Make your own traps
Traps can be made from articles and items you already have at home.
To make this trap you need four small glasses, four 2L bottles and 1/4″ tubing such as found in pet shop for aquarium.
- Attach or glue a piece of cloth or paper towel to the outside of the cups.
- Cut it straight at the top and cut the bottom in contact with the floor, bedbugs will climb up on that to get into the cup. A little bedbug ladder.
- Make a hole in the cap of the bottle with the point of one blade of your scissors, just big enough to insert the tubing in it.
- Get an old sock and cut off the toe and slip it over the bottle to cover it from light.
- Take a lenght of tubing to go from the cap of the bottle and into the cup. Insert the tubing only slightly into the cap (1/4″ max) to collect the Co2. The tubing should not touch the liquid.
- The first trap is done, you will need four.
———- To hold the flexible tubing to the bedbug pitfall, tape the tubing to the handle of the cup ———
If bedbugs were confined to one room, and the bed in that room did not have any bedbugs in it, and that bed had interceptors on the legs and was isolated, is it still necessary to use traps? Wouldn’t the lure (human) and the traps (interceptors) do the same thing as a CO2 trap?
Yes, if there are no bedbugs in the bed and if you have a mean to intercept them (Climb-up Interceptors) when they try to get into the bed using the legs of the bed, bedbugs will keep trying to reach their “host”, attracted by the warmth of their body (bedbugs see in the infrared and can detect warmth from across a room).
It is the same as a “Human body heat” trap, luring bedbugs towards the bed and blocking them with interceptors. We have the very same thing with a bedbug shield, an impenetrable barrier that no bedbug can get through or around it. In the case of the bedbug shield, this “Human body heat” trap does not only stop bedbugs on the floor but will stop any and all bedbugs which might already be in the bed and keep them from biting (feeding on your blood).
CO2 bedbug traps can be used as monitors to detect bedbug presence elsewhere in the room by catching them when they forage or come out of their hiding places.