parasites are along for the ride with me!
Many thanks in advance for any advice you offer
& Very best wishes to you.
IS only bed bung shield okay or we must have to make bed bug trap????
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! — And I thank God He led me to you!
I have battled these creatures for three decades and finally, finally, by the grace of God and your website and videos, these creatures have been severely stopped.
Plastic sheeting over the box spring and cellophane tape around the walls of the room were ingenious! It took me years to discover that they were dropping from the ceiling and I didn’t know how to stop it. But Praise God, I know now!
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! You have been a Godsend!
Jules,
I’ve been trying to reach you. Are you still availale to answer questions. I greatly appreciate all that you’ve done to help people. Hope to hear from you soon! :)
~Gabby
A tip of the hat to you Jules !!!!! Take A BOW. Extra curtain calls !!!
You put it all in one website. A MASTER STOKE!
Concise, well written, excellent illustrations, nearly perfectly emphasized points; a beautiful piece of work.
You are going to be able to take credit for tormenting, slowly starving, and suffocating MILLIONS of bedbugs. I’m jealous.
I was just going to put what I have learned on a website when I found yours. Thanks for saving me time, and I doubt I would have done it as well.
It started with a website by Jules, grew into a movement, then rumbled round the globe devastating the entire bedbug world!
“Jules! ……Jules! … Jules”, they chanted.
Jules! Jules! Jules! Jules! Jules! Jules! Jules! Jules! Jules! Jules! Jules!
JULES FOR EMPEROR!
Thanks
Jeremy
hi jules,
first of all god bless you.
please make a donation link, i will be the first to donate, your work has and will help a lot of people.
I set my first trap tonight.
Again GOD BLESS for being so kind to share this information and help people.
Iyer
Hi Iyer,
I never took any money for the Bedbug Trap and I never will, but your offer is nice. One thing I would like is that you keep a history of your bedbug fight and once you are bedbug free, share it with others, this would be better than money. Helping others carries its own rewards.
Don’t forget to use the bedbug Shield with the trap and stop all bites at once.
Blessings
JulesNoise
Greetings!
I fear I have been invaded. Thankfully I have come across your blog to help me fight back. However, I live in a bachelor apartment with a pet cat, which leaves me with a couple concerns once I’ve taken the suggested precautions to shield myself.
My concerns are as follows:
1. Once I’ve starved the bedbugs from my blood, will they not feed on the next best thing (my cat)?
2. My cat regularly comes onto my bed. Could bedbugs hitch a ride and get back into my bed?
Thank you for any insights you can provide!
All the best,
Corey.
Hi Corey,
Cats are lucky, they have natural protection against bedbugs. Unfed bedbug bodies are thin and flat making them unable to walk or crawl through hair, even if they could slip sideway, it would be impossible for them to reach the cat’s skin with their short stylet fascicule used to draw blood.
It is easy to detect abedbug on a hairy animal. I know this from experience having a little hamster as a pet. I have seen a bedbug on her (female) only once when I had bedbugs over three years ago and I spotted it without even looking for it. They cannot get into the hair and are easy to spot unless your cat would be reddish brown.
As for humans, bedbugs can only bite on bare skin. Sheets, clothes or fabric keeps bedbugs from being able to reach the skin. In case of doubt if there are bedbugs in or on the sheets, hold them up against the window or a lamp, any bedbug will stand out as a dark spot the size of an apple seed against the light.
In further doubts, run the bedding in the dryer for 20 minutes on high heat, it will kill any bedbug and eggs.
Use the Bedbug Shield as the perfect barrier against bedbug and go to sleep soundly without a bite. Stuck under the shield, bedbugs die of starvation within a few weeks without you having to worry about them.
Do you see why I keep saying that it is easy to get rid of bedbugs? They either die by themselves under the Shield or the fall into the trap that you so generously provided for them.
Sleep tight and the key phrase is, don’t let the bedbug bite. Oh and enjoy the company of your cat.
JulesNoise
Hi Jules!!! You should have a shrine named after you. I live in Toronto, and you’ve inspired me to look into funding to start up a program for low income buildings and shelters to show residents (and staff) how to make their own traps and shields. Do workshops for people who feel hopeless because they can’t afford the exterminators, and they can’t afford to throw out and buy new items just feels right to me at this time of my life. I’ve only liked working on projects that help people (I’m currently a yoga teacher), and this sits right for me.
Here is my question. Mid August, I had discovered itching on the right side of my body (shoulders, arms, legs) and since they were more hive like, I thought I was having an allergic reaction. I went off to New York with my mum to visit a cousin over the last long weekend of the summer. Itching had slowed down to stop for the time I was there. Came back and started up again. Just to backtrack, I have been sleeping on my couch since Good Friday when my bedroom and bathroom walls were ripped out due to behind the wall leaking. I was living in a mess for 2 weeks prior to this (the contractors were lackadaisical about getting stuff done – I live in an apartment and the owners being cheap only get the crappiest contractors).
With the bedroom done (although with dry wall powder all over the place), and me going into a mini depression, my place became a hot mess (I’m a pack rat anyway, not a good thing), with clothes (clean or otherwise), books and magazines on the floor. I’m not just talking about the bedroom, but the living room and even the kitchen. Yes, I’m a bit of a slob.
Anyway first week of September, while I’m laying on the couch, chilling before bed, I see 2 bugs crawling on my pillow. They were like fruit flies but without the wings. I killed them. Then I saw another one and was like “WTF” when I crushed it between my fingers and the blood that came out made me realize I had bedbugs. I came out of my depressive stupor to look at my pillow and quilt and saw the tell tale signs of dark patches all over my pillow and quilt. It was the middle of the night, but I threw them out. I covered my sofa with plastic bags and had to sleep. I went into shock for about 2 days and then did the talc and Shop Vac thing and found where they had gotten into the base of my couch from the outside. It’s a great couch, so I decided to tape up around the corners and seams and put some double sided tape around the edges. I sleep covered from head to toe and the bites have def. lessened, but there is still a couple here and there.
Finally, my questions. I am house sitting for a friend for 2 weeks. She doesn’t have bed bugs, but I’m paranoid about housesitting for her (I will def. do laundry before I go to her place and intend to stay there for as much as possible). Should I bring a Co2 trap to her place to calm down my paranoia? As well, while I’m gone for the 2 weeks, I want to set up the traps in the whole apartment. Since I’ve practically been living in my living room, should I put 4 around the couch and four around the bed (even though I haven’t slept in there for month, but do go in from time to time to get clothes), and 1 trap in the other rooms. Since I won’t be there to sleep for 2 weeks, are the traps still effective without having my added presence? Should I put the protective cover on my couch after I return from housesitting (since I won’t be sleeping on it, and haven’t for a while, but intend to when I get back, and I intend to do the bed as well), or should I wait until I get back, then put the shields on and wait further until the traps no longer traps new bugs and I do the dry ice stage.
As well, should I be emptying out the glass traps every day (I will pop in here and there, but I’m hoping not much).
I do intend to get the dry ice and do both the sofa and the bed.
Sorry about the super long email and let me know what you think.
Thank you SOOOOOO much,
Jackie
hi!! this website is so informative and interesting, thank you!
i have an odd problem, i guess, and i was wondering if you had a possible solution.
i’ve been getting these bites for the last two or so month. they’re spaced far apart on my body, i only ever have 3 at most at a time (and not right near each other)… they’re raised in the middle which is atypical for bed bugs but then again, everyone’s bites are different.
i did an entire investigation of my room and i only found carpet beetle larvae. people can be allergic to them, but i’m not getting hives… just these couple of bumps every so often.
i don’t know if i have bed bugs. my problem is that i have clinically acknowledged hypochondria and among other medical delusions i go under, i am also as a result prone to bouts of delusory cleptoparasitosis.
the bites ARE REAL. i am in enough control of my sanity that i can ask other people i trust who will tell me the truth and i will believe them. other people have seen the bites.
to be honest, i am willing to accept that these are some minor dermatological condition or, indeed, dermatitis of carpet beetle larvae, but until i know for sure that they aren’t bed bugs, i will sit here in obsessive terror that i have bed bugs.
what i wanted to do was set up a trap as a test for bed bugs. my reasoning was: if i set up a trap, i will find at least one or i will find none at all and i will know for sure if i have bed bugs.
i made the trap according to your ‘step by step’ guide last night and no bugs. i was wondering if that’s the kind of trap i should be making for such a purpose, though. i really do not want to sheet my bed until i know for sure i have bed bugs, especially because my father is also a hypochondriac and if he saw me doing this he would also begin to panic about bed bugs that might not even be there. is it possible to set up a bed bug “positive/negative” test, if you will, without the sheeting?? or will they always only go for the human despite the traps if they have access to him or her?
i hope this all makes sense. i’ll try to phrase it again once more to make sure: i do not know if i have bed bugs. is there a kind of trap i can make, without sheeting my bed, to confirm their existence or lack of existence in my room?
thank you so much!! as a side note, i see you’re from Quebec City… i am in upstate NY right now but my family is from Montreal, i used to live in the Laurentians… QC is very beautiful!! :) bonne journée!
sorry if this posts twice… wordpress did something weird
hi!! this website is so informative and interesting, thank you!
i have an odd problem, i guess, and i was wondering if you had a possible solution.
i’ve been getting these bites for the last two or so month. they’re spaced far apart on my body, i only ever have 3 at most at a time (and not right near each other)… they’re raised in the middle which is atypical for bed bugs but then again, everyone’s bites are different.
i did an entire investigation of my room and i only found carpet beetle larvae. people can be allergic to them, but i’m not getting hives… just these couple of bumps every so often.
i don’t know if i have bed bugs. my problem is that i have clinically acknowledged hypochondria and among other medical delusions i go under, i am also as a result prone to bouts of delusory cleptoparasitosis.
the bites ARE REAL. i am in enough control of my sanity that i can ask other people i trust who will tell me the truth and i will believe them. other people have seen the bites.
to be honest, i am willing to accept that these are some minor dermatological condition or, indeed, dermatitis of carpet beetle larvae, but until i know for sure that they aren’t bed bugs, i will sit here in obsessive terror that i have bed bugs.
what i wanted to do was set up a trap as a test for bed bugs. my reasoning was: if i set up a trap, i will find at least one or i will find none at all and i will know for sure if i have bed bugs.
i made the trap according to your ‘step by step’ guide last night and no bugs. i was wondering if that’s the kind of trap i should be making for such a purpose, though. i really do not want to sheet my bed until i know for sure i have bed bugs, especially because my father is also a hypochondriac and if he saw me doing this he would also begin to panic about bed bugs that might not even be there. is it possible to set up a bed bug “positive/negative” test, if you will, without the sheeting?? or will they always only go for the human despite the traps if they have access to him or her?
i hope this all makes sense. i’ll try to phrase it again once more to make sure: i do not know if i have bed bugs. is there a kind of trap i can make, without sheeting my bed, to confirm their existence or lack of existence in my room?
thank you so much!! as a side note, i see you’re from Quebec City… i am in upstate NY right now but my family is from Montreal, i used to live in the Laurentians… QC is very beautiful!! :) bonne journée!
Hello,
I found 4 bed bugs in my second bedroom. I killed 3 saved one to get confirmation from a professional. I never had them before. I never been bitten by one of the bed bugs. I checked my outlets, checked my mattress and box springs since my first spotting and I cant find where the infestation is. I tried the dry ice trap and I didn’t catch any. I tried the CO2 with the sugar and yeast but I am not sure if I did it right. Also how do you keep the water temperature at 104. Also how many traps do per room do you need. I plan on getting bed bug covers for my mattress and box springs
Hi IncreaseMinded,
This is so similar to the previous request I had, for a moment I thought that you were the same person using a different name. But it might and probably is not, so it will be easy since I already have it all in my mind.
Here is a picture of the bedbug life cycle to identify them. http://www.bedbugs.org.uk/bed-bug-lifecycles/thorough-bed-bug-life-cycle.jpg It covers all stages of the growth of the bedbug. Bedbugs are totally dependent on blood, they need a blood to molt into each successive stage and they need blood to incubate and lay eggs as adults. It is the major weakness of the bedbug, since you can control their only source of food, you can easily control them by simply denying it to them. You can make them die of starvation.
Four bedbugs in a second room clearly show you were they are, coming out of hiding from somewhere in the particular room, roaming around to try to feed of the person who is sleeping in that bedroom. Since you have never been bitten, the other rooms, beds and/or couches might still not be infested and there might not be any bedbugs anywhere else yet. It is only when a colony matures, 100 bedbugs or more that natural scattering occurs, under the attacks of male bedbugs that other bedbugs leave the bed to flee.
Since you checked the outlets, mattress and box springs and can’t find where the infestation is, it probably means that you have only a light infestation. But you do have a bedbug infestation with the four specimens you found. At the beginning, bedbugs are always in the bed. The few bedbugs of a light infestation will turn into a large infestation of hundreds of bedbugs if they can feed. It takes about 6-8 weeks; soyou have a head start to prevent it from happening.
A dry ice trap is an insulated container to hold the dry ice on top of an upside down dog bowl, it is a CO2 bedbug trap. The sugar and yeast trap does exactly the same thing; give off CO2 to attract bedbugs. They both work only on the floor since CO2 is heavier than air and the CO2 will not go up to attract bedbugs in the bed.
°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°
Here is a review on how to make a CO2bedbug trap:
The four water bottles video is about how to make a bedbug trap with common things and for less than a dollar.
• Common water bottles cost nothing.
• Flexible drinking straws cost only one penny each.
• A simple glass can be found in any kitchen
The video shows how to make it.
• First make a hole in the top side of each bottle, just under the cap. Be careful with the point of the scissors.
• Then put the short end of a flexible straw in the hole you made
• Seal the hole around the straw with something sticky that you have at home. I use some jam found in my fridge to do that because that is what I have that does not cost anything. Jam works just fine to seal the straw to the bottle. The hole where the straw goes in the bottle must be sealed, you can use anything that is handy for you; it can be glue, silicone or anything sticky that will seal the small interstices around the straw. I my case, I use strawberry jam or honey that dries up within a day or two, making a perfect seal for less than a penny and so convenient too since I always have some in the fridge. That seal makes sure that the CO2 goes in the glass where I want bedbugs to fall into and not leak out from the bottle and on to the floor without attracting bedbugs in the glass.
Note that in the video I have water in the bottles, but you do not need it. I put water in the bottles only to give them some weight because those bottles are so light that they fall and are easily knocked down, but if you are careful, you do not need the water.
• Next, wrap a square of paper towel around the glass and hold it with elastic. You can also use a piece of scotch tape to hold the paper towel around the glass, but an elastic band is faster and tighter.
• Then cut the paper towel straight with the bottom of the glass and also straight with the top of the glass.
• This paper towel on the outside of the glass will make it easy for bedbugs to climb up on the glass and when they will reach the top, they will fall inside the glass. Once bedbugs are in the glass, they cannot get out anymore because the inside is too smooth for them to climb out.
That’s it, your trap is ready. All you need now is to put bait in the bottle that will lure bedbugs into the glass.
That bait is a liquid made with:
• 2 __ cups of sugar
• 1 __ envelope of yeast __ Fleischmann’s Yeast found in any grocery store
• 2 __ quarts of water __ water must be at body temperature around 100°F or 37°C, also called lukewarm.
Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl or a pitcher and let it stand 10-15 minutes.
When you will see some tiny bubbles beginning to form in the cloudy light beige liquid and some foam floating on top, with a funnel fill the bottles to about half an inch below the straw.
Bring the filled bottles and the paper towel covered glass where you want to place the trap, put the straws in the glass and your bedbug trap is now working and ready to catch bedbugs.
It is the CO2 that comes from the tiny bubbles that attract bedbugs into the glass. That CO2 is the same thing as what we breathe out from our respiration, that’s why it attracts bedbugs.
You now have the easiest to do, least expensive to get and most efficient bedbug trap in the world.
You can get more information on my website called “The CO2 Bedbug Trap”
You can get to it by using the link under this video.
You can find it on Google by typing “julesnoise.com”
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• The mixture as you probably saw is light tan in color and the liquid is cloudy right after the mix, it has a smell of baking dough at the beginning turning to a light smell of alcohol at the end. Very tiny bubbles are forming in the solution and slowly rise to the top to form a small ring of foam on top. That is the CO2 given off by the yeast that has started to eat the sugar. Yeast is a micro organism that feeds on sugar to form ethanol and gives off CO2 from its breathing. The reaction starts within minutes and lasts 2-3 weeks. Once the yeast ate all the sugar, the liquid becomes clear like lemonade, the reaction is spent. When it is, empty it, rinse the bottle with the hottest water from the tap and make another mix. A trick to see if the mixture is producing CO2 and that the seal is done properly is to put the end of the straw into a glass of plain water. If everything works fine, you will see CO2 bubbles escaping in that glass of water about every second or so at first and slowing down to 2-3 seconds as the days go by. At the end (2-3 weeks) when the solution becomes clear, there will be no more bubbles
• Put back the straw in the glass used as a bedbug pitfall. CO2 is invisible but it will fill the glass to finally overflow out of the glass and run in invisible trails on the floor and it will attract bedbugs into the glass. Bedbugs do not smell CO2 which is odorless, instead bedbugs have night vision which is also called thermal vision or infrared vision. CO2 absorbs infrared, like in the greenhouse effect and becomes dark to the infrared vision of the bedbug. Bedbugs do not smell CO2 but they see it from a distance and the dark trails of CO2 on the floor mimic the breathing of a human. That is why it is such a powerful lure.
• Dry ice and sugar-and-yeast bedbug traps are the same and work on the same principle, except that dry ice traps last only 8-12 hours compared to sugar-and- yeast hat last 2-3 weeks.
• Since CO2 is heavier than air, dry ice and sugar-and-yeast bedbug traps or any other traps that uses CO2 to attract bedbugs work only on the floor. No CO2 bedbug trap can attract bedbugs which are already in the bed (or couch).
• Any trap, no matter if it is for bedbugs, any pest or even to catch any animal has to be in the pathway if the prey you want to catch. So bedbug traps go on the floor, close and behind each leg of the bed. Since you will need four, you can split the bottles you now have, one bottle behind every leg of the bed. You can also use a smaller glass to collect bedbugs; I suggest using small 1 oz shot glasses that will fill more quickly than an ordinary drinking glass.
Now that you know how to make the bedbug traps and how to use them, we will take care of another important part of the whole trap system.
• Since CO2 bedbug traps can only attract bedbugs on the floor, we must use something else to stop and trap the other bedbugs which are already in the bed. Those bedbugs will not go down to the floor to be caught by the CO2 bedbug traps.
• The most efficient method to stop bedbugs already in the bed is to put an impenetrable barrier between the bedbugs and ourselves. I call that a bedbug shield. A bedbug shield is something that bedbugs cannot get through or around it. It stops all and any bedbug from being able to reach you and to feed. An analogy is like the screen we put in the window to keep mosquitoes from being able to get in the room or the net we put over the bed to keep them from being able to bite. It has worked for centuries and always does the job. Since bedbugs do not fly and are in the bed, that screen or net goes directly on the mattress of the bed and will keep bedbugs from being able to get to us and to bite.
It is very easy to make using a simple plastic sheet ( a painter’s plastic) draped on the bed with its sides hanging down vertically all around the bed and almost all the way down to the floor. It is merely cut a toe space (about one inch) above the floor to allow bedbugs that might be anywhere in the room to get underneath it and get caught by the CO2 bedbug traps. It completely stops any bedbug in the bed to be able to feed and lets you sleep without a bite. Bedbugs cannot walk vertically on plastic and when the try to use the hanging sides of the plastic, they lose their grip and fall to the floor where you have put your four CO2 bedbug traps. Furthermore, bedbugs cannot negotiate the 180° turn from the inner side of the outer side at the edge of a vertical plastic. Again they always fall down to the floor where theCO2 bedbug traps are. I have two videos showing how to make that bedbug shield, one using a whole sheet of plastic draped over the mattress of the bed and the second one using a strip of plastic about 2 feet high by 24 feet long taped to a regular fabric contour sheet with duct tape. The second bedbug shield is more convenient and more comfortable than the first one. They both do the same thing and stop bedbugs from being able to bite. You will find their links under this video, on my website or by using Google (videos) and typing “The Bedbug Shield”
• Bedbug Shield – Sheet ___ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKx7l_HR0S4
• The Bedbug Shield ___ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wy-ry66A7U
The CO2 bedbug traps and the bedbug shield cost less than 10$ together and get rid of any infestation, right down to the last bedbug without getting a single bite.
It is the most efficient bedbug trap in the world, and the least expensive.
Be good to yourself and though on bedbugs, they do not deserve to feed on our blood. Starve them to death under a shield and suffocated by CO2 at the bottom of a trap.
JulesNoise
Can you please confirm your CO2 recipe for the yeast quantity. You specify 1 envelope or 8 grams or 1/2 teaspoon. Mine wasn’t foaming so I checked that 8 grams is about 1 TABLESPOON (a huge difference).
@__Bruce
You are right. There was a mistake on the recipe sheet that I used on the “Making CO2” post. I deleted The one with the wrong quantity and replaced it with a corrected one where 8 gr is in fact one tablespoon. I never really measured it, always using the whole envelope directly. I’m sorry if it caused you ant inconvenience.
I am a male and I don’t remember the last time i was in tears. I’ve searched for countless hours on the internet for bed bug solutions and luckily ran into your videos. I was amazed by how thorough you where with the comments, so I decided to watch all of your youtube videos. You are absolutely right. Knowledge is power! It is because of people like you I am happy to be be alive in this world. Thank you so much!!!!
@__Serge Urakhchin
Hi Serge,
It makes it all worthwhile. The deep satisfaction of doing something good and to pass it on. Qualities of the mind and qualities of the heart are qualities of the soul. And when I’m done philosophying, I kill bedbugs.
I would like to hear your story Serge.
Be good to yourself.
Hey Jules wanted to say again how awesome you are. Also quick update on my progress. Just got all my supplies from Home Depot/Jewel/Laundry and now I am ready to kick some bedbug ass! I have a few questions and concerns. First of all after watching all your videos I came to the conclusion that I need to build the bed bug shield first. In the video though you very briefly mention that you constructed a custom encasement for your box spring, and i was bummed that I couldn’t find that video considering that is probably the first step of this whole process, well at least for me. Check it out! http://i.imgur.com/E9ZWduK.jpg I bought this 10X25 painters plastic from Home Depot for 8 bucks and still have most of it left. I used a bunch of scotch packaging tape (the whole freaking thing) to make sure i sealed it up pretty good. Around the edges and corners i double reinforced with duct tape cause that’s where the box frame comes in contact with the metal frame. My next step is to build the plastic skirt shield around the mattress. I’ll send a picture with an update! Although I do have a question on the C02 building process. When I was at home depot I also picked up some 1/4” plastic tubing so i have that for my exposal when completing the traps. I was wondering because the 14min instructional video on how to make C02 traps mentioned 2L containers, but all i have laying around the house are 1G ice tea jugs. Do you think the following diagram will be an effective C02 trap? http://imgur.com/EORwuaU Because there is gonna be extra liquid space cause 2G is like 3.78L. You think this is fine or should I get smaller containers? Maybe I gotta adjust my yeast/sugar ratio to accommodate the extra 1.78 L? Let me know what yu think
Hi Serge
I’ve been struggling all day to get through my inboxes; it seems that there are more coming in than I can get out. It’s one of those wave days I guess. Well, I’ll give you a quick answer to this one before coming back to another more detailed I’m putting together for you.
I’m pretty happy that you went ahead and got all you need to make your own trap. I appreciate your enthusiasm. Yes you were right that you need to build the shield first. It is the most important part of the trap. The bottom encasement is on…hmmm… a video I haven’t uploaded… I guess, I can’t find it on my YouTube channel. Sorry about that, I’ll get it as soon as I’m done here. From the picture I saw from your message it will be similar to what you are doing now. 10×25 painter’s plastic is perfect and you will have more than enough to make the whole shield.
You can make CO2 bedbug traps out of most any containers. A 1G jug is fine with four air line tubings going into four glass pitfalls at each corner of the bed. 2L bottles are fine to supply CO2 to two glass pitfalls. Smaller bottles are fine too and eliminate the need for long tubings. Any other containers are also just as fine as they are used only to hold the liquid and their size and shape have no incidence on the working of the trap. It is only a matter of availability, convenience or space underneath the bed. It will be no problem for you as you already consider to accommodate the extra liquid into a second container to which I might add adjust the sugar and yeast quantities to fill various sizes of containers. I will send you a short document explaining how yeast and sugar fermentation works and how to adjust it for longer or shorter periods. You will be able to master it in no time at all.
You might already be making the shield or the skirt, tell me if you are following the video like a skirt or making it from a single sheet of plastic. Both have plus and cons nd both can be adjusted for a specific use. If you use a skirt, the top could be fabric or it could be plastic, fabric is more comfortable, but on the other hand plastic can also be made comfortable by adding extra sheet or thick sheets over the plastic to make it breathe so it does not become too sweaty.
This is not as in order as my usual message which I take more time to think out but I have to send it to you right now so I can catch my breath and assure you that your progress is in the right direction. The other document I’m preparing for you is more thought out and about the ideal bedbug trap that you gave me the idea about.
Thank you Serge, you are doing real good
Julien
Julien,
Dude thank you! You are truly something else. You answered all my questions perfectly. 4 glass pit falls per jug was my favorite part. Here is my math for it http://i.imgur.com/iO6twpA.jpg . I can approx. make 3 gallons worth of C02 with 12 pitfalls. That’s really nice considering I need to do the couch as well. I’m actually super glad you answered promptly because my gut tells me that it would be wise to build the skirt and the C02 traps together, because it is a 2 part system… I want them to fall out of the bed into/around the cups right away. I was only able to cover the bed frame with masking tape http://i.imgur.com/uZA1Xbn.jpg so far because of work, but now I can resume the bed skirt. I went to the laundry and washed and extra long dried my bed cover and I am aware that bed bugs cannot bite through fabric so I am pretty much gonna infuse that bed cover into my mattress along with the skirt. I was actually thinking buying another bed cover on top of it but we’ll see. You know what I don’t really have any questions at this point, but I’m sure I will when I hit the couch section of my place. I will keep up the updates as well!
Sincerely,
Serge
Day 2 update everybody!
Finished my first C02 trap…..sleep mode activated!
Here is the picture link http://imgur.com/a/jlNIM
Here is the system I just finished up for my room, gonna test it out and see how it goes!
Here is my 2nd trap that I put on top of my couch.
Check it out guys! Couch Trap Day 2: Death toll- 3 !!!! Freaking bed bug suckers told ya I’d woop yo ass
Confidence is building. First a night without bites and now death threats towards bedbugs. That’s the way to do it Sergey. I swore I would kill them all and now bedbugs are scared shitless of me.
Here is what I have to work with, if you can help me come up with an ideal C02 Trap with these stuff that would be awwweeesoommmee
p.s. I also have a hot glue gun
Julien,
Dude thank you! You are truly something else. You answered all my questions perfectly. 4 glass pit falls per jug was my favorite part. Here is my math for it http://i.imgur.com/iO6twpA.jpg . I can approx. make 3 gallons worth of C02 with 12 pitfalls. That’s really nice considering I need to do the couch as well. I’m actually super glad you answered promptly because my gut tells me that it would be wise to build the skirt and the C02 traps together, because it is a 2 part system… I want them to fall out of the bed into/around the cups right away. I was only able to cover the bed frame with masking tape http://i.imgur.com/uZA1Xbn.jpg so far because of work, but now I can resume the bed skirt. I went to the laundry and washed and extra long dried my bed cover and I am aware that bed bugs cannot bite through fabric so I am pretty much gonna infuse that bed cover into my mattress along with the skirt. I was actually thinking buying another bed cover on top of it but we’ll see. You know what I don’t really have any questions at this point, but I’m sure I will when I hit the couch section of my place. I will keep up the updates as well!
Sincerely,
Serge
Here is what I have to work with, if you can help me come up with an ideal C02 Trap with these stuff that would be awwweeesoommmee
Lol what do you think
Hello Jules, and thank you so much for all of the helpful information on eliminating bedbugs. Your hopeful information is so heartening. My primary question at this time is how to do everything safely considering thatI have a cat and also avoiding complicating things with her roaming about the building. Will a CO2 trap be more enticing than her? And is it safe to set these in her presence or should I keep her out of the bedroom. Thank you so very much, Susannah
Hi Susannah, I have good news and bad news.
First the good news. Cats have an excellent natural defense against bedbugs, their fur. Bedbugs have a thin flat body and cannot get into the dense fur of cats. Cats do not get bedbug bites. Humans are more enticing to bedbugs than cats. The CO2 trap is placed under the bed, so bedbugs will be drawn into the trap when they try to reach the human sleeping on the bed. I strongly recommend using a bedbug shield on the bed to stop any bedbug from being able to reach you. A bedbug shield stops all bedbug bites at once and Co2 traps on the floor catch them.
Now the bad news. Permethrin is highly toxic for cats. This poison used by exterminators cause tremors, muscle fasciculation, and seizures. It can kill your cat in a few hours.
http://www.vetprof.com/clientinfo/permethrincats.html
Use the non-toxic bedbug trap to eliminate bedbugs instead. It contains no poison or chemical of any kind, only yeast, sugar and water, yet it attracts and kill bedbugs right down to the last one. The only danger (if we can call that a danger) is that your cat might knock it down and make a sticky spot on the floor because of the sugary water.
CO2 bedbug traps are easy to do and cost less than a dollar, so you can make as many as you want (usually four for each bed).
Put a bedbug shield on the bed. Use a regular contour sheet directly on the mattress to which you fix a strip of 2 feet by 24 feet all around the mattress with white duct tape. The hanging sides or skirt will stop all and any bedbug from being able to reach the top and feed on your blood; you will be able to sleep without a bite. Cut the plastic about one inch above the floor. You can make a bedbug shield for less than 5$.
Make bedbug barriers on the legs of the bed, the furniture, above the baseboards of the walls, outside the trims of the closets, around light switches, electrical out lets, picture frames, bed headboard or anywhere else you do not want bedbugs to go. Their name is well deserved, they are bedbug barriers. Bedbug barriers are made with the simplest of things and the least expensive; all you need to make bedbug barriers is a roll of scotch tape and a bottle of talcum powder. Scotch tape is very difficult for bedbugs to climb on and becomes too slippery to get across when brushed with talcum powder. Bedbugs always lose their grip and fall to the floor where CO2 traps are waiting for them. You can make as many bedbug barriers as you want for less than 2$.
And everything used is totally harmless to humans and pets. Yet it eliminates any bedbug right down to the last one. How do you get rid of bedbugs? Stop feeding them and starve them to death.
Good luck? Nah, you will not need luck, the bedbug trap works every time!
JulesNoise
Washing clothes and putting them in the dryer works. I have been using the microwave for small amount of bedding and clothes. ! minute per bed sheet. I have done a experiment where I put a sheet on a mattress and sleep on it. In the morning I shake the sheet over a white board and examine. Find very little. Stick in the microwave for a minute and shake over the board. The result is a significant amount of bugs.
It is a useful tool to know instead of washing every few days.
@__John
I agree with you. Heat does kill bedbugs. I suggest washing clothes only if you think they need to be washed as drying only will kill bedbugs just as effectively. Your microwave method clearly demonstrate that and is a very smart and fast way to kill bedbugs out of anything that will not be damaged by heat (plastic and metal). Items that cannot support microwave heat can be cleared out of bedbugs with rubbing alcohol.
Both methods are useful tools to quickly clear out bedbugs of many items.A slower way is to use bedbug barriers to keep bedbugs from being able to go into these items. With bedbug barriers, bedbugs can get out of these items but are unable to get back in again.
Bedbug barriers are made with scotch tape brushed with talcum powder. Taped vertically or horizontally on legs of the bed, on legs of the furniture, above baseboards of the walls, around trims of windows and doors, aroud picture frames, around light switches and electrical outlets, in and around drawers and closets and most any places you do not want bedbugs to get into.
These bedbug barrier are versatile and hardly visible. They cost less than two dollars for the whole lot of them and can be installed in less than an hour.
The idea is quite simple. Scotch tape is a smooth and hard plasti and bedbugs have a hard time to vertically climb on it, but when you brush the shiny surface of scotch tape with talcum powder, then it becomes too slippery for any bedbugs to hang on to it. Bedbugs slip. slide and always fall back down to the floor.
That in itself is sufficient to keep bedbugs out of our belongings and from anywhere else in the room. But if you want to get rid of those bedbugs on the floor, all you have to do is to place a CO2 bedbug trap to completely eliminate them.
John I’m curious about your experiment. I’m not sure if I’m interpreting you correctly. When you shake the sheet before heating nothing falls off, but after heating (killing them) loads fall off the sheet? So are they known for gripping on really tightly and is that why they don’t fall at first? Also, can you not see them if it’s just a simple sheet? Or is it a fitted sheet and they’re hiding in the crevices created by the elastic? Just curious as I’m trying to understand these creatures and what they’re capable of… thanks!
Hi i think i may have bedbugs and i was very excited to find your page. one question (for now ;) ) – you mention that those trapped in the bed will die of starvation in a shortime (ican’t remember now how quickly you said). but everywhere else i read they can remain dormant for up to a year? Also what about those lying dormant in any other hiding place?
Thank you!
Worried
Hi HappyMammy
You think you may have bedbugs. That’s good news, meaning that you might have only a few or a light infestation. Good news because it is easier to get rid of them at the very beginning and that we will not let them grow and multiply. That’s what the shield on the bed does, it keeps them from being able to feed and it breaks their life cycle. Bedbugs can molt or lay eggs only after a blood meal, If you keep them from feeding, then they cannot molt (grow) or lay eggs (multiply). A shield on the bed and traps on the floor attract and eliminate all and every bedbug in the room.
How long can a bedbug to live without a meal? It depends if the bedbug is active or not and also that bedbugs are very dependent on temperature.
• An active bedbug will spend more energy than a dormant bedbug, so an active bedbug will die faster than a dormant bedbug if neither can feed.
It is actually possible to measure how long bedbugs can live without food in laboratories and it is nearly impossible to measure the length of time an active bedbug will take to die. So we will start with what we know the life expectancy of dormant bedbugs.
• The one-year-old bedbug is a myth. Nobody can say: “I have seen that bedbug last year and it is still alive today!” How can you tell the age of a dormant bedbug? Bedbugs are totally dependent on temperature. The warmer it is, the more active bedbugs are and vice-versa, the colder it is, the less active bedbugs are.
• Can bedbugs hibernate? Yes, like most insects do to survive winter. Hibernation occurs at temperature under 60°F (16°C). So under normal conditions, bedbugs cannot hibernate in a heated house.
Normal conditions is our environment between 68°F – 80°f (20°C – 27°C). It is at those temperatures that the bedbug is most active.
• 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 were dormant and 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.
So in our environment, dormant bedbugs can last only 2-3 months. But how about active bedbugs, how long does it take them to die if they cannot feed? Only 2-3 weeks, it is explained by the fact that bedbugs keep spending energy instead of conserving it like when they go dormant. An active bedbug has to feed every 5-7 days and if the bedbug cannot ”recharge” its energy on our blood, it uses all it has got in search for food (without being to get it because of the shield) and finally die of starvation.
What makes a bedbug go dormant or not? Bedbugs go dormant when they cannot detect any food around. They become immobile and wait for their next victim to pass by. The simple presence of a human wakes up dormant bedbugs. They are alarmed by the heat given off by our bodies and the CO2 contained in our respiration. When bedbugs are close to a human, they cannot go dormant. That is the case of bedbugs which are trapped under a shield. They can feel the warmth of our body and it makes them hungry. They search and search in vain for a way through the shield and find none. The only way out from underneath a shield is down to the floor where the traps are.
If you have only a few bedbugs, the first thing to do is to put a shield over the bed. There are simple inexpensive ways to do that.
The Bedbug Shield ___https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wy-ry66A7U
Bedbug Shield – Couch ___https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzqc71VXlcs
Then make the CO2 bedbug traps to be placed behind each leg of the bed. The shield and the traps will attract and trap all and every bedbugs by keeping them from being able to feed. We use hunger to defeat bedbugs and it is better than poison because it leaves no bedbug behind.
See HappyMammy, if you stop bedbugs right here and right now, they will never have the chance to make your life a miserable nightmare. The CO2 Bedbug Trap is prevention as much as elimination. The least expensive, yet most efficient bedbug trap in the world.
Knowledge is power HappyMammy, that’s what you will find on this site
Peace of mind
JulesNoise
Thanks so much for your reply. I have just finished reading every page of your website, including every single comment and answer, and have learned so much. I was starting to feel v depressed after deciding a few days ago that it’s very likely we have bedbugs, and everything I read offered me zero hope of ever getting rid of them fully. I’m finally breathing out again and feeling hopeful – thank you so much! :)
A couple more questions :)
– Constantly reading that bedbugs are “in” your mattress had me envisaging them inside the mattress somehow but I have finally learned from your site that they can’t penetrate fabric. So when people say that they mean they are in the seams/corners? And I assume they get into the seams of the mattress by crawling down the side of the bed and crawling under where the fitted sheet meets the mattress?? And they can’t get inside the actual mattress unless it is torn??
– We have only had a few bites (“we” being me and my 6- year-old; my husband, 3-year-old and baby don’t seem to have been bitten, or don’t react) over the last few months, spaced up to 2/3 weeks apart. It’s only now I’m realising that the bites are characteristic of bedbugs, but I’m unsure why we are getting so few, as the infestation should have grown more in that time. Does that mean it’s not bedbugs? Or does it mean that some have become dormant/ they have slowed their feeding as the weather has cooled?? It is typically 18deg C in my bedroom these days, probably slightly cooler in my son’s room where we have a heating problem. (Unfortunately we may have migrated the problem to his room ourselves as we moved his brother’s bed from our bedroom into his bedroom about 2 months ago. Wish we’d known before then! )
Any thoughts/help would be appreciated! I keep thinking that perhaps we’re dealing with something else except for 2 things – we always get 3 bites, and back in August/Sept (not sure which) I remember seeing 3/4 little bugs crawling on the walls of our ensuite bathroom. I thought nothing of it, though noted them as I hadn’t seen them before. They were around for a few days/maybe a week before disappearing again.. Now I’ve seen pictures of the 1st stage nymphs I think I know what they were :(. Though these were crawling around in the daytime? Is this likely behaviour? It possibly started (I’m doubting my memory on this) when we came back from 2 weeks holiday, so possibly they were wandering about during the day due to starvation and lack of anyone to feed on??? I’d be delighted if you said this doesn’t sound like bedbugs, but I fear they are :(.
Thanks again for this wonderful website!
Ok my son got two more bites last night, that’s twice this week, so they must be getting more active/increasing in numbers. Need to get on to putting up the bed shields. Two more questions! :)
– Do i need to do any cleaning beforehand, except for a little vacuuming around the bedroom? There’s no need to vacuum the seams of the mattress, or should I?
– Am I right in assuming that your method means I don’t have to clean out my closets, drawers, wash clothes etc as all the bugs will come to me and be trapped?
– My sons have bunk beds, do you have any tips on how to shield it? I saw a picture of a covered bunk bed on your “step by step” page
Thanks again, so happy I found this site, I’m no longer feeling sick, I’m feeling ready to take them on! :)
@__HappyMammy
The dynamics of a bedbug infestation. An infestation usually starts with only one bedbug or only a few. That or those bedbugs are seldom noticed because they bite only once a week or so. Their bites are usually dismissed as something else and with a lap of time between bites, discarded as not important. But if bedbugs keep on feeding, then they are able to molt and reach the adult stage where they will start to lay eggs. A typical bedbug infestation takes 6-8 weeks before it reaches maturity, meaning that the first eggs from the initial bedbugs have also reached the adult stage and have started to lay eggs too. That is when the nightmare begins and you start seeing bedbugs moving around, even in day time.
From your previous description and also from this message, I think you still are in the early weeks of the infestation, bedbugs that recently hatched and are growing with each bite they can take.
Week one: Someone picked up a bedbug and brought it home. That lone bedbug will find a place to hide and in the following days, it will get closer to a bed where someone is sleeping attracted by the body heat and the CO2 that person emits.
Week two: That lone bedbug will succeed in getting a blood meal. If that lone bedbug is an adult female, most of the blood she took will be used to incubate 8-12 eggs that she will lay about a week later.
Week three: The eggs will hatch and the lone adult bedbug will go for another blood meal with her 8-12 hatchlings.
Week four: The lone adult bedbug will incubate a second batch of eggs while her first hatchling will molt into the second stage of growth.
Week five: The second batch of eggs will hatch and will go for their first meal, along with the first batch now in stage two and of course the lone adult bedbug that will get her third meal to incubate even more eggs.
Week six: you now have a lone adult bedbug that bites every week or second week, along with 30-40 tiny first stages bedbug nymphs. Only the bite of the adult is noticeable, tiny first stages bedbugs leave little trace of their bites, merely a pinkish light rash that is almost never associated with bedbugs. (What most people believe is that a bedbug bite is a breahfast-lunch-dinner crescent that only adult bedbugs can make.)
Week seven: The lone adult bedbug keeps laying successive generation of eggs while the nymphs keep molting in the late stages of growth.
Week eight: Same as week seven except that the first generations of eggs now reaches maturity, having gone through the five stages of molting and are now ready to lay eggs of their own.. So instead of one lone adult bedbug, you now have 9-13 bedbugs that can lay eggs. At maturity, a bedbug infestation multiplies about ten times faster than at the beginning of the infestation.
Something else also happens at maturity. Before the first batch of eggs reaches maturity, all bedbugs tend to go back in their hiding place somewhere in the bed after a blood meal, and very few bedbugs if any leave the bed where it is safe and close to their next meal. But as soon as late stage nymphs reach maturity, male bedbugs appear and start to attack any other blood-filled bedbugs, male or female, adult or nymph. Under traumatic insemination, the blood-filled bedbugs begin to leave the bed in search of a safer place than the bed. Those are the red and round bedbugs we see daytime, they are only trying to get away from the aggressive males. In bedbug language, it is called natural scattering. Additional scattering is also caused by human intervention, heavy clean-up, use of pesticides and intempestive activities that will make the bedbugs flee anywhere else in the room and get deeper in hiding.
And this goes on and on until the whole place is fully infested, 100-1000 bedbugs from a single lone adult. Most people do not know what to do with a bedbug infestation, they feel helpless and will try anything and everything to get rid of them. Unfortunately, most of what is showed on the net offers no real solution and only make the bedbug problem a nightmare.
The first thing to realize is that bedbugs can do all of that only because they can feed. Bedbugs are totally dependent on blood to lay eggs, molt and simply survive. The situation described from week one to week eight can only happen if bedbugs are allowed to draw blood from us.
Behold the bedbug shield, something that keeps bedbugs from being able to feed. That is the solution to any bedbug infestation, keep them from taking blood from us. Without blood, bedbugs cannot molt or grow. Without blood, bedbugs cannot lay eggs and multiply. Without blood, bedbugs simply cannot survive.
So, put a bedbug shield on your bed (the combination fabric contour sheet and plastic skirt is the best) and CO2 bedbug traps on the floor and let them do the work of stopping the growth and multiplication of the infestation while eliminating them one by one every time they are hungry. It is all natural, using their hunger against them. Bedbugs are a nuisance, good riddance.
Now, your questions:
___Do i need to do any cleaning beforehand, except for a little vacuuming around the bedroom? There’s no need to vacuum the seams of the mattress, or should I?
You do not need to do any cleaning beforehand; in fact I recommend that you dont because if it will get rid of a few bedbugs you can see, you are sure to miss the very small ones that are nearly impossible to see. Many will escape and flee somewhere else around the room. Intempestive human activities always scatter bedbugs. Installing the bedbug shield as quickly and with the least disturbance will trap and neutralize all bedbugs which are already in the bed and keep all those bedbugs from being able to feed (90% of all bedbugs are still in the bed at your stage of infestation).
___Am I right in assuming that your method means I don’t have to clean out my closets, drawers, wash clothes etc as all the bugs will come to me and be trapped?
Absolutely. We do not have to put the place upside down and take on all that work. Bedbugs will come out all by themselves, leave their hiding places and gather under the shield, the CO2 traps on the floor catching bedbugs on the move and clearing out the room. Your job is to make sure they can never reach you and feed. We defeat bedbugs with hunger and leave no bedbug behind. Keep them hungry by denying them their food. No more bites is the first benefit of the trap and is also the key to their elimination, bedbugs die of starvation while you sleep soundly without a bite. Depending if you had a small or a large infestation, there will be spots and traces of their passage, organic left-over that can be taken out with rubbing alcohol and a paper towel. Spot cleaning as you go or find them. No clean-up frenzy required.
___My sons have bunk beds, do you have any tips on how to shield it? I saw a picture of a covered bunk bed on your “step by step” page
Bunk beds are very practical but really complicated to cover with a shield. Im a tinkerer and I make do with what I got to get the same results, from a simple mattress on the floor as for the ultimate challenge, the bunk bed. Bunk beds give the bedbug easy access and a lot of places to hide. Easy target for a bedbug.
Bunk beds can be made impervious to the passage of bedbugs by using bedbug barriers, simply something that will keep bedbugs from being able to climb up into them. Bedbug barriers are really simple and really inexpensive, anybody can make bedbug barriers with scotch tape and talcum powder. Thats all it takes to stop bedbugs from climbing up on any vertical surface. The slick shiny side of the scotch tape is difficult to hang on to but when it is brushed with talcum powder, it becomes too slippery for any bedbug to get on it. They slip, slide and always fall down to the floor. The difficulty is to apply the scotch tape so that there is no pathway the bedbug could use to get around it.
Ill get a few pictures of bunk beds and see where the bedbug barriers should be applied. Ill come back to you with that later.
An alternative would be to kill all the bedbugs in the bunk bed in a single shot with pure solid CO2. Dry ice in a plastic bag kills bedbugs by suffocating them with pure CO2. Next day, the bunk bed can be used safely cleared of all bedbugs. It involves a very large sheet of plastic, 10-15 pounds of dry ice, an extra pair of hands to lift and move the whole bunk bed in the middle of the plastic.
The method with bedbug barriers is easier to do and also is more permanent. A lot could be said for prevention.
As protection from bedbugs still in the room, use high plastic or metal floor protectors that bedbugs will not be able to climb on. Those floor protectors will elevate the whole bed enough so that bedbugs will not be able to reach and grip it. The bunk bed also has to be away from the walls.
Sending this, I want to go on to the bunk bed pictures I downloaded and also to two other correspondents with similar bunk bed question
Talk to you later
Julien
Thank you so much for your help, i didn’t expect such a detailed answer. You are such a kind person to help so many strangers like this!
@__ HappyMammy__You are welcome. I keep saying that knowledge is the key to get rid of bedbugs, and knowledge is something that we share between strangers. And strangers are not as strange as we think, most often they are people just like us trying to have a good life and do the right thing. All of my friends were strangers once, thats what we do with our friends, try to help each other. So I prefer to see a stranger as a friend I havent met yet.
The sheet is dark blue so they are hard to spot. I am using the sheet in a way you would use plastic to keep the bb from getting to you. Therefore they are crawling under the sheet. I have the mattresses are encased in white. So when I take the sheet off in the morning and shake it nothing falls most of the time. It is easy to see when shaking above a white encased mattress. I put the sheet in the microwave for a minute and shake above mattress and see what shakes out. I want to see what kind of infestation is left.
I use CO2 traps on the floor with DE and spray any stragglers with rubbing alcohol. After a month when I shake the sheet there is no BB falling out in any stag. Nothing in the CO2 traps I think they are gone. Will kind of miss the challenge in a weird way. Went over to a friend’s house and they have bed bugs. Which they thought were ticks originally, because they have dogs. Now I have a new challenge.
@__John
___”Using the sheet in a way you would use plastic to keep the bb from getting to you”. Smart thinking John. Bedbugs can no more walk through fabric than through plastic, so we can use it to make bedbug shields. Fabric has the advantage of being less sweaty and less slippery. All you need to add to a fabric sheet is the plastic strip at the edge of the fabric sheet to keep bedbugs from being able to cross over at the edge and reach the top side where we want to sleep without a bite.
So nothing falling means they are great at holding on? Good to know that shaking out clothing etc wouldn’t be enough!
Shaking clothes will not assure you of all BB falling out even if they are dead. They do shake out easier after they are nuked.
@__John,
Nuking them will definitely shake them out. I like the way you think.
But seriously, bedbugs can hang on to somthing even after a long time being dead. It has to do with their filament pincer hooks they have at the end of their legs. The bedbug does not need to be alive, they hook naturally. You can see me handling a dead bedbug at the tip of a steel blade in my video “Making CO2” and that bedbug had been dead for two years.
Your microwave method is ingenious and very effective. Shaking them only brings contenment, seeing dead bedbugs every time you do it. The more bedbug you bring down, the less the bedbug nightmare is and the less bedbugs you get in your shakings. It is a good tool in the bedbug war.
My salutations
JulesNoise
I really learned a lot from the videos but there is one thing I’m uncertain about. Will one 500ml bottle per trap produce enough CO2 to attract the bugs or should the trap have more than one bottle of solution? Thanks for your time. If you have time please email your reply. Thanks again.
@__ spl1949
Yes, one 500 ml bottle puts enough CO2 to attract bedbugs. The 2 liters recipe comes from the convenience of one envelope of yeast as a measure. When you want to make a mix, you want to use the whole envelope of yeast and have no left over. A tablespoon of yeast (it says 7-8 grams on the envelope) will eat two cups of sugar in two to three weeks. In what do we put the yeast and sugar? What is more convenient than a 5 cents 2L bottle? So the amount of water needed in the mix is about two liters. There you go, you have a DIY CO2 generator and it cost less than a dollar.
Now, can we split the mixture in four smaller containers and make four traps with the 2L recipe? Absolutely, I recommend doing it and put one behind each leg of the bed (which is the main pathway bedbugs use to get in the bed, a strategic place to put a bedbug trap, four legs, four traps).
The trap is simple and very efficient. For bedbugs, CO2 is like trails of smoke cascading down from the bed and running on the floor, they just can’t miss it. Dividing a fire in four make four columns of smoke instead of a larger one, it is still the same amount that bedbugs follow.
The trap is the lure to attract and catch bedbugs, but you also need the bedbug shield to prevent and stop all bites. The bedbug shield is a physical barrier between the bedbugs and yourself that make it sure bedbugs will not be able to reach and bite you. It is being able to sleep at night without a bite. While the shield on the bed stops all bedbugs from being able to feed, the traps on the floor catch any bedbug on the move. It is hunger that defeats them. We attract them with a lure and then we starve them to death.
JulesNoise
Hi, thanks for all the good info. Another question though if I may. I watched your video about putting the shield on the couch but don’t understand why you made that fold along the bottom. If the bugs can’t climb on the plastic it doesn’t seem that making a fold or not would make any difference. Am I missing something? My couch may or may not still have bugs in it so I have to opt for the other cover shield system in unison with the traps so I can make sure I’m rid of the little monsters. Thanks and hope to hear from you soon. Steve
Hi Steve, the good info is shared experience, the more you know about traps and why they work, the better equipped you will be to defeat them. If only we could see them for what they really are instead of making them bigger than life, all the worries, the work, the costs and all the bedbug nightmare misery would never happen. We always have the last word with bedbugs, at some point we decide we had enough and we take whatever means we have to get rid of them. That’s when “interest people” jump in. No other insect has such large panoply of gadgets to buy; no other insect has such media coverage, no other insect causes as much emotional damage. The bedbug is a star, very profitable; everybody pays the piper as they say. That’s how they make money; the bedbug is a cash cow. They will never eradicate it.
I can see that you are quick of mind, your folded down plastic observation is pertinent. It is only partly true that bedbugs can’t walk on vertical plastic, some plastics are soft and bedbugs can succeed to needle their hooks into it, getting a weak grip, feeling their way of their next step and getting another needle-grip, then another. Most of them fall doing it but what if a few bedbugs could make it? Most improbable, bedbugs from the floor would have their back to the plastic sheet under the couch; they would have to turn on their back to reach for the plastic with their legs. Flat-bodied bedbugs do not turn easily and often cannot get right back up. They do not tend to roll on their backs. And the plastic would offer them any grip or nothing they could hang on. If some unexplainable reason one of them would succeed, that bedbug would have to walk upside down on that plastic, needling all the way, an even more improbable situation; that folded edge of the plastic seems irrelevant. It probably is, it was my paranoia showing off. In a world of what-if, I wanted to make the couch absolutely foolproof any in the event of “what if”, I just folded the edge of the plastic as an additional barrier bedbugs can’t cross.
The edge of a plastic hanging down vertically is impossible for bedbugs to get around. Their bodies simply do not allow them to make the 180° turn from one side of the plastic to the other. They can’t reach it; much less needle it to get a grip. The more they try, the more they fail. It is that principle that makes the bedbug shield so impervious to bedbugs. On top, it is obvious that bedbugs cannot walk through plastic or fabric, the sides of the plastic hanging down around the bed keeps bedbugs from being able to go from the bed to the sheets used to sleep in and the edges of those plastic hanging sides (about an inch above the floor) make the ultimate barrier for bedbugs. That’s why I say that a shield is a barrier that bedbugs cannot get through or around. That edge works for the shield on the bed and I reproduced it on the shield for a couch with that fold.
In another thread, I talk about seamstresses to make bedbug shields. It is because the shield does not have to be all plastic. The top horizontal parts can be made with fabric which is much more comfortable than plastic, less sweaty and less slippery. Only the bottom part of the hanging sides has to be made of plastic. Bedbugs cannot go through fabric any more than through plastic, but they can easily walk up and down on it, that’s the reason of the plastic strip at the edge, nearly impossible to hang on and impossible to get around. You might find it worthwhile to make your shield with a combination of fabric and plastic.
This is interesting and it would be nice to know how you did it. Could you take a few pictures as you do it and show the world how to make a trap the right way.
Julien
Hi Jules!
I think i read through every single article on your web sight. It gave me a lot of hope. I’ve been dealing with bugs for almost half a year. Trying moving to a different room, chemicals, diatomaceous earth. But was getting more and more bytes every day.
Set up the barrier in my bed three days ago and three traps around the bed. Barrier – solid piece of plastic under the mattress. Mattress in a bug-proof case. Put bed legs into plastic cups with some baby powder on the bottom and sticky tape on top. Also tape on the ceiling.
The weird thing is that I had no bugs in the traps at all. And also got bitten last night by seems like one mature bug and several little ones (judging by the red area on my arm). Would you tell me how this could happen? I mean possible mistakes that I made in the process of building a barrier.
Washed in hot water and dried the sheets, pillow cases, clothes that I sleep in. Also sprayed pillows with rubbing alcohol (those are made of memory foam). I don’t know what else I can do. Please help.
Thank you
Dan
@__Dan
Wow! Nobody has ever read everything I wrote, you must be very eager to find out how to make bedbugs die. I’m game. I keep repeating it again and again and it feels different with everyone I talk to, yet it is always the same. All the methods you tried partially worked, I’m sure you greatly kept their numbers down with your efforts. Is it possible it would have been worse? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvgaEZ4A8RE
How do we keep the numbers of bedbugs down?
• Moving to a different room? You did your own experiment, it never works. Bedbugs simply follow you and you end up with two colonies instead of one.
Bedbugs can see the heat from our body; bedbugs have night vision, also called thermal vision and infrared vision. Bedbugs can also the CO2 we exhale by our breath. That’s how they always find us no matter if we move into another room. How about using that against them and lure them into trap? A heat trap to starve them and a CO2 trap to get them out of hiding? There is nothing on the web like the CO2 Bedbug trap.
• Chemicals… how come we still have bedbugs? Poison is the worst way to fight bedbugs. Bedbugs become resistant to poison and then poison spreads them instead of killing them; try to explain where bedbugs really come from and you will find poison pushing them on to you.
The CO2 Bedbug trap does not only get rid of the bedbug but it also gets rid of the poison pusher.
• Diatomaceous earth, a great alternative to poison. Nobody wants to buy poisoned food, so Agriculture uses non-poisonous DE to kill insects, DE desiccates them and dries them, and it works great in farms. But in human dwellings, DE must be applied as it is in farms to work, shoveling it in large amounts on the ground where insects will cover themselves with it. If bedbugs only dip their feet in DE, it almost has any effect on them. Bedbugs walk back and forth in DE and keep walking.
Of course, there is a long list of other ways people use to try to get rid of bedbugs. Wash and dry, intensive clean-ups, bleach, rubbing alcohol (watch out for fires), fancy gadgets to buy, mattress encasements, miracle products, secret techniques, sniffing dogs … and the list goes on, all of them designed to get money off you. Business has never been better!
… and you are the one stuck with bedbugs, and you are the one from whom they get money off, right? And you do not want to pay, so you suffer and it will keep going on until you can’t take it anymore and get someone to poison your life, kill your pets and make our kids sick only to kill a few disrupting bugs.
And now, in the hope of ending it all, you try an alternative method from a guy who claims anybody can get rid of bedbugs all by ourselves. Well, it is a method that uses hunger against bedbugs to make them come out of hiding and to starve them to death by keeping them from being able to bite.
• Three traps around the bed. __ Will catch bedbugs on the floor and bedbugs coming out of hiding from the room.
• Barrier – solid piece of plastic under the mattress. __ Will stop any bedbug from feeding (biting) as long as the plastic extend down all around the bed like a skirt. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wy-ry66A7U
• Mattress in a bug-proof case. __ Will encase bedbugs already in the mattress, those bedbugs will also die of starvation. (We can also make our own mattress encasement with two contour sheets sealed together with duct tape)
• Bed legs into plastic cups with some baby powder on the bottom and sticky tape on top. __ Will keep bedbugs on the floor from being able to climb-up the legs of the bed.
• Tape on the ceiling __ Will keep bedbugs from walking upside down on the ceiling and dropping on the bed to feed.
No bugs in the traps at all. Possible explanations:
• The traps are not working. Check if there are bubbles in the light tan sugar and yeast mixture. If you traps have an air line tubing or a straw assembly, there should be bubbles forming when you put the end into a glass of water. If you do not have an air line tubing or a straw assembly, the CO2 filling the bowl or container that the bottle sits in should smell like baked bread.
• There are no bedbugs on the floor. This is possible in places where bedbugs are hunted down. When there are lots of activities trying to eliminate bedbugs, they tend to hide deeper in the cracks and crevices and stay there to escape detection. Sometimes they do not move for weeks, waiting for all the activities to calm down and feel safe enough to try and go for a blood meal. Co2 bedbug traps are monitors of bedbug presence, no catch means no bedbugs close or around the traps.
• Getting a bite (or multiple ones) is always possible if bedbugs are in a place higher than the bed. Some could come from the ceiling, although you already blocked that pathway, or bedbugs are in a headboard, behind a picture frame on the wall, or in an adjoining piece of furniture touching the bed. The best way to keep those bedbugs from getting direct access to the top of the bed is by leaving a space (1/2” is enough) between the bed and any other objet that could touch it. Another way is to use bedbug barriers in the form of the tape you already used on the ceiling and brush it with talcum powder to make it too slippery for bedbugs to hang on to. Of course, there is also the possibility that bedbugs had a hitchhike that got them on the top side of the bed even if it has a shield.
Possible mistakes are not total defeat. It is only information where your system might be weak or leave a pathway for bedbugs. We only need to correct those possible mistakes to make the system work. A few bites is the price to pay to become aware of those weaknesses in the system.
Washing and drying everything is still the way to keep bedbugs numbers down. Fresh bedding used on top of the shield will give you a sound and restful bite free night.
There is nothing else to do Dan; it is the shield and the traps that will eliminate the bedbugs. Our job is to set up the system properly to get full protection. Please keep finding out details about making your set-up. I will give you as much information as possible; sometimes a simple detail can make all the difference in the world. I suspect that you do not have the plastic sides around the bed and that could be a major pathway bedbugs can use to get from under the mattress encasement and easily onto the bedding. A bedbug shield should be something that bedbugs cannot go through (you perfectly understand that with a solid piece of plastic under the mattress) and it should be something that bedbugs cannot go around. The hanging plastic sides around the bed are exactly for that, to prevent bedbugs from getting around the mattress encasement by using the bed sheets with a plastic between the sheets and the sides of the bed (mattress, box spring, bed frame) touched by the sheets.
Sorry about the delay before my answer, I got another swamping time of 99+ messages. I will be faster when you tell me about what you did with this actual information.
I want to follow your activities and give you the system that gets rid of bedbugs forever, that’s what the CO2 bedbug trap does. Talk to you later
JulesNoise
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Hi, i think i caught bed bugs from my friend though contact cause he had those bites. then i stayed in a hotel. im so freaked out i brought the bugs home i sleep on plastic sheets in the living room on the floor. i washed all my clothes and bags with hot water and detergent but my books and belongings cant be washed. especially books i somewhat wipe with alcohol but i cant wipe the paper pages itself. im paranoid that the bed bugs might infest my house. How can i ensure or be sure there are zero bedbugs that have escaped or are in my home?
Hi WJ,
So you think you might have bedbugs and it makes you insane? You are right, bedbugs are a nightmare, and the fear of bedbugs is very real. Stop it; bedbugs are not worth all the problems that you have and they only need to be taken care of, once.
That’s how I treat bedbugs, making their life impossible by denying them their only source of food. That annoying and disgusting parasite must not be fed. DO NOT FEED BEDBUGS and they will die of starvation! I killed millions of bedbugs that way and I am not done yet, welcome to the CO2 Bedbug Trap.
Facts will save your sanity, bedbugs are said to be undefeatable and the only get rid of them by digging in your wallet. Well, those who profit from the bedbug do not use a bedbug trap and do not care about your well-being and your health, all they want is your money. What a stupid way to deal with bedbugs, making people pay to get poisoned. Your wits and your hands are your greatest power and the way to defeat bedbugs forever, for you and also for your friend. We will make both of you bedbug-free and bedbug-proof with your help.
First, no matter if you have bedbugs or not, we will make a shield that will protect you from bedbugs and completely eliminate them if you have any. A shield starves all bedbugs to death and CO2 traps catch them. The shield and the traps leave no bedbug behind and catch them right down to the last one through their hunger.
A bedbug shield is a physical barrier that no bedbug can get through or get around. Bedbugs are climbers; they have filament pincer hooks at the end of their legs to climb up on rough, fibrous surfaces like wood, fabric, paper, paint, and most of all the things our homes are made of. That’s why they say bedbugs can get everywhere, and they do because we let them do it, even chase them into it with intensive clean-up activities that might kill a few bedbugs but will scatter all the other ones. All of sudden the room is full of bedbugs hiding everywhere because someone chased them there. The CO2 bedbug trap does exactly the opposite, if bedbugs are impossible to find so we let them stay in their hiding places where no damage is done, and wait for them to come out when they become hungry, and then stop them with a shield before they can bite and catch them with CO2 traps when they move. Bedbug traps are very efficient and quiet; you hardly notice them while they catch bedbugs under the bed. Once in a while you check if the traps caught something and if you had a lot of bedbugs, there will be a lot of them in the traps and if you had only a few bedbugs, there will be only a few or none in the traps, all bedbugs will be starved to death under the shield. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wy-ry66A7U and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWd5dBdyqVc.
A shield on the bed to stop all bites at once and keep bedbugs from being able to feed. And traps under the bed to catch bedbugs on the move. You do not have to soak and ruin your books with alcohol, and you do not have to turn your place upside down chasing bedbugs. Let them come out all by themselves and make them go into an impenetrable cul-de-sac, an impasse that stops all bedbugs, a shield on the bed that will let you sleep soundly without a bite. The secret of getting rid of bedbugs permanently is to keep them from feeding. No bites, no nightmare.
More information about bedbugs can be found on this website http://julesnoise.com/. It is knowledge that defeats the bedbug. It is only a mere insect that stands no chance against those who know how to stop it and kill it while sleeping happily and bedbugs starve to death.
Contact me if you have difficulties, I want you and your friend to become not only bedbug-free but bedbug-proof, no chance of getting a bedbug infestation ever. The Shield and CO2 Bedbug Trap eliminate and prevent bedbug infestations.
JulesNoise
Thank you so much for this site. 8 days ago, on New Year’s Eve, my wife and I were stripping the bedding off our king size bed and when I took the pillow case off my pillow….’BAM!’ there they were…confined to a 4 inch circular space…8-10 bed bugs. Yikes. I had my wife quickly grab a tall plastic kitchen liner and we put the pillow in it and sealed up the bag and I walked it out to our trash by the street (it was trash day). At the same time, I had her grab a zip-loc baggie and swept the four that had dropped on to the mattress into the bag…two of them had fled to the side of the mattress and had nestled themsleves into the crease between the piping and the side of the mattress.
I then inspected more and saw nothing. The fecal matter / spots were present pretty thick in the that original spot on the pillow I’d found them. On the side of the mattress at the head end, where one of them had fled, I found just a few tiny black ‘peppering’ spots. I inspected the rest of the mattress and found nothing.
I then headed to a local big box home improvement / hardware store and found the endcap display selling all sorts of mattress bags, room foggers, spray bottles, etc.,…all of them touting to be ‘the answer’ to the problems. I then went on to the Internet to find out their customer reviews and found them to either be ‘5* stars’ / ‘the best’, or the other end, ‘1* star’ / ‘the worst’ / ‘made the problem worse, etc….
I then stumbled upon one of your youtube.com videos and dutifully watched all that I could on my phone. I’m sure the employees thought I was crazy, sitting there in one of their display patio chairs, for over an hour….I was convinced of the intelligent answer to my problems.
I bought the plastic sheeting and silicon sealer from the painting dept. The plastic hose from the plumbing dept., then put back all the poisons. Then I went and bought 2 liter bottles for the Co2 traps, along with the sugar and yeast.
I made the traps and placed them under the two corners of the bed, with the 2 liter bottle outside next to the bed, and the hose running down and under the bed and then up into the red plastic ‘party’ cup, that I had glued strips of paper towel to on four sides, and had also dusted the inside with talcum powder.
I made two other traps and put one in my daughter’s room (even though we inspected her bed and have never seen a single one there, or fecal remnants, or any in the traps. She has slept in her bed every night and it is not ‘wrapped’ at all, but I made her pull it out from the walls and away from anything draped over it, plus had her keep her covers up off the ground. She has not reported any bites, rashes or itching. How long do the bites take to ‘show’?
My wife and I have not slept in our bed since this happened….and we’ve found none in the traps….however, I now realize that we may have to sleep in there to draw them out with our body heat. The wife isn’t willing, but I am and will tonight…we’ve been on couches over the last week so I’m ready for a good night’s sleep, and thanks to the information here, realize these pesky little things are really no worse than mosquitoes.
Questions:
1.) Is it possible we just happened to catch these in a very early stage and actually ‘got them all’?
2.) How to best make the bed so the plastic doesn’t make it unbearably hot?
3.) Do we still use the mattress pad and contour sheet and if so, how ? Do we let them grab into with the elastic and pinch in the plastic sheeting between the mattress and box spring?
4.) Do we really have to do the masking tape half way up the wall around the entire room?
5.) We do have a lot of clothes and occasionally they do wind up in a pile or two on the ground….as they were on the fateful day…they are still there. Should I ‘rustle’ those piles and the clothes in the closet before I go to bed tonight? Just before or how long beforehand?Finally, how long do we have to do this for? I will leave the traps up for a couple months I guess…but that is a long time to go without a ‘normal’ night’s sleep.
Thanks so much for your time and answers Jules. I am glad I found your site.
Riley Grattan
Columbus, OH
• Sorry about the delay, I was stuck with a tenant that needed renovation work to be done. But I really wanted to get back to you as you have one of the best bedbug case reactions.
• Good reflexes, catching them and squishing them (optional) keeps their number down and gives us time to prepare if any of them got away or if there are any other around. The pillow in the bag trick is priceless, you wanted to get rid of those repulsive insects as quickly as possible and that was the easiest and fastest way. The zip-lock is also the best way to dispose of bedbugs, sealed in a bag so that they will not get out and infest someone else.
• You were very thorough in your inspection of the bed and it says a lot about you and it give an idea of the progress and the size of the infestation. The thick fecal spot in the pillow case and only tiny black peppering spots elsewhere tells that you had only one bedbug harborage, a few of them moving around after their blood meal and leaving traces of their passage (digesting and getting ready for their next meal). Those wandering bedbugs might have been in the pillow case when you threw it out or they might be somewhere else in the room. In the latter, it is not a problem, we will get them with your shield and traps when they will come back to feed. The whole trap works on hunger, irresistible for bedbugs and if for some reason it does not work on the first time, it catches them anyway on their second try. That’s the reason we do not have to chase them, we simply wait for them to come out and eliminate themselves. There is no need to put the place upside down and do all the useless recommendations required by poison pushers. In a way, we can see the trap like a magnet for bedbugs.
Then you had another excellent reflex, you went to get something to make sure you had rid of all of them or kill them if there could have been any other bedbugs, there was no way to tell, so you did what had to be done. That you found my site when you did it shows that you are also thorough in your search.
Traps are not found commercially, anything you can find on the market is only a way to make money, these products have been around since the bedbug re-appeared in the 1990’s and were still efficient to kill bedbugs. Unfortunately, the bedbug became resistant since then and these products are now a total waste of time and money. Nothing on the market can eradicate bedbugs, not even the high concentrations of poison used by “professionals”. By the way, the overuse and overexposure to their poison is the reason why bedbug became resistant, and where the actual bedbugs come from.
I like your time sitting in the display patio chairs; that was well worth it. Customers should be allowed to verify what they are about to buy and you did not want to buy some crap that would not solve the problem, excellent. So you went for an intelligent solution instead, that was smart and shows how much you analyse. We defeat bedbugs with knowledge, our greatest power.
Having gathered the materials you needed, you went on and made your own traps. From your description, they sound really well made. You even made extra traps for your daughter’s room. I don’t believe those traps are necessary since at the very beginning of an infestation, bedbugs tend to stay together in the main harborage. It is only when a colony matures that bedbugs start to scatter under the aggression of the male bedbugs. But those extra traps are not wasted, traps are monitors and sentinels. They can tell you of bedbug presence by catching the very first bedbugs before they can bite and make a second harborage in your daughter’s room.
Bedbug bites show within a short time after their bites. Most often bedbugs feed at night and we find their marks when we wake up in the morning.
I understand your reaction about not sleeping in the bed after you found bedbugs. The simple idea of going to sleep with bedbugs is repulsive to just about everybody. We have zero tolerance for blood sucking parasites that defecate in our bed. The bedbug must be stopped and we must be absolutely certain that they are neutralized before we dare to safely use our bed again. You are right in thinking that we draw bedbugs with our body heat. It is not something I like to use, but there is nothing that can stop bedbugs from doing it, we can set all the traps we want and bedbugs will avoid them in the presence of body heat of a human. For bedbugs, the CO2 leads to this heat that contains the food they crave so much, they follow CO2 only to get to that heat. That is why the shield is so important, if CO2 bedbug traps can and do catch bedbugs, it is the shield that stops them and it does not stop only a few bedbugs but all of them. The shield allows you to sleep soundly without a bite. Want to get rid of bedbugs? Stop feeding them! There is not a single creature on the face of this world that can live without feeding and bedbugs are no exception.
Now, there is something that can be done to make your wife feel safe and confident. First it is what you did, use the bed trusting the shield to keep bedbugs from being able to feed (no bites), a demonstration from you. And you can also make a small change of your set-up. You might have placed the shield directly over your mattress and it might be too close for comfort for your wife. Even if it is only psychological, the aversion to bedbugs is real. You can give her some relief by placing the shield (plastic) directly over the box spring instead of over the mattress and bedbugs will be stopped at that level instead. The mattress can be made to be impervious to bedbugs by using two contour sheets, one on top of the mattress and the other one underneath it, and then seal the two contour sheets together with duct tape. It is a comfortable homemade mattress encasement. Another way would be to clear out any bedbugs that could be in the mattress with rubbing alcohol that kills bedbugs on contact. Once the mattress is cleared, it can be used over the shield over the boxspring. Of course, there is a third way to clear the mattress (or any other item) by using dry ice to kill all bedbugs (including eggs) inside a sealed plastic bag or encasement. I could explain that method in a further communication if you choose to use that method.
Yes, you are so right, bedbugs are not worse than mosquitoes but it does not make them more likeable. But we use the same way to stop mosquitoes or bedbugs. For flying insects like mosquitoes, we put a screen in the window to stop them, For climbing insects like bedbugs, we use a shield over the bed, Both are barriers that stops them all from feeding.
Your questions:
1.) Is it possible we just happened to catch these in a very early stage and actually ‘got them all’? Yes it is very possible, I have seen it many times. It is mainly possible in the beginning of an infestation before something has scattered them
2.) How to best make the bed so the plastic doesn’t make it unbearably hot? Plastic can be hot, sweaty and slippery. The best way to avoid these problems is to use a fabric contour sheet for the top of the bed instead of plastic. Only the sides of the shield has to be made of plastic that bedbugs have a hard time to hang on to and always fail to cross over from the inside to the outside at the edges of the plastic. Bedbugs fall on the floor where the traps are and will catch them. The shield and the traps work together.
3.) Do we still use the mattress pad and contour sheet and if so, how ? Do we let them grab into with the elastic and pinch in the plastic sheeting between the mattress and box spring? ___The plastic is set around the bed with its sides hanging down. The elastic of the contour sheet goes on top of it and is sealed to the contour sheet with a band of duct tape that clings well to both fabric and plastic.
4.) Do we really have to do the masking tape half way up the wall around the entire room? ___It is only optional. Bedbug barriers are designed to keep bedbugs from climbing up on walls and into furniture. It speeds up the elimination of bedbugs and make a room bedbug-proof. In your case since I believe you have only a few bedbugs, if any of them are left, the bedbug barriers are not be needed and any bug in the room will be caught by the traps and any bedbug that might be already in the bed will be stopped by the shield which will starve them to death.
5.) We do have a lot of clothes and occasionally they do wind up in a pile or two on the ground….as they were on the fateful day…they are still there. Should I ‘rustle’ those piles and the clothes in the closet before I go to bed tonight? Just before or how long beforehand?Finally, how long do we have to do this for? I will leave the traps up for a couple months I guess…but that is a long time to go without a ‘normal’ night’s sleep. ___ Don’t worry about clothes that wind up in a pile. First as I stated above, I do not believe you have lots of bedbugs and any bedbug you might have are not wandering around but are hiding close to where you sleep to digest, harmless while the digest, and waiting for their next meal. Those bedbugs are always caught when they come out of hiding. The only precaution I suggest is to visually inspect anything you pick up from that pile to see if there is an improbable bedbug in it. It takes weeks before you can feel sure that you do not have bedbugs. We know we are bedbug free, not from the number of bedbugs we catch but by the number of bites, hopefully zero that we get while getting normal night sleep as if there are no bedbugs. Normal life comes back only a few days after putting the shield on as you confidence increases with every night without getting a bite, knowing the shield and the trap works. As for bedbugs that could still be in hiding somewhere, they are harmless as long as they do not get a bite. Bites or rather the lack of is the key to measure the efficiency of the trap and your peace of mind.
I hope this was worth it for you. As for me I had so many proofs that bedbug traps are the solution, from my own experience battling bedbugs and winning, and from the numerous, thousands of people who made traps for themselves and gave me feedback, all of them now bedbugs free, it blows my mind. I never expected such responses and praises. I have to watch out so that it does not get to my head and keep my attitude to being respectful and humble. Traps are not something to glorify myself but to share with other people who are stuck with a bedbug problem just like I was.
Best regards
Julien aka JulesNoise
(continued from above) I originally planned to have a commercial exterminator spray the whole house but will not do that now due to your admonishments. I’m considering heat treatment but my gosh it’s expensive and will be quite a sacrifice to be able to do it. Still, I don’t want to inflict the new tenants with a bb problem.
If a tenant doesn’t move in for another month it will be 3-1/2 months empty. The weather here is cold and the temp inside the house is around 60. There have been workers there for several hours every week since they moved out.
Do you think the bugs are/will be dead by then? Should I go ahead with the heat treatment. Anther course of action? Any advice you have is very much appreciated.
Thank you for the service you are performing. It’s most comforting to hear a calm voice among all the hype.
Hi Mary,
Nice to talk to a landlord with a conscience, not every rental place has that respect of its tenants. Tenants with bedbugs have a hard time living with them and then finding a place they can call home without bringing bedbugs with them. It is a curse they never asked for and that haunts their life. And what did you do wrong to deserve all the problems and the worry of knowing there were bedbugs in your rental house? Nothing, you did nothing wrong. You simply rented the house in good faith, and I assume your tenant was of the same good faith when he rented it. So how come you both end up with so much problems? When it is caused by bedbugs, there is no one to blame. Bedbugs come out of nowhere and nobody brings them home intentionally.
Now you have to solve the problem and you want to do it only once, as quickly as possible and without any chance that it will ever happen again. I’m game.
You gave me a lot of information and it seems to me that this is the best time to make the whole house bedbug-proof. The renovations that you are doing can make the house impossible to infest. From your description the house is basically an empty shell. With the tenant gone, most bedbugs went with him. Too bad for him, I wish I could show him how to deal with his bedbugs. Now, could he have left bedbugs behind? Probably, you saw a live adult yourself, so there might be more. You have a huge advantage, having taken out all the baseboards, crown moldings cabinet and flooring, you greatly reduced the places where bedbugs can hide and from my point of view, there are very little places to hide now, except deep in the walls.
At this point, you have a variety of ways to deal with whatever bedbugs could be left.
• A pesticide treatment, applied blindly because the exterminator will not have any specific target and no other choice but apply poison everywhere, to the point of soaking the walls and with no guarantee that it will reach all bedbugs and kill them. A pesticide treatment is a loss of money with unpredictable results.
• A heat treatment, also applied blindly, a heat treatment must bring the whole house over 120°F within minutes to “cook” any and all bedbugs before they can feel the heat and escape by going deeper into the walls and the structure. “Professional” heat treatments often fail and the entrepreneurs who do it know about it and always apply a pesticide treatment at the same time as the heat treatment. Again there are no guarantee it will work.
• Steam, it is a different way to use heat to kill bedbugs. You can get a high capacity steamer in most rental places and apply it to every corner of every room of the house. If steam kills bedbugs on contact, it must be done quickly and thoroughly making sure you do not leave a single bedbug behind, that’s an almost impossible task.
• Alcohol, 91% rubbing alcohol like steam kills bedbugs on contact. The same as steam, it must be done quickly and thoroughly making sure you do not leave a single bedbug behind. It is simpler to apply than steam but has the disadvantages of having to use a huge quantity of alcohol which might damage the walls which is the lesser inconvenience of alcohol, the risks being to the person applying this alcohol that can get sick from the vapors or fumes and send him to the hospital. Alcohol is also very flammable and once the whole house is soaked with it, a single flame can start a fire and burn the house down.
• Paint, and that is the intelligent solution I propose. Surprised? I assume you will paint the place for you renovations anyway. With bare walls and no other place to go that’s where bedbugs have to go to find a place to hide. Once you will have put back the baseboards, crown moldings cabinet and flooring in place, a coat of paint will fill and seal all cracks, interstices and joints and block the only way that bedbugs could come out of the walls, bedbugs will be entombed inside the walls without any possibility of ever coming out again. When you paint, you make a barrier that bedbugs cannot get through; they become effectively trapped under or behind that coat of paint. The only precautions you have to take is to give specific instructions to the worker that will do it to cover any and every small crack and opening bedbugs could use to get out, but on the other hand, that’s what a good painter will do anyway. There are other openings in a wall that cannot be covered with paint, such as light switches, electrical outlets, thermostats, heating units and of course baseboards and trims. Those can be made impervious to bedbugs by using calking or silicone to fill any pathways bedbugs can use behind those fixtures.
o A light switch can be sealed with a bead of silicone on the edges of the back side of the of the light switch plate where it make contact with the wall and around the toggle of the switch to close that opening too without tampering with the operation of the switch. The same can be done to electrical outlets and thermostats or wherever there is a legitimate hole in the wall such as behind a heating unit where the electrical cable comes out.
o Baseboards are particularly vulnerable to bedbugs, it is one of their favorite place to hide. In the same manner as you do for light switches and others, make two long continuous beads of silicone, one behind the upper edge of the baseboard and the other underneath the bottom of the baseboard. Glue the baseboards to the floor and the wall to block any pathway that bedbug use to get in and out of the wall by going under or behind baseboards.
o
With every opening sealed in the walls, baseboards and fixtures, there is no way any possible bedbug can come out of the walls. Any bedbug caught behind it will never be able to come out and will eventually die of starvation. The bedbug problem is solved. All you need is paint, calking, silicone and the attention of a good worker.
You see, this is the same thing as the shield I use on beds and couches but on a larger scale. If bedbugs are such a problem it is because they can easily get at us to feed on our blood. Deny them this only source of food and bedbugs die of starvation without ever getting a bite. Bedbugs can’t survive without our blood, take it away from them. Your job is to close all the doors bedbugs can and do use. You are lucky, since you are already doing renovations, doing these extra works will not only solve the actual problem but will also make the house impervious to any future bedbug infestation. You can solve the bedbug problem this way and you will solve it only once.
When the walls will be sealed, you can make the house even more bedbug-proof with a band of scotch tape running horizontally above the baseboards in the room. Scotch tape is an amazing bedbug barrier, its shiny top surface is very smooth and bedbugs cannot get a grip on it and they always fall back down to the floor when they try to cross it. That band of scotch tape keeps bedbugs off the walls, ceiling, closets, cabinets and any other place you do not want bedbugs to be able to go into. Since bedbugs have no other place to go but on the floor, it is where we put traps to catch bedbugs that fail to climb up. The floor is the most vulnerable place bedbugs can get and that is where those scotch tape barriers sends them. We control where bedbugs can go or not. That band of scotch tape, that bedbug barrier is optional in your case but it will give you protection against any future infestation and that’s why I say you solve the problem only once, there will be no more bedbug infestations.
Your rental house will be available to rent as soon as you will have completed your renovations. You will stop losing money because of bedbugs. The costs of making the house bedbug free and bedbug proof are minimal, most of the work having to be done anyway, the only extras being the calking and silicone and of course the extra time needed by the worker to check and seal all the openings that are usually left behind.
We get bedbugs because the door is wide open for them and nothing is done to stop them. Well, it will not be so anymore in your place, you will be able to rent your house without worries about bedbugs and even if you ever get any, they will be easily taken care of with traps.
The CO2 Bedbug Trap and all its ways to defeat bedbugs brings peace of mind.
JulesNoise.
(My first comment didn’t post — here it is out of order)
Thank you for all the excellent information on your website. You are very knowledgeable on the subject so I would like to ask your expert opinion. Tenants moved out of our rental house at the end of October. They left behind a bb infestation throughout as evidenced by droppings (very extensive), dead bodies, etc. We also came across one live adult near the ceiling.
We are in the process of rehabbing the house, and as part of that work have removed all the baseboard, crown molding, cabinets and flooring. The house is basically an empty shell at this point. Installing the flooring, cabinetry and other work is going to take another month, at least.
Thank you so much for the reply. You’ve given me a clear plan of attack that’s reasonable and logical. A huge improvement over the $$$$ FEAR SPRAY FEAR SPRAY $$$$ hysteria that seems to surround this pest.
I may sprinkle some DE behind the baseboards before they’re put back and while I’m at it into other recesses and crevices before they’re sealed. Just as a further future barrier.
Thanks again for your great reply.
DE as a dust might keep sealants to adhere properly and should be brushed off before painting over it. You could use it on the floor until you find a new tenant. It could be an extra precaution that is sound; in the bedbug war, overkill is allowed.
Jules! Let me first say, as many, many others have already–you are a wonderful person to help all of us get rid of this nasty pest. Here’s my story: two years ago, at the end of 2012, my husband came home and told me that one of his friends had bed bugs in his house and was getting the house sprayed. I thought at the time, “uh, oh. . .it might be only a matter of time before they get over here!” Sure enough, my husband continued to go over to his friend’s house (his friend was convinced that the spraying worked and he critters were gone) and starting at the end of *this* past summer, August 2013, I started noticing that I was getting bug bites. Given that it was summertime, and the bites were itchy, I just chalked it up to mosquitoes, but I was really concerned because I was getting bit on a regular basis, which had never happened before. My husband, however, was not getting bit. Anyway, I continued to experience bites all the way up into early November–it was at that point that I knew this had to be more than mosquitoes, because the weather was getting cold and I’ve never received mosquito bites that late in the year. So, I began to research about bed bugs, and sure enough, that’s what it was. We saw two of their droppings in the folds of our mattress, and we actually caught about 8 of them once we really looked around the mattress. We didn’t see very many at all, and we looked all over the box spring. Boy, was I freaked out–and I was still getting bites. So, I really started to look for ways to eradicate them and was very discouraged because I was reading how everything had to be thrown out and I had to pay big money to an exterminator. We even tried a spray that we bought at a hardware store (we used it frequently on the mattress and boxspring). AND THEN I FOUND YOU—THANK GOD!!!!!!!!! I read as much as I could from your websites and studied your YouTube videos. My husband and I went out and spent a total of $25 to get all of the suggested tools for the bedbug barrier and the traps and carefully followed all your instructions. LO AND BEHOLD–THE BITES STOPPED IMMEDIATELY!!!! And I have not been bitten since (it is now the end of January!) I do have a question: we never caught any bugs in the traps. I used the big two liter bottles, which did not fit under the bed, so I put the four of them next to each leg of the bed. I’m thinking I may need to switch up and use smaller traps. However, it’s been two months since I’ve been bitten. Do you think we still need traps? I used one set of traps for three weeks, and emptied them out, but haven’t replaced them yet. How much longer should we sleep on the plastic? Do you think those nasty bugs are dead yet?
@__SHELLEY
Sorry about the long delay before I could answer, but your comment is so interesting that it got me into developping a new page on my website. I’ve been trying for many months to set-up such a page and could never get it quite right.
But you story and question fit so well in what I was trying to say, it inspired me and I started to make a graph of a typical bedbug infestation and its many variations.
How long does it take to get an mature infestation, and what happens meanwhile.
How long does it take to get rid of an infestation and how to stop it.
Why does it works.
When will they be gone. Some are fast and some are slow.
… and many others.
I uploaded your comment from my inbox (omitting personal information) and its reply on the new “Bedbug Free” section on the front page of my website.
It was nice to finally do it as it is a frequent question that I hadn’t explained anywhere else before
Thank you
JulesNoise
Whoo Hoo!!! I’ve been used as an example!! My husband and I are very happy to have shared our story, among the many others here, to help you further help others! As a follow-up, I will make the two other CO2 traps and keep them running for the rest of the year. We’ve decided, since the average life span of a bed bug is around 90 days, that we will remove the plastic shield from our bed in April, just to be safe. We’ve had the shield on since late November.
Jules, once again, I can’t thank you enough. You have given us our lives back!!! And if that nasty pest ever shows up again, we’ll know just what to do, thanks to you.
Hi Shelley,
It is a delight to read your comments; you are so enthusiast that you shine. I guess you are not worried about bedbugs anymore, it is the untold side effect of the shield. I picked your story because you describe so well what happened to you at the beginning of the infestation. It was short, precise and concise; exactly what I needed to make a page others readers could relate to, thank you.
I already used it as an example of what happens when someone uses the shield, it will be read by many others. It simplifies my answers as I only have to give a link instead of writing it down one more time from scratch. I am grateful that I could use it and it became more than a simple “what happens now?” request, it is a source of information that will help others.
Could you tell your husband’s friend about your experience and direct him to the website. He might find as you did the solution to his problem. It is a shame to have to turn our back to a friend because he got bedbugs somewhere along the way. The scare of the bedbug is real and this is one of its negative effects, but now that we have means to defend ourselves, it is a knowledge we can share. One gets a way to be free of bedbugs and the other gets the reward of helping others, human warmth money can’t buy.
With friendship
Julien
one of the videos you linked to showed a yogurt container being used to make the traps and I followed that one, making 4 of those – 700 millileter containers, around 120g of sugar and a quarter packet of yeast divided between them.
Then I read how we’re supposed to make it look like the CO2 is from an adult human.and that’s why you suggest the 2 liter bottles.
Should I chuck the yogurt and start over?
the landlord got my apartment sprayed a couple of days ago and I have seen none and captured none but I suspect they’ll be back soon.
@__Sam Smithe
Oh, that looks funny; I did not mean it that way. Those yogurt containers are an alternative to the 2L bottles, just like the 500 ml bottles are another one. They only show that we can use different containers to make bedbug traps, it is only a matter of convenience for you. Any container can make a bedbug trap. Yogurt containers are easy to find and make lower and more stable traps than bottles.
CO2 from an adult human looks the same as CO2 from a yogurt container, bedbugs can’t tell one from the other. The recipe of 2L bottle gives around 20 liters of CO2 a day. Placed on the floor, that CO2 overflows from the bedbug pitfall and runs in trails on the floor just like our breath does we are sleeping on the bed. They both mix together and bedbugs follow the CO2 coming from the legs of the bed which is their only way up in the bed. It is the perfect place to place the traps, behind each leg of the bed and also out of our way.
It happens that 2L is the best quantity of water, sugar and yeast to make the mixture last 2-3 weeks and the right amount of CO2. But we can split that mixture in different containers if we wish and it will work just as fine (three 700 ml yogurt instead of a 2L bottle.
It sounds complicated but it is not, it is easier than making a cake, three ingredients mixed together and poured in three containers will attract bedbugs for 2-3 weeks.
Don’t throw anything away, your four individual mixes will produce CO2 the same as if you would have done the mix in a single batch.
Pesticides treatments are less and less reliable as bedbugs become more and more resistant to poison. The actual toxicity of legal pesticide has reached its limit and exterminators have lost control of the bedbug. It is time that we do things by ourselves and for ourselves and eradicate the bedbug.
Don’t worry about bedbugs coming back, with a shield and the traps you will stop them bedbugs and you will eliminate ithem, and right down to the last one.
Hello! This is an incredible website. It gives me lots of hope to see an effective bedbug method. One question though, how do I put boiling water into the 2L bottle? Won’t it melt the plastic bottle? Do i need to use glass?
Please do not use boiling water. The temperature of the water should be body temperature. Some people call it lukewarm, others call it tepid, but the right temperature is 100°F or 40°C.
And do not forget to use a bedbug shield along with the trap. The two work together to stop all bedbug bites at once and eliminate bedbugs right down to the last one.
I am buying my house and previous tenants told me the guy before them had bed bugs because they found pesticide bombs that he had set off in the attic. I did not believe that it was the guy before them because their 5 year old daughter had bites all over her and they said she was allergic to mosquitoes. Retrospect tells me they were the ones with the “critters”. The previous guy may have had them but so did they. I am just beside myself that someone could just let something like this go.
I have read everything I can find that you have put out there. I feel that I know waaaay more than any person should about bed bugs. BUT … I so very much appreciate what you are doing. There is no way that I could deal with my issue without knowing as much as I do. And for that I thank you.
Yeast was already in my pantry… Making a new batch today.
Hi Lori Tyree,
Getting a new house should be something to look forward to… but there are problems brewing, just like it did for the previous occupants. It is possible that “the guy before” had some bedbugs and left because he could not take it anymore. He probably got all his furniture and belongings, bedbugs and all, and went out to find a new place for himself. Unfortunately, he probably left some bedbugs behind and those abandoned bedbugs got a new life when the next tenant moved in. Their daughter was full of “mosquito bites” and that is sad, no child should be left as food for bedbugs, and no adults either. The bedbug is a no-fault nightmare; nobody feeds and spreads on purpose. Those who get stuck with them are more like helpless victims that do not have a choice of letting the situation go like this. They did not have anybody to help them and no way to stop bedbugs before it reached that point, so they moved out.
And here you are, with a new house and the determination to put an end to this house bedbug problem. You read everything you could find and that I have put out there? Well here is more: How to make your house bedbug proof and never be bothered by bedbugs.
Install bedbug barriers before you move in. Barriers above the baseboards of the walls, and barriers around electrical switches and outlets. Barriers around windows and door trims, and barriers in closets and storage spaces. Barriers around each leg of the furniture and on everything bedbugs can climb on. Bedbug barriers everywhere you do not want bedbugs to be able to go. It will cost you an amazing low price of one dollar and a few hours of sticking tape in strategic positions and places.
Bedbug barriers are made of common scotch tape. Bedbugs are climbing insects with filament pincer hooks at the end of their legs, allowing them to easily hang on to rough, porous and fibrous surfaces such as fabric, paper, wood, bricks and masonry as well as certain soft plastics and paints. On the other hand, it is impossible for bedbugs to hang on to hard and smooth vertical surfaces such as glass, porcelain, ceramic, polished metal and also certain hard and smooth plastics. Adding (brushing) talcum powder on these smooth and hard surfaces makes them even more efficient. These vertical smooth and slippery hard surfaces (scotch tape) become more slippery and totally impossible for bedbugs to grip and hang on to. That’s the secret of the bedbug barriers, bedbugs simply cannot get across a bedbug barrier. Bedbugs fall down to the floor where it is very dangerous for them, easily spotted and squished if they dare roam around, attracted by the CO2 coming from the bedbug traps placed behind each leg of the bed, or on each side and behind the couch.
To protect the bed and the couch from being infested by bedbugs, another strip of plastic can be placed on the underside of the bed (or legs) of furniture to deter and make bedbug fall down if they try to cross it. Wait until you discover how good bedbug barriers can be to clear out a whole room out of bedbugs. The best thing is that you have no work to do to eliminate those bedbugs. They come out of hiding all by themselves and cannot go back up to hide again once they fall from these barriers. Once on the floor, they have no other place to go but towards the bed and the traps where they will be caught and suffocated by the CO2 in the small glass pitfalls.
Here is a recent video about bedbug barriers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mVg9ZtLz8Y&list=UUDzXASfh_Vvuu7EvNXOrngQ. This one is in French but the description is the same as what I wrote you here. The language is not important, it is seeing what bedbug barriers can do and how to make them that counts. I’m working on its English version and I should be able to upload it sometime this evening or tomorrow.
Bedbug barriers and CO2 bedbug traps should be enough to clear out any bedbug there might be in your new house. But as an additional precaution, I suggest putting bedbug shields on your bed (s). A bedbug shield is an impenetrable barrier placed on the bed and keeping all and every bedbug from being able to reach you and bite you. It is the ultimate defense against bedbugs. Bedbugs stuck under a shield cannot feed, cannot molt and cannot lay eggs. Stuck under a shield, bedbugs die of starvation while you sleep soundly and comfortably without getting a bite. Here is the bedbug shield: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wy-ry66A7U
Knowledge is power, and it is knowledge we use to defeat bedbugs. Knowledge the previous occupants did not have. CO2 traps on the floor, bedbug barriers on the walls and on the furniture, and bedbug shields on the beds make your house totally proof against bedbugs. It catches and eliminates any and every bedbug right down to the last one without spreading them and without leaving a single bedbug behind.
Thank you for trusting the CO2 Bedbug Trap, this is something you will not regret and that you might pass it on.
Best regards
JulesNoise
quick question: the traps are working like a charm! super stoked. i’m only catching the super tiny baby bugs though. obviously catching any bugs is fantastic but what do you think this means? where are the adults? either way, gonna keep these going for the recommended time! thanks for your service!
Catching super tiny baby bugs means that you are lucky and that you reacted before those babies turned into adults. In the beginning of an infestation, babies and nymphs outnumber the adults 70 to 1. You might still have only one lone adult female bedbug and when you will catch it, you will catch the only bedbug that can lay eggs.
Meanwhile, you must make sure that no bedbug can bite you. Without our blood to feed on, bedbugs cannot molt and grow. Without our blood to feed on, adult bedbugs cannot lay eggs and multiply. So, how do you stop bedbugs from reaching you and biting you? With a bedbug shield. If traps work like a charm, they only catch bedbugs that are in the room and on the floor, but there might be bedbugs already in the bed and the only way to stop those bedbugs is to place an impenetrable barrier on the bed, between you and the bedbugs.
A bedbug shield is made with a long plastic strip about 2 feet wide by 25 feet long. It is attached to the sides of the mattress and hangs down like a skirt all around the bed. Once adjusted about on inch above the floor, place one of your fabric contour sheet directly on the mattress and seal the edges of the contour sheet to the top of the plastic skirt using white duct tape that adheres well to both fabric and plastic.
The Shield stops all bedbug bites at once and let you sleep soundly without getting a bite. Bedbugs under a bedbug shield are unable to reach you and are unable to feed. Those bedbugs are doomed and will die of starvation within a few weeks. Bedbugs in a mattress remain active and can last only 3-4 weeks, while dormant bedbugs hiding somewhere else can last up to 90 days without feeding. So leave the shield on the bed longer than any bedbug can last and keep your traps running for 90 days.
The shield and the traps will eliminate all your bedbugs right down to the last one and you will never be bothered by bedbugs again. The traps and the shield are on the job 24/7 and the first thing you will get is “No more bites!” and peace of mind.
Bedbugs? We are fighting back and we win.
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Jules, I need possibly some unique advice. I live in a studio apartment the size is about 300 square feet. It has a murphy bed which springs back into the wall after use. The bedbugs are completely infested throughout the apartment. I am ofcourse riddled in bites and get them not only at night but throughout the day as I am disabled. They are in my couch, clothes, bedding, everywhere. I need help. I need to know who to address the murphy bed style to make a proper shield. Also, my couch is a double recliner with center cup and cubby console. It is a suade like material. Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks,
Suffering.
Unique advice indeed. You are special, stuck in a small appartment with bedbugs and without any means to defend yourself. You have two principal places where bedbugs hide and feed, one is your murphy bed and the other is your center cup and chubby console couch. It is those two spots that we have to take care of. There are ways to kill bedbugs in those two pieces of furniture. Once those two pieces of furniture will be cleared out of bedbugs, you must take measures to insure that bedbugs will not be able to come back and infest them again.
To keep bedbugs from being able to climb up the walls and any piece of furniture, we can use simple inexpensive scotch tape. It is amazing that common scotch tape can stop bedbugs. It is not the sticky side that stops bedbugs but the hard shiny smooth side of scotch tape. Simple common scotch tape is simply too smooth and too slick for bedbugs to be able to get a grip on it and be able to climb on it. It is as simple as that. Bedbugs have hooks at the end of their legs and they use it on rough, fibrous or porous materials to climb and get to their victims. On the other hand it is impossible for bedbugs to climb on hard smooth surfaces like glass, ceramic, porcelain, polished metal and various kinds of hard tape or plastics. That is what we use to defeat bedbugs. Bedbugs being unable to climb up the walls and furniture have to stay down on the floor where we place bedbug traps and catch them. Within no time at all, all bedbugs will have tried to climb up to feed and failed having nothing but the traps to follow. Traps make them fall into small glass pits from which they cannot get out.
I’m willing to show you how to make those bedbug barriers and those traps. First we must clear bedbugs out of the bed and the couch. To do that we use dry ice in a big bag. We lift and place the bed and the couch on top of a single large (20’x 20′ minimum) sheet of 2 mils painter’s plastic on the floor. Bringing the side up and tying them together will make that large plastic bag arounr the bed and the couch. Then we place 5-10 pounds of dry ice inside the bag and let it stay for 24 hours. The dry ice will turn into nearly pure CO2 and will asphixiate bedbugs within 8-12 hours. At the end of the 24 hours period, all bedbugs either in the bed or the couch will be dead. Once the bed and the couch are clear, the appartment has to be fixed with the scotch barriers that will keep any bedbug from being able to get back in the bed and/or the couch.
Depending on your disability, you might be able to do that or not. In the latter, we need hands to help you, family or friends, or even a social worker. I will give you precise instructions how to it from pictures that you will send me. I want you to be my eyes and to find someone to be my hands. Costs will be kept to a minimum. What you will have is permanent protection from bedbugs and prevention against any future infestation.
Are you interested? If yes we will do it together.
Take good care of yourself
JulesNoise
Hello Jules,
First of all let me thank you for this website, you helped thousands of people. I would like your opinion on my situation, I recently got a couple of bites that look like mosquito bites about an inch apart. So I immediately checked my bed, bedsheets, mattress and bedboard and couldn’t find any traces of bedbugs, I decided to make a trap anyway and followed your instructions, I know the trap is working properly, cause I can hear bubbles inside 2L bottle and I can smell yeast in a trap container, trap has been up for 48 hrs, however there are no bedbugs in there. How long in your opinion it would take to see bedbugs in that trap if bedbug problem does exist? I even used my blackouts during the day to make room dark…Thank You in advance for your feedback..
Igor
Hi Igor,
So you think you might have bedbugs? Nobody will do anything about it unless you have more evidence than a few unidentified bites, well nobody else but me. I believe in prevention, setting up your place so bedbugs will be unable to reach you and bite you. Prevention is not a matter of how many bedbugs you might have but to catch and neutralize the very first bedbugs. If you keep the very first bedbugs from being able to feed, you will keep them from being able to molt and more importantly from being able to lay eggs. Unable to feed, bedbugs will not be able to grow and multiply. Even better than that, being unable to feed those very first bedbugs will not be able to survive for long and will die of starvation.
The best way to stop bedbugs and to block them from being able to feed is to place an insurmontable obstacle in their way, preventing them from being able to reach you at night while you sleep. An insurmontable obstacle for bedbugs is a shield.
You made a CO2 bedbug trap in the hope of catching the few possible bedbugs you might have and did not catch any so far. In the beginning of an infestation, there are very few bedbugs and those bedbugs will be in the bed. That is where all bedbug infestations begin and bedbugs do not scatter (leave the bed to find a safer hiding place somewhere else in the room) until the colony has matured. A colony matures when male bedbugs appear and attack all other fed (blood-filled) bedbugs. A mature colony has between 100-200 bedbugs, meaning about15-20 bites a day. So you must not have more than a few bedbugs at this point. If you neutralize those few bedbugs at this point, you will never have this large mature colony. That is prevention.
It would be a waste of time and energy to start a bedbug chase, what you need is protection against probable bedbugs, whether you found out if you have bedbugs or not.
A bedbug shield is an impenetrable barrier you place in the path bedbugs will take to get to you. It is placed between the bedbugs and yourself, just like a screen is placed in the window, keeping the mosquitoes outside while you are safe from their bites inside. In the case of bedbugs that “screen” or shield is placed on the bed because that is where bedbugs are.
A shield must allow you to sleep soundly and comfortably while keeping you from receiving bedbug bites. A bedbug shield is made with a simple contour sheet to which you attach a long strip of plastic, about 2feet wide by 25 feet long. This strip of plastic is fixed and sealed to the sides of this contour sheet with common duct tape (I suggest white duct tape) hanging down vertically to about one inch above the floor, like a skirt all around the bed. Bedbugs cannot go through the fabric of the contour sheet, no more than they can go sideways to use the bedb sheets to climb up and get to you.
Here is an exanple how to make a bedbug shield: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wy-ry66A7U
With the protection of the shield and a trap on the floor to detect any presence of bedbugs, you will be safe from bedbugs. If you have bedbugs, they will gather under the shield and remain stuck there with no chance of ever getting out and ever feed again. Bedbugs that cannot feed eventually die of starvation (a few weeks to a few months while you sleep soundly without a bite. One day after months of zero bites and no signs of bedbugs whatsoever, you will lift the shield and you will find your dead bedbugs if there were any.
But what if it was not bedbugs but something else? Well, other than flying insects, the shield stops all other crawling insects, fleas, ants, spiders, mites….anything that crawls. Flying insects must be stopped by a screen in the window.
We still do not know if you have bedbugs or not, and you might never know, but what you know is that you will never have a bedbug bite, even if you ever inadvertently bring one home. That lone single bedbug will try to get to you and to do that, it will have to use the legs of the bed, ending up under the shield to be forever stuck. It will wither and die of starvation before it can even get a bite. Funny thing is that you will not even be aware that you had a bedbug attack. It happened to so may of my correspondents, surprised to find a dead bedbug in the bed as we clean the bed once in a while.
The shield is homemade and cost less than ten dollars. With a shield, you become not only bedbug free, but also bedbug-proof. You might have a light bedbug infestation and the shield will simply eliminate it.
Good night, sleep tight and do not let the bedbug bite.
JulesNoise
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Dear Jules,
Thank you for a quick reply. While I understand the concept of the shield, my bed is a little different it doesn’t have legs or boxspring mattress just sits on top of the support inside the wooden frame, woodboards on both sides of the bed are the legs. How do I do it in this case? See pictures. I don’t have plastic right now, I’ll buy it later, bot right now I have the original big plastic bag that mattress came in when I bought it, I am thinking of putting mattress back in there and sealing it with tape (see picture)..I ll do the skirt shield later, (do I even need it if mattress will be sealed inside plastic?) if I do, does it have to go above the wooden frame of the bed ? even the tall front one?I ll be using clear packing tape like in a picture it’s very sticky. I was also planing on using that same clear tape for a wall barriers with talc on top, and using this tape around the bed woodboards (front and rear) with talc to prevent bugs from climbing up….please advice and sorry for so many questions, I am starting to freak out a little bit and we also have a small daughter who sleeps in a different room in a crib but she has no bites yet…
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/xxsh191ccw2idpn/AABrniKF301ICnnWouYuk89Qa?dl=0
@__Igor__A bed which is a little different simply needs a different shield. A shield for your bed as shown in your pictures would be a simple sheet of plastic placed directly on top of the support boards and cut to fit inside the wooden frame.
You can use any kind of plastic or even make your own by taping many smaller pieces of plastic together. Use thick plastic to protect it against wear and tear. Seal it to the inside of the wooden frame with tape so there is no path or holes bedbugs can use to get to the higher parts of the bed. Bedbugs anywhere under the plastic will not be able to get through or climb up to get to you. As for the outside of this bed, a simple band of tape placed on the underside of both woodboards is enough to keep bedbugs from being able to get agross it. It is a bedbug barrier. Two more such bands of tape should be placed at the lowest part od the head and foot boards to keep bedbugs from being able to climb in the bed. Here is your picture with places where the tape (bedbug barrier) should be taped. I suggest 3/4″ wide Scotch tape which has proven to be excellent to keep bedbugs from being able to cross it. You can see bedbugs trying in vain to cross such tape and fail at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5sFz9jC-nQ. You will see that no matter how bedbugs try, they simply cannot get across that plastic because they cannot grip into it. Adding talcum or baby powder doesnT help them at all as talcum or baby powder make the tape even more slippery.
This bed does not have many hiding places where it is assembled together. A simple coat of wax will seal any interstice, crack or crevices, sealing any bedbugs or eggs in a tomb of wax and giving you a bed free of bedbugs. Bedbugs can also be killed with 91% rubbing alcohol, it kills bedbugs on contact and then you apply the wax.
The mattress can be protected with an encasement. You can use the original big plastic bag the mattress came in with but plastic can be slippery and sweaty. A fabric mattress cover is much more comfortable. You can make your own mattress encasement using two regular contour sheets, one on top and one underneath the mattress , sealed together with white duct tape. White is only because it is better looking than the usual grey one.
Bedbugs that cannot climb onto the bed because of the barriers, and that are stuck on the floor are lured into traps also on the floor. Regular traps will not fit under the bed, so place the bottle or whatever container you are using to hold the sugar/yeast mixture and send the CO2 it produces into four small glass pitfalls bedbugs will fall into and suffocate from the CO2 that attracts them. The best pitfalls for bedbugs are ordinary one ounce shot glasses that nobody ever use.
Use the same tape (barriers) to protect the crib from bedbugs. If you do not have bedbugs in the crib yet, it is probably because it is difficult to bet in it. Cribs are often smooth with very few places to hide. The casters also are a major obstacle for bedbugs. The wheel pivot held by smooth polished metal is a natural barrier that offers little if no grip to bedbugs. Cribs are also easier to handle and to clean than a large heavy bed. Simply look at it and try to find any path bedbugs could take and place a tape barrier at those possible paths to keep them from being to cross it. It can be done in no time at all.
If you need more information, contact me again, there is a solution to everything, especially a solution to the bedbug problem. Soon it will be a thing of the past.
On Sat, Oct 18, 2014 at 4:13 PM, The CO2 Bedbug Trap wrote:
>
Thank You for a quick reply, you said attached the picture where the barrier should be taped, but I can not see any pictures for some reason….can you please repost or email it to me….thank you again
Got it thanks! I will work on that and report on progress. You are a lifesaver!
Glad to help. I’ve been doing that for over four years now and I had tens of thousands of people making their own shields and traps, always happy and relieved.
Some people experience difficulties because we are not used to think that way. We are being told that we cannot do it by ourselves. That’s pure bs because anybody can do it. You are actually proving them wrong. Those people only pretend to know when in reality they only pick up their product at the shop and bring it to your home where they spray it. They call themselves professional when in reality they are delivery nen, no more than that. Do they study bedbugs to spray their poison? Absolutely not, the only requirements to be an exterminator is the ability to read and write, a driver’s license and two weeks training with a licensed exterminator. And there you go you are a “professional”. Hardly any knowledge of the bedbug and how to eliminate it.
You just avoided putting your baby at risk. The poison they use is a cancerigenous neuro-toxin that they call mildy toxic when it is ten times more dangerous for babies than for adults. Where do they put that harmful poison? In the beds and in the crib, and your baby and yourself sleep in poison for three months or more. Aren”t you glad you found a way to get rid of bedbugs as well as getting rid of the poison-pusher too?
You are doing well and you will be free of bedbugs soon.
Find as much as you can about what you are doing now. Sometime down the line you might hear of someone else stuck with bedbugs and what you are learning now can be passed on to these unwilling bedbug victims like you. That’s what happened to me. I fought bedbugs and I won, since then, I kept telling others about it and it works.
I made friends all over the world and now I believe I’m making another. JulesNoise
On Sat, Oct 18, 2014 at 7:19 PM, The CO2 Bedbug Trap wrote:
>
Absolutely! If only there were more people like Jules arround who are ready to help other people without monetary gain….and to update you on my story…we had no bites for 4 nights now. After I put my mattress in the original plastic bag it came with, bites did stop but I wasn’t quite comfortable knowing that this plastic might and did have miniature holes in it because air was escaping from it, it was used for transporting it from the factory and who knows how many small rocks, or woodchips from warehouse pallets could’ve punctured it, I was paranoid at night imaginig that bedbugs found the hole thag I missed and crawling outta there…there is no way I could be sure it’s completely sealed even with carefull inspection of plastic, so I went ahead and also bought a bedbug proof mattress encasement and put it on top of plastic (doublebagged it!). I sleep a lot better now knowing that they have no way outta there….I will continue to update…thanks again for everything!!!
Hi Jules, first I just want to thank you for this incredible resource! I’ve been combating bed bugs for about a year now and your website is an oasis of information. My question is this: I have a platform bed frame with no headboard, that looks like this
I’m pretty positive that the bugs are all in the frame as that’s where I find their evidence. In regards to my shield, could I just take the matress off and drape the plastic over the frame? I have it set up currently so that the plastic is taped in the middle of the mattress, like your video, but I just can’t help to wonder if they will just go from the frame into the mattress and stay there? Nothing is preventing that, right? Couldn’t placing the barrier over the frame prevent this? If I inspect the mattress and find no evidence is this a sufficient shield?
Thank you so much!
@__Jeremy
Draping a large sheet of plastic over the bed is the easiest way to make a bedbug shield. If you take off the mattress, you should wrap it between two fabric contour sheets sealed together to make a fabric mattress encasement. The shield will protect the frame of the bed while the fabric homemade mattress encasement will entomb any bedbugs and eggs that might be in the mattress. The reason why it is better to use two contour sheets to make a mattress encasement is that it will trap bedbugs just as effectively as any plastic encasement but will be much more comfortable as it will be less slippery and less sweaty than a plastic encasement.
In the case of a platform bed such as yours, there is another way to make a shield. First, use a smaller sheet of plastic that will be placed directly on the support boards and fitted inside the frame. This smaller shhet of plastic should be sealed on the inner side of the frame to block any path that bedbugs could take to climb up and reach the mattress. Then, place a long sheet of plastic all around the bed like a skirt. This long sheet of plastic should measure about 2 feet wide by 25 feet long, fixed to the exterior side of the frame and and sealed using clear wrapping tape and hanging about one inch above the floor. This space allows bedbugs that might be anywhere in the room to crawl underneath the shield, where they will be trapped and unable to reach you while you sleep. The first thing that will happen is that all bedbug bites will stop at once. Once the shield is in place there will be no more bedbug bites.
This method stops all and any bedbugs from being able to feed. Bedbugs that cannot feed cannot molt, cannot lay eggs and simply cannot survive. Within a few weeks, all bedbugs die of starvation while you sleep soundly without a single bedbug bite.
I looked at your bedbug trap and it is very well made. The container holding the sugar and yeast mixture is low and will fit under the bed. The pitfall that bedbugs fall into is made of plastic and the inside should be brushed with a light coat of talcum powder (baby powder) to make the inside of the plastic bowl too slippery for bedbugs to be able to climb out of it. The CO2 filling the bowl will suffocate bedbugs within a few hours, no oxygen is inside the bowland bedbugs are asphixiated and will die.
I killed millions of bedbugs that way and hundreds of thousands of people have made their own bedbug traps. The trap belongs to everybody and has the potential to completely eradicate bedbugs for good. We won the war as so will you.
Thank you Jeremy for trusting the trap. You will not regret this, nobody ever did.
JulesNoise
Thank you so much for your quick reply!!! I appreciate the feedback about the trap and shield. One more question…I’m not sure that I really understand the difference between the two shield options. If I were to simply drape the plastic over the entire frame and cut it an inch from the ground, wouldn’t that accomplish both jobs of preventing bugs from getting to the mattress, and luring other bugs from the room?
Both shields are the same thing, an impenetrable barrier that stops all bedbugs. Simply draping the plastic over the whole bed and cutting it about one inch above the floor is the fastest and easieast way to make the bedbug shield, that’s what I used when I had bedbugs then. The second option, as seen in the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wy-ry66A7U is a more comfortable way to make the bedbug shield as plastic can be slippery and sweaty. The plastic hanging down all around the bed (like a skirt) is more neat as you can hardly see it when the bed is made, as well as it will not move as plastic can.
If you prefer to put the plastic uder the mattress instead of over it, in both options you must wrap the mattress between two fabric contour sheets that you will tape and seal together with duct tape, (preferably white to make it look better). The shield will protect you against bedbugs in the frame while your homemade fabric mattress encasement will entomb any bedbugs and eggs that might be in the mattress.
A shield over the bed will make bedbugs come out of hiding and clear the entire room out of bedbugs. The shield will stop them from being able to feed and bedbugs will die of starvation wihile you sleep soundly without a single bite.
You are on the right track, soon your bedbug problem will be over and over for good.
JulesNoise
Also, is this an acceptable trap? :)
Hi Jules,
First of all, thanks for all your advice.
I have a little concern since I have a cat. Is it risky to use the traps with a cat in the house ? I’m afraid it might turn upside down or destroy the traps.
And another question : what make do you suggest as far as barrier tape is concerned ?
Merci !
Bonjour David,
Cats are totally indifferent to the traps. CO2 is odorless by itself but the smell of the sugar and yeast mixture is the same as baked bread , turning into a slight smell of alcohol as the fermentation progresses. There is nothing to attract them and cats leave the traps alone. Cats also have a natural protection against bedbugs, all furry animals do as bedbugs cannot get between hair and reach their skin, so cats do not get bedbug bites.
Because CO2 is heavier than air, it flows downwards and traps are placed on the floor, preferably behind each leg of the bed which are the main paths bedbugs take to climb in the bed, and also where they are protected from getting knocked down. The containers can also be tied to the legs of the bed for additional protection. Tall 2 liter bottles might not fit under certain beds and the containers can be replaced by other lower and more stable containers like empty juice bottles, yogurt containers, ice cream containers. Recycled containers must be free of any bacteria, especially dairy products that inhibit fermentation, by rincing them thouroughly with the hottest water from the tap. The recipe for the sugar and yeast mixture can be separated in two 1 liter containers giving you two traps, or four containers of 500 ml and giving you four traps even more efficient as if you have only one trap of 2 liters. The containers do not have to be under the bed if you use an airline tubing (found in a local hardware store, or in a pet shop if it is more convenient for you), or by making your own tubing using flexible drinking straws, to bring the CO2 from the mixture container to small glass pitfalls that bedbugs fall into and can’t get out. Here is an operational trap with a 2 liter bottle that can be placed anywhere it would be convenient for you, using drinking straws to bring the CO2 into a small one ounce shot glass that serves as a pitfall. http://julesnoise.com/2014/10/27/a-simple-bedbug-trap/ Here is also a different stable short trap made with 1 liter yogurt containers that fit well under a bed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWd5dBdyqVc
You might already have the recipe but here it is again to make it easier. https://julesnoise.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/c02-bedbug-trap-__-recipe8.jpg
Tape to stop bedbugs is the most amazing thing. It cost less than a dollar to made a whole room proof against bedbugs. This tape can be anything as long as it is slick and slippery on the shiny side. Transparent 1/2″ scotch tape is the best, hardly visble when in place on the legs of the bed, of the night tables, dressers, couches and chairs above the baseboards of the walls and vear the ceiling, as well as the trims of the closets, around light switches, electrical outlets or any opening bedbugs could hide without the tape which is a bedbug barrier. The tape used to make these bedbug barriers can be made even more slippery by brushing a light coat of talcum or baby powder on the outside vertical shiny surface of the tape. Bedbugs are unable to climb on such tape as can be seen on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5sFz9jC-nQ. Bedbugs keep trying and fail, lose their grip and fall down to the floor where traps are. The combination of the tape barriers and the traps on the floor clears the whole room out of bedbugs.
You have only one thing missing to put an immediate stop to the bedbug infestation and that is the bedbug shield. The shield is an impenetrable barrier placed between yourself and bedbugs that might be already in the bed. Those bedbugs do not go back down to the floor where the traps are and must be contained under the shield where they cannot reach you and bite you. The shield is made from one of your contour or fitted sheets with a plastic strip of about 2 feet wide by 25 feet long, and hanging down like a skirt all around the mattress and about one inch above the floor. The plastic skirt is sealed to the contour sheet with white duct tape Here is an example how to make a bedbug shield: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wy-ry66A7U
The traps, the tape barriers and the shield on the bed is all you have to do to eliminate bedbugs. Once your set up is in place, all bedbug bites stop at once and you can use your bed as if there are no bedbugs, in fact you will hardly see another bedbug if any as they will hide as bedbugs always do until they come out when they will get hungry. During the night they will come towards the bed and will be caught by the traps and stopped by the shield. Bedbugs caught into the traps die within hours of CO2 suffocation and bedbugs also die of starvation under the shield. The traps, the barriers and the shield last longer than any bedbug can live, so this system always eliminate bedbugs and right down to the last one. It is the end of the bedbug nightmare. You do not have to do heavy clean-up, put everytnig in plastic bags, turn the whole place upside down, throw anything away, chase elusive bedbugs, or worse use poison to get rid of them. The traps, the barriers and the shield give its true meaning to an old rhyme: “Good night, sleep tight and don’t let the bedbug bite… because they can’t bite you no more!”
Almost all I do is in English but future correspondance could be in French, my first language, if you wish. Thank you and the best to you from, Quebec City.
JulesNoise
Thanks for the quick response.
How do you make sure the talcum powder get stuck in the tape ? When you apply it, it just stays on the tape ?
I am corresponding in English so other people can possibly take benefits of it, even if I’m bad ! :D
Encore merci.
Oh and I forgot. When you say 4 x 500ml bottles instead of 1 x 2 liters, do you mean one trap per bottle or one for the 4 bottles ?
Thanks
Yes, it sounds confusing said that way. Everything is about the quantity of yeast we can get in a store. These small packets of yeast are most commonly of 7-8 grams, and we want to use the whole packet of yeast every time we make a mix.
So a packet of yeast needs two cups of sugar in two liters of lukewarm (100°F) water. It is that mixture that can be separated in four 500 ml containers each with its own small glass pitfall. One mix of two liters make four separate traps (one trap per bottle), one trap behind each of the four legs of the bed.
Corresponding in English for the benefit of others is very toughtfull of you, merci.
Talcum powder or its equivalent baby powder is easy to apply and it is so light that it sticks on the tape all by itself. It remains there for a long time without degrading until something wipes it of, and even in that case some remains on the tape. The powder can be applied with a small soft brush, such as a make-up brush and only a very light coat is enough.
Hello …I desperately need your help …I actually think i may go insane…I live in London in an old Victorian flat with floor boards and a flat below me and above me…However in October I notice i was bitten and I discovered I had bed bugs…I bought a steamer & numerous sprays..>I noticed the bed bugs came up from under the floorboards and I believe come from downstairs neighbors who had not long moved in ( 5 months) with all their furniture..Anyway I have managed using the shield and a mattress protector to stop being bitten in my bed …but the problem is the upholsered furniture in my sitting room…I do not have money for exterminators ..Anyway I have tried your traps but I have not caught anything even though I know my flat has a massive problem….The mixture does froth up and I have tried more or less sugar and several mixtures & locations in the room…However not one bed bug in trap yet I still get bitten in my sitting room…..Also upholstered chairs now have bugs and I have wrapped in plastic but still cannot sit on them as get bitten..I cannot see how they are getting out !!! …My flat is like a battleground and I am at me wits end…My trainers were even infested and I got bitten out running ..All my clothes are in bags, washing and drying sheets everyday as manged to bring bugs into bed on clothes once & got bitten in the night ….what can I do to make traps work & how can I save my furniture ….I have used DE in my room and tried it in the sitting room but the floorboards make it impossible to use…I live alone and have no help and I ma afraid to ask anyone round as they could go home with bed bugs….Please help me
Hello Maria,
I read you loud and clear. I know all about how you feel because of such a frustrating bedbug situation, professionals call it emotional distress, I call it a nightmare. I wish bedbugs had never existed and they were nearly extinct until some greedy fools brought them back. And now we are all stuck with bedbugs and they tell us we cannot do anything about it and that they will never eradicate it. The only thing bedbugs are good for is for their business and that sucks! You do not have any money for exterminators? Good, I do not want you to give them any money, they are the ones who brought the bedbug back. I will do anything I can so you will never have to call an exterminator. We can take care of bedbugs all by ourselves and with costs as minimal as possible. We want you to get rid of bedbugs only, but not to get rid of our hard-earned money, bedbugs are not worth it.
I’ve been fighting bedbugs for over five years, and I’m responsible for the death of millions of bedbugs. Now is the time to kill yours. It will not be an all-out war, just a change of strategy. If bedbugs are all over the place, it is only because they can. There is nothing to stop them except where you stop them with a shield.
First we have to sort out what works and what does not. From what you told me, a steamer & numerous sprays are a flop, DE is difficult to handle and even the traps seem to have no results. Intense heavy clean-up does not work either, it is endless and does not even put a dent in the bedbug population. Only the shield gave you some relief and you wish you had shields for other furniture items that you can’t use anymore because of bedbugs.
Well, you know the shield works and that your bed is protected, there is at least a place where you are safe from bedbugs. In this missive and probably a few others to follow, we will extend that protection your whole place. We will use it to protect these other valuable items you wish to keep, and rightly so. Once your belongings will be secure, we will use bedbug barriers to make your whole flat bedbug-proof. Once we will have taken care of that important part, And then we will have a look at your bedbug traps and see how to make them work.
Let’s look at your furniture first. Your bed is protected by a shield, your upholstered chairs are not and that is where you get most of your bedbug bites. What we can do is to make those chairs inaccessible by bedbugs with either their own shields or use bedbug barriers to keep bedbugs from being able to get into them.
A quick fix solution would be to cover the chairs with a sheet of plastic that will stop and keep bedbugs from being able to bite you. But it is not the most appealing or comfortable thing to sit on. A better solution would be to kill all bedbugs in those chairs at once and protect them from being re-infested with bedbug barriers on the chair legs or any other place bedbug could use to climb up.
First, we can kill bedbugs out of anything by using dry ice. Bedbugs need to breathe like every other creature on this planet. High concentrations of CO2 suffocates bedbugs, as it can suffocate anything that lives, it is called the silent killer. It is harmless in the air, we breathe it in and out twelve times a minute and it is essential to life. But in an enclosed space, if CO2 can accumulate it becomes deadly because it replaces the oxygen all living creatures need to breathe. So to make a deadly bedbug killer out of something normally safe to use, simply wrap the upholstered chairs in plastic and place a chunk of dry ice in this plastic bag.
To wrap an armchair in plastic, you need a large sheet of plastic of about 12 feet by 12 feet. Place the large sheet of plastic on the floor, lift and move the chair in the center of the plastic sheet and lift all the sides, bundle and tie them together to form a bag around the chair, leaving only a very small hole at the top where air will escape and will be replaced by nearly pure CO2 inside the bag.Dry ice will sublimate in CO2 gas and push all the air out of this plastic bag, leaving only near pure CO2 inside the bag. That nearly pure CO2 inside the bag will kill all bedbugs and eggs within hours as it turns to gas. It is called dry ice because it does not turn liquid and will not cause any damage to the chairs or anything else other than suffocating bedbugs to death.
It is cold, very cold and we should wear gloves to handle dry ice. To keep dry ice from sub-freezingthe chair or make the plastic brittle, wrap it in a large and thick insulating bath towel and place the bundle on the floor inside the bag. The next day slice the plastic bag open and all the CO2 will come out, it will dissipate in the air and it is perfectly safe to do so. Dead bedbugs and residues can be cleaned with a brush or a vacuun cleaner. The chair will be totally free of bedbugs.
A dry ice treatment costs a few pounds for the large sheet of plastic needed to make the plastic bag and about five pounds of dry ice for each chair. Dry ice sells for about 0,67 £ a pound, so the whole dry ice treatment should not be more than five £.
You can clear bedbugs out of most anything using dry ice to kill them. Once the chairs will be cleared out of bedbugs, wrap small bands of scoth tape around the legs of the chair and use barriers to keep them from being able to re-infest them again. You know that the shield is amazing because it does exactly what it says, it stops bedbugs from being able to reach you and bite you while you sleep. These bedbug barriers will do exactly the same thing.Who would have thought that a simple band of scotch tape is all we need to stop a bedbug infestation. It blew my mind when I found it, This is such a common and inexpensive item that it is hard to see it as the best defense ever against bedbugs. one roll of 1/2″ scotch tape is all you will need to make your whole place bedbug-proof.
It is the next step in your protecting yourself against bedbugs. Killing bedbugs with dry ice is the fastest way to get rid of all of them at once, but we cannot treat the whole apartment with dry ice and there are bound to be bedbugs elsewhere. That’s why we need barriers to keep them from being able to reach those places or items cleared out of bedbugs. Scotch tape is a shiny hard plastic that bedbugs cannot hang into. Bedbugs have filament pincer hooks at the end of their legs, making them excellent climbers, if bedbugs could not climb, they would not be able to reach ud. To defeat bedbugs, you must keep them from being able to climb. A bedbug on its way up to feed will met such a band of scotch tape and will not be able to get a grip on it. the bedbug will start to slip and slide and will fall down to the floor, unable to get any higher than that band of scotch tape. To see those barriers in action, live bedbugs defeated by something as simple as scotch tape, look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5sFz9jC-nQ
As you can see in this video, bedbugs cannot cross a vertical band of scotch tape. Put a band of scotch tape on the legs of the bed, the upholstered chairs, the desk, the night tables, the dressers or anything else you want to keep bedbugs out of. Put more scotch tape at the bottom of the walls, above the baseboards to keep bedbugs from being able to climb up on the walls. Put another band at the top of the walls to keep them from being able to use the ceiling. One roll of scotch tape is all you need to clear out bedbugs from anywhere in the apartment and keep them down on the floor where is will be easy to catch them with traps and neutralize them.
With a shield on your bed, furniture cleared out of bedbugs and protected with bedbug barriers, as well as more barriers on the walls there won’t be any other places where bedbugs will be able to go other than down to the floor and you will have control of the situation. Bedbugs on the floor are so easy to kill and it doesn’t matter if they can keep coming through the floor boards. That’s when the traps will work at their best. CO2 flows on the floor and entices any bedbug that feels it. It is the second most powerful bedbug attractant, it lures bedbugs in a false meal that will only bring them death. Bedbugs can go nowhere, thanks to your smart anti-bedbug set-up and all bedbugs have is a bare floor and these things that give off CO2 like a human and looks like the blood meal they crave for.
And that’s it Maria, that’s all you have to do. Forget about the plastic bags keeping all your clothes and belonging from you, forget about heavy intensive clean-ups, forget about the problems and the worries caused by bedbugs, plain and simple, forget about bedbugs that can go nowhere and can’t bite anybody.
Kill bedbugs in your chairs and belongings, block them with bedbug barriers and keep them from feeding and catch them if they ever dare come out of hiding. If they keep coming, just keep killing them and show the neighbors how you do it.
You will be free of bedbugs, you will be bedbug-proof. Now is the time to do it and if you need any help or information, contact me again, I’ll be with you all the way to fight those bloody parasites and we will see the end of it.
Could you send me pictures of your upholstered chairs so I can point out the best places to put the tape barriers.
My best regards from Quebec City.
JulesNoise
Thanks Jules and greetings Quebec City….I just read your reply and you are very kind ..(except to bed bugs…’killing them by the millions’ …If bed bugs had a history channel you’ be on it …ha ha )
I am now trying to purchase dry ice …not easy in London. I will be doing the chair cleaning soon …I cannot take a picture of my chairs but here is an example on the internet of what my chairs look like
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=upholstered+chairs&biw=944&bih=431&tbm=isch&imgil=MerrLYmIJmt0JM%253A%253BicpxscFhlACsGM%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fwww.rialnodesigns.com%25252Fsydney-upholstered-chair%25252F&source=iu&pf=m&fir=MerrLYmIJmt0JM%253A%252CicpxscFhlACsGM%252C_&usg=__EzqFCuTkjGyZxsibSC8LgDykIYs%3D&dpr=1.25&ved=0CGYQyjc&ei=6w0lVcqQCKjX7QbHq4HIDw#imgdii=MerrLYmIJmt0JM%3A%3BMerrLYmIJmt0JM%3A%3BD25qznMl4PH3dM%3A&imgrc=MerrLYmIJmt0JM%253A%3BicpxscFhlACsGM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.rialnodesigns.com%252Fwp-content%252Fuploads%252F2013%252F04%252Fupholstered-chair-970.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.rialnodesigns.com%252Fsydney-upholstered-chair%252F%3B1372%3B912
I am not sure about where to put scotch tape …do I need to put it on all the walls to stop bed bugs climbing my walls ?
What do you think I could be doing wrong with CO2 traps ??
Definitely frothing, used straws, and a plastic container ?? Could smell CO2 in container but feint …How strong should it smell
I used 16g of yeast and 5 times that of sugar ….in a 2 litre bottle
Also have now be bitten in the bed…wondering if the plastic shield plastic is too soft ….or has too many folds ??/ How thick should the plastic be & what about folds in the skirting ??…Maybe not shield but somehow brought bugs into the bed …but very careful to undress in bathroom and use clean PJs
I not have a massive reaction to the bits and I am covered n a rash all along my legs and abdomen …
I am fed up with DE all over my bedroom and need to hover and steam the carpet but I feel it keps bed bugs in the room …not sure if I should hoover it up
.In my sitting room I sit at a table with chair ,placed on plastic that is taped all around the table and wall behind the chair and raised 4 inches form the ground all round the edge …Its seems safe put found BBs dead on the plastic inside my fortress and was bitten in the neck from a sweat shirt in wore that must have had a bb……Worst problem is I cannot see them , I am trying so hard but its seems like I am invaded….how many can there be
thanks for all your help
Maria
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for my knowledge. thanks admin
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site, because here every information is quality based stuff.
@julesnoise. Thank you so much for your detailed and caring response. Everything you said is right and it is so hard to not get totally consumed by these truly insignificant creatures. I am keeping up with everything you have told me to do so far no bites it has been 2 weeks since I discovered that one adult bug in my bedroom and also 2 weeks since I have been using your methods. There is an update and two more quesitons I have for you. The update is last night as I was entering my bedroom it was only 9 pm and I see out of the corner of my eye on my wall near the ceiling (but not on it thanks to your barriers) BED BUG! It seemed trapped and what was so confusing to me is that is not their usual habits. They say bed bugs are most active between 2 am and sunrise. So I immediately grabbed alcohol soaked it and killed. My question is, since I discovered this bug in that situation do you think its because they are on the run trying to get to the bed and would this most likely be a dormant bed bug? Also my second question is, I have a cat who has never been allowed in our bedrooms however would they start to leave the room and go find him as a host? Thanks again for all your help and support. I think you’re the only person who understands and knows how to put the rest of us at ease.
Thanks , I’ve just been searching for info approximately this topic for a long time and
yours is the greatest I’ve came upon till now. However, what concerning the bottom line?
Are you certain in regards to the source?
Hi, the bottom line of the “Contact us” page that you responded to says:
“Stop them from feeding on you. Use a shield between you and them. You control their only source of food: if parasites try to feed on you, make it impossible for them to reach you and starve them to death!”
Well if this about killing bedbugs by starving them to death, there are no better source than dead bedbugs by the thousands while you sleep soundly without not receiving a single bite. The best demonstration of that fact is doing it by yourself and seeing the results with your own eyes.
This is not a scam or someone trying to make a fast buck with an unproven theory. Traps and shields are not for sale nor does anybody makes any money from it. It is knowledge shared with people stuck with the same problem I had. I got rid of bedbugs all by myself and right down to the last one, then and only then I began to tell other people about it. It is my source, hundreds of thousands of people who tried it in the last five years and got bedbug free without filling the pockets of corporations.
Get smart, it is only an insect and no insect will ever be better than you or me or any of us. How do you get rid of bedbugs? Take away their only food, your warm blood and bedbugs will die of starvation like any other creature on this planet that absolutely meed food to survive.
Why do we have bedbugs? Because we feed them. The Bedbug Shield is the only thing that tries to stop them and it is the only thing that can.
This method is available for everybody and it is free. You have nothing to lose except those disgusting bedbugs and all the worries that bedbugs bring, including getting poisoned with a product bedbugs are resistant to and that spreads bedbugs.
If you are searching for info approximately this topic, I’m willing to share anything I got with you and make you not only bedbug-free but forever bedbug-proof. Other methods, traditional or not will never eradicate the bedbug because they profit from it and we know they will never kill their business.
I would appreciate your thoughts, thank you..
JulesNoise
Hi-Thanks for your helpful website. My question is about your easiest and fastest bedbug trap ever on YouTube. How does this work??? I am not talking about your yeast traps, I mean the one with only water bottles, straws, and a glass? Water does not give off CO2, so I just don’t get it. Please advise…
The “Easiest and fatest bedbug trap ever” on Youtube is a yeast trap. Recycled 500ml bottes are so light that they they tumble and fall when you are making them. The water in the bottle serve no other purpose than give some weight to the bottle while making the trap. The water is replaced by the sugar and yeast mixture which is what produces CO2. ( At 02m18 on the video. it says “Replace the plain water with the mixture of sugar and yeast in lukewarm water”)
The traps are placed on the floor behind each leg of the bed. A 2 liter sugar and yeast recipe costs less than one dollar and can fill four 500 ml traps.
Traps will take care of bedbugs that might be anywhere in the room. The traps will catch them when they come out of hiding and go towards the bed to feed at night. But there probably are bedbugs already in the bed, and CO2 traps will not attract and make these bedbugs go down towards the floor. For bedbugs that might be already in the bed, you need a bedbug shield. A bedbug shield is a barrier the stops all and any bedbug and keep it from being able to reach you and bite you.
Combining a bedbug shield with the CO2 traps will clear any bedbug infestation. The first thing to happen is that all and every bedbug bites will stop at once! You can sleep very comfortably with a shield on your bed and and without getting a single bite!
You stop bedbugs with the traps and the shield and since they will not be able to bite and feed, bedbugs begin to starve and die within a few weeks of not getting any bite.
Here is the bedbug shield: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wy-ry66A7U
Start with the shieldthat will stop all bites at once and we will have the time to make the four 500 ml CO2 traps that are placed under the bed.
Contact me if you need help or if you need more information. I’d like to make sure that you are protected against bedbugs and that your shield and traps will eliminate all the bedbugs right down to the last one.
Today is the day you will defeat bedbugs.
JulesNoise
Thanks. Must have missed that on the video. My other question is have you ever tried the trap with less bottles? Or is 4 the optimal number according to your tests?
The trap is based on an existing recipe used to feed CO2 to plants in an aquarium. It took it as it is because it just happened to give off enough CO2 to attract bedbugs and it lasts long enough to work for 2-3 weeks. Perfect to make a bedbug trap. I tried it and it worked the first time. I made more traps and I got rid of all my bedbugs. I also had a plastic draped over my bed at that time and I never received another bite while using it. It is from the idea of that plastic that I made the bedbug shield. Bedbugs could not reach me anymore, got hungry and tried to get to me and bite me, but never could. I found dead dried up bedbugs months later when I took of my shield in a normal clean-up.
The 2 liter recipe has long proven that it gives off enough CO2 to attract bedbugs. That 2 liter mixture can be separated in as many containers or bottle as we want. We can have a single trap of 2 liters, four traps of 500 ml or even 8 or 10 smaller traps if you want and they will all work just fine. Containers do not have to be bottles, any container with a lid and that we can attach a tube to, will do just fine. We can even make traps that do not look like traps, one of my correspondents made a trap with a flower vase to hold the mixture and the pitfall was a simple porcelain the vase was sitting in. With artificial flowers (yeast and sugar is not good for plants) that’s exactly what it looked like but it in reality it wqs a working bedbug trap! We can make our trap anyway we want as long as we have a container to hold the brew, small slippery recipients to serve as pitfalls (the best are small one ounce shot glasses that very few people use but everybody has at home) an a tube to bring the CO2 in the pitfalls. Airline tubes can be found in hardware stores or pet stores. To shape and bend the tube and make it stay in place, insert a steel wire inside the tube and it will keep any shape you give it.
You are doing good, keep going and with the shield you might be able to stop the bedbug infestation today and sleep without any bites from now on. You will sleep peacefully while bedbugs begin their starving agony, because with what you are doing now, soon all bedbugs will be dead!
You are on your way to become bedbug-proof.
JulesNoise
Very nice post. I absolutely appreciate this site.
Keep it up!
hello, I put a CO2 bedbug trap I made in my room, near my bed, I didn’t slept in it, and no bedbugs have benn traped yet, is it normal ? thanks in advance, Anne
Yes it is normal. Catching a bedbug on your first try depends on the size of the infestation. Large infestations always give lots of bedbugs on the first try but small infestations often give no catch at all in the traps because at that nursing stage all bedbugs are still in the bed. Bedbugs leave the bed only when a colony matures, meaning they all hatch and grow together until the first agressive male appear and make blood-filled bedbugs leave the safety of the bed.
Something made you suspect you might have bedbugs. Did you get bit? Bedbug bites is information about what should be done. Irrelevant of the size of an infestation or how and why it happened, there is only one thing to do in doubt of bedbug presence, raise your shield!
A bedbug shield is an impenetrable barrier between the bedbugs and yourself. It is the same thing as putting a screen in the window to protect you against mosquitoes. But mosquitoes are flying insects and bedbugs are climbing crawlers, and bedbugs start, feed and grow in the bed. So the shield, that screen against bedbugs, goes over the bed, like a tent over all the bedbugs since it seems there are very few bedbugs outside the bed.
It will make your battle easier. Simply set your shield on your bed and all bedbug bites will stop at once. No matter if you have a large or small infestation, a shield stops all bedbugs, even if there is only one or a thousand. They all starve to death since they cannot feed anymore. It is the secret of getting rid of bedbugs for good and forever, keep them from being able to feed. No food for bedbug means no more bedbugs.
A shield is made with one of your contour sheet placed directly on the mattress and covering a 2 feet wide by 25 feet long plastic skirt , hanging down to about one inch above the floor and fixed to the sides of the mattress with small squares of duct tape. Seal the ends of the contour sheet to the top of the plastic skirt with white duct tape and your bedbug shield is made.
Keep the trap running under the bed, it will warn you of any bedbug presence in the room. A working trap slightly smells of baked bread, when it stats to smell of alcohol, it is time to renew the mixture of the trap.
Please install a shield on your bed, it will not only eliminate any bedbug you might have but it will also be prevention against any future bedbug attack. It is true that the shield can stop a single bedbug even the one that just came in. Imagine being able to stop the very first bedbug, that’s what the shield does once it has starved all other bedbugs to death.
It is safe, non-poisonous and it costs only a few dollars for materials locally found.
Keep us informed of your progress. With great results, there is hope and inspiration for others. Thank you.
JulesNoise
Hello again, and thank you very much for your response , yes we get bite, and we ask some dog’scan to come here and they found bedbugs (in two rooms and in the sitting room). The thing is, I really wonder about shields, if I put a shield on my bed, adult bedbugs can wait several months (maybe more than a year) until they die, and also if they don’t have any thing to eat any more, they can just leave to go to the neighbours, can’t they ? or to the sofa where there are already maybe, and how to do a shield for a sofa ? thank you for your attention and help !
Anne