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bb advice neededDear Jules,
I found your site online and have followed your instructions in covering the bed and making the CO 2 traps, but we have caught nothing. It’s been 10 days and I am frustrated with sleeping on a plastic covered bed which crackles and pops with each move. Any advice? My husband and I had been to two different hotels in a matter of weeks and after being home a week or two had gotten several bites on two occassions. So I started wondering about bed bugs and started doing some research. Is it possible we just brought home one or two bugs and that they’ve died since I haven’t caught anything? I’m not even sure we had a problem and wanted to set up your system to confirm we did. But like I said, we have caught nothing and I don’t know where to go from here. Please advise and I thank you very much!
L**** S*******
Catching only a few or no bugs at all is normal if you have a light infestation. At the beginning of an infestation, there is only one or very few adult bedbugs that can bite only every 5-7 days. It explains the few number of bites spaced apart by days. When someone gets bites every day, the infestation probably had matured into 100-500 bedbugs and there are enough bedbugs to get bites every day. Also, at the beginning of an infestation, bedbugs are almost always are all in the bed. That is where bedbugs hatch, grow, feed, live and multiply. There are very few adults and the young bedbugs have to be close to their human host in order to feed and molt after a blood meal. If the young are too far, like outside of the bed, they have a hard time to get to the source of their food (your blood) and many die trying to get to feed. Most bedbugs, over 95% of all the bedbugs are in the bed. So when you covered the whole bed with a sheet of plastic, you caught all of those bedbugs under the plastic and they cannot go through it or around it to reach you on the other side of the plastic and those bedbugs absolutely cannot bite you. They stay stuck under the plastic, incapable of figuring out that they could go back down to the floor and they slowly starve to death under the plastic while you can sleep on top without getting a bite. The plastic over the bed stops 95% of the bedbugs and all and every bite. That is where your bedbugs are. The other bugs that might or might not be in the room are caught with the traps. So, if your traps are working and you do not catch anything, it might be because there are few or no bedbugs in the room. Nobody can tell where bedbugs come from and even if hotels are suspects; there is no way to confirm it. You got bedbugs unknowingly from a legitimate normal activity and you became aware of them much later down the line. No one can tell where the bedbugs out of nowhere come from. All we can say is that someone pushed them in the public places where you most probably picked them up. Why am I saying that? Because when left alone, bedbugs tend and go towards the beds and stay close by for their next meal. They leave the bed (or the area around the bed) only when something pushes them out.
So it is best as in your case to catch them while most of them are still in the bed and neutralize them. There is very little possibility that you got one or two bedbugs and that they died since you got them. It takes 70- 90 days for a bedbug to die of starvation under the plastic (or shield) which is over the bed, protecting you from bites. While those bedbugs slowly die under the plastic, the traps catch all the other bedbugs in the room every time they come out and try to feed. All you have to do is set up your place so that bedbugs cannot forage, come and go at will all over the place with bedbug barriers which will send the bedbugs towards the traps on the floor. Once your set up is completed, you will see how easy it is to maintain the traps and let bedbugs eliminate themselves. Now, the bedbug shield over the bed can be made much more comfortable by using a combination of fabric and plastic. Instead of a single plastic sheet over the bed, you can use a contour sheet to trap bedbugs underneath it the same as plastic does. Bedbugs cannot bite or walk through a bed sheet; they get stuck as effectively under a contour sheet as under a sheet of plastic. What you need to do is attach a plastic skirt to the contour sheet, hanging down almost to the floor, the same way as the plastic to keep all bedbugs already in the bed from being able to reach the topside of the contour sheet and bite you. That plastic skirt is a long strip of plastic, probably 24 inches wide by 22 feet long that is taped to the sides of the contour sheet. Use duct tape that stick easily to fabric and of course to plastic. Duct tape comes in many colors and I suggest using white duct tape to secure the plastic skirt to the contour sheet. That arrangement is just as effective as a whole sheet of plastic but much more comfortable as it does not crackles and pops and does not get sweaty. If you feel you are still too close to bedbugs, put another sheet or a comforter on top of the contour sheet and you will sleep almost as on a cloud, safe and sound without a bite.( Do not forget to protect the headboard against bedbugs if you are using only a cover over the mattress like with a contour sheet. A headboard can be cleaned out of its bedbugs with a simple brush and 70%+ rubbing alcohol which kills bedbugs on contact when you spray the cracks and crevices of the headboard with it. Simply complete the protection with wax (paste) to fill all these cracks and crevices once you have cleaned the headboard with a brush and alcohol. Do this over a sheet of plastic on the floor to catch any debris and residues but mostly to catch any bedbug that might try to flee when you are doing the cleaning of the headboard. Besides a shield over the bed (contour sheet with a plastic skirt alternative), and traps under the bed (minimum two, one on each side of the bed and at the head and preferably under the bed), what is needed to make the place impervious to bedbugs are barriers (Scotch tape brushed with talcum powder) on the legs of the bed and the furniture, Long strip of Scotch tape brushed with talcum powder, one above the baseboards to keep bedbugs from being able to climb up the walls; another at the top of the wall where it meets with the ceiling to keep bedbugs from being able to walk upside down on the ceiling and drop onto the bed to reach and bite the person sleeping on the bed. The same Scotch tape brushed with talcum powder can be used around windows and door trims as well as around electrical outlets, light switches, thermostats, heaters or heating outlets and also anywhere you do not want bedbugs to be able to go onto. You will be amazed how something as common and simple as Scotch tape brushed with talcum powder is one of the most useful barriers against bedbugs. It is available anywhere around the world and for only for a few dollars. Yet it stops bedbugs from infesting the room by making them lose their grip and fall to the floor where traps are waiting for them. Look at your place with this information and analyze how you can use it in your place to stop all bites at once and send bedbugs towards the traps that will catch them and suffocate them to death while you sleep soundly on top of the bed without a bite. It is the bites that matters, not the number of bedbugs that you will catch. Bedbugs have a huge weakness and that is the fact that they do not feed on anything else than our blood. If you take that away from them, the bedbug starves to death and is totally eliminated without having a chance to grow and to multiply. You want to get rid of the bedbug? Take away their food. JulesNoise ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ |
Dear Jules
I would like to add my sincere thanks to those of the many others who have found comfort and support at a time when you are rendered helpless and desperate. Like many of your followers, we have endured an unsuccessful encounter with our local authority’s pest control department personnel, who twice sprayed our house with poison, demonstrated a total lack of flexibility in their approach, never followed up and failed to deliver successful eradication. We have been successfully applying your brilliant advice to wage war on an infestation which has slowly been coming under control since last summer. We failed to understand what was happening and so for some months a population was left to establish and sadly we could not prevent it spreading from our room to my son’s.
Since the end of January we have shielded, trapped and hunted with hoover and diatomaceous earth. We have put barriers on beds and desk legs as well as walls and ceilings and thank goodness, the bites have stopped and we have seen less and less activity.
Two weeks ago, we removed the plastic sheeting from the mattresses and put fabric covers on instead – the plastic is now over the top of the box springs. So far, so good as we have neither caught anything in the traps nor seen any evidence of activity for 3 weeks now.
As rotten luck would have it, I happen to be extremely phobic of anything crawling on me (be it spiders, ants or flies) and very sensitive to insect bites – I am still itchy 3 months after I last got bitten. I could not have coped mentally or physically without your website and guidance which has been both sanity and life-saving. Now we have to take the next steps of hunting around the room to make sure we’ve drawn out any of the bugs that are dormant and then we have to use the dry ice treatment to finish off the process.
My question now is that although we have hoovered the bedrooms within an inch of their lives and we haven’t caught any bugs for three weeks in the traps, what type of bugs (adult/juvenile/eggs) will be dormant in the house, what will they be doing at night and where are they likely to be congregating so that I can get to them and kill them? I am completely obsessed with the fear that they are going to travel away from the bedrooms and to head downstairs to the dog’s basket and our sofa if they can’t get to us in bed to feed.
Looking forward to your reply.
Yours sincerely
S B
@__Sarah Bealey__Thank you for your feedback. Knowledge is power and our greatest power is our mind. Local authority’s pest control department personnel, a very fancy name for ignorant delivery man. That is exactly what they are, people hired to take a product from their shop and deliver it to their customers. The only requirements to be a “professional” such as they claim to be are:
Degree Level ______________ High school diploma or equivalent
Experience _______________ Two weeks training with a licensed exterminator
Skills ___________________ Good physical shape, and customer service skills
Technical Skills ___________ Familiarity with using pesticides and applying it
Additional Requirements ____ Driver’s permit
Nowhere does it say that this delivery man should know anything about bedbugs or have any knowledge other than how to apply (spray) poison. It is limited to that and that’s exactly what they do. They get a call, bring their poison to your house, have 45 minutes to apply it and then go back to the shop to wait for another call and delivery. Their technique is simple, first make a poisonous perimeter all around the room and then spray poison mostly in the bed (because that’s where most bedbugs are), in every area close to the bed and finally on every surface in the room. The whole room gets poisoned and you have to live in it for the next three months. Cost: 500$ to 1000$.
Again, nowhere does it say they have to treat you with courtesy and respect; they have only so much time to deliver their products. Follow ups means only more time for them and time that does not bring in money. As for the effectiveness of their products, they deny that bedbugs can and do get resistant and their pesticides always lost their effectiveness against bedbugs and always did. It is a lesson they did not get from their previous DDT fiasco and that they are repeating with the actual permethrin and its pyrethroid derivates.
As for your son’s room infestation that you say you could not prevent from being infested, well it has nothing to do with anything you did. When the exterminator made your room poisonous and failed to kill all bedbugs, those surviving bedbugs got repelled by the poison and moved out in search of a safer place to feed and found the body warmth of your son in its then non-poisonous room. If bedbugs hadn’t been pushed out of your room by a repellent, they would have continued to thrive in your room and wouldn’t have moved out, preferring to stay close to their then source of food as all bedbugs do. People blame themselves for the exterminator’s mistakes and failures.
Then in January, you started using bedbug barriers, the bedbug bites stopped and you saw less and less activity. It only shows that the bedbug barriers work and that they restrict bedbug activity by putting obstacles in their path. What a novel idea, keeping bedbugs from being able to go in places where you do not want them. You saw the results with your own eyes.
Changing the bed cover from the plastic sheeting to fabric does not change the effectiveness of the bedbug shield as bedbugs cannot walk any more through fabric than plastic. It only makes the shield more comfortable and less slippery. Of course, you still need the plastic skirt all around the bed and fixed (sealed) to the sides of the fabric cover. The shield must be impenetrable and keep all and any bedbug from being able to feed (bite).
Your rotten luck about being extremely phobic of anything crawling on you is not unusual and is only a healthy reaction. Most people have zero tolerance of insects on them, especially when those insects are parasitic. Most people only want to get rid of them no matter what. And without the knowledge on how we can get rid of bedbugs ourselves, at some point, they simply call the exterminator who carefully makes you feel bad by telling you that you cannot do it by yourself and insist that you should leave it to “professionals”. And that’s what their business is based on.
Now, so far so good, you haven’t seen any evidence of bedbug activity for three weeks. Something is keeping bedbugs from being able to reach and that something is your bedbug shield. It is the ultimate protection against bedbugs, an impenetrable barrier that bedbugs cannot get through or around it. Try as they may, bedbugs simply cannot reach you anymore. They are stuck under the shield and are slowly dying of starvation. Are there any other bedbugs elsewhere? Probably since the bedbugs you had before got scattered by intense activity and the repelling poison the delivery men used. Those scattered bedbugs went to hide somewhere away from the bed and not detecting human breath and body heat, they became dormant.
You are thinking about going on a dormant bedbug hunt. Well there are two ways to do it. You can start going after bedbugs all over again and maybe eliminate a few of them at the cost of more intensive labor or you can use the more much easier way of trusting the traps and the shield to do it for you. Dormant bedbugs can last a long time and it could take just as long to catch them if they remain dormant. But if you wake them up, then they will become active again and seek their food (your blood) to replenish their strength, and use it to either molt or lay eggs. Without your blood, bedbugs cannot molt and cannot lay eggs, so it is paramount that you keep them from being able to feed. Without you blood, bedbugs are doomed since they do not have any other source of food other than your blood. Without your blood to feed on, bedbugs cannot survive and simply die of starvation. And during all that time you can sleep soundly without a single bite and without any worries about bedbugs. Go around the room and open all drawers and closets, move things around. Let dormant bedbugs detect you and come out of dormancy. Do not fight them or let them get to you. The following night any bedbug that got awaken by your activity will come out of hiding and search for you in the room. While you sleep, unaware of bedbug activity, they will go towards the bed where you sleep and will get under the shield, if they are not attracted or caught by the traps on the floor and they will become helpless under the shield. Hunger will keep them there, so close to their only source of food yet unable to reach it. Then their long starving agony will begin since close to body heat, bedbugs cannot go dormant. They will simply keep looking in vain for a way up or trying to find a non-existent opening in the shield and finding none will spend all their energy in that search dying much faster than dormant bedbugs that keep their energy and lasting much longer by remaining immobile.
You took care of a lot of bedbugs with DE and Hoovering (vacuuming) and it paid off, you greatly kept their numbers down but you could not eliminate them completely. Fighting bedbugs is endless, I much prefer to let them come out of hiding all by themselves and block them or catch them with traps. All bedbugs come out of hiding at some point because all bedbugs have to feed. When they try we have the shield and the traps waiting for them and this is the ultimate way to defeat bedbugs completely and right down to the last one.
This has been done by hundreds of thousands of people and they are now bedbug free as soon you will be too. This is my long term bedbug eradication plan, having people all over the world eliminating their own bedbugs as soon as they find them, and becoming bedbug-proof so that they can never be re-infested again. The more people know how to get rid of bedbugs without pushing them away to the neighbors, the less bedbugs there will be in this world.
Is there anything else I can do to help you? If this method is good for you, pass it on.
Thank you
JulesNoise
Ps: If you are uncomfortable because bedbugs are too close to you on the other side of the impenetrable bedbug shield, place a thick wool sheet or a comforter on top of the shield, and then your bed will turn into a cloud that you will enjoy sleeping on. Bedbug protection, both physically and psychologically.
Jules:
Last week, I got rid of my bed, after discovering bugs in my bed and on pillows, mattress and possibly my steel frame. From the looks of it, it couldn’t have been more than 50 visible (dead and alive), the rest, probably having hidden INSIDE the pillows, mattress and frame. Besides, the frame was falling apart, anyway, but the bugs forced me to trash the bed sooner than I expected.
My guess is that the bugs had one month to multiply, because I believe I may have brought home one or two from the subway system (there have been reports of bedbugs spotted in the New York City transit system). I saw (and killed) only 2 or 3 beforehand, and I thought that was all I had, because i didn’t see another bug for weeks, until last week when I discovered that my pillow was getting dirty quite fast.
My guess is that I probably don’t have more than 100 (the bulk of them, dead or alive, gone with the bed and frame), because my skin never reached the point where I had blisters and red spots all over my sides, face or back. Everything is quite clear.
Now, I’m in the process of dealing with the stragglers. First thing I did was get FabriClear spray, to spray in many areas where I think they may still be (even the picture frames). Now I only use it if I see one, sometimes in places I can’t reach, like the ceiling. I’ve got diatomaceous Earth to spread on the floor and my shelves. I recently bought some Fast-Trap CO2 traps (I have 3 in my room now, soon to lay down a 4th), but I don’t know how much effect they will have since I don’t know how much CO2 is pumped out of those traps and how fast.
I sleep in another room, and will be there until I am sure I got rid of all of them. I’m preparing to get interceptors for my next bed. I may also need something unique as an interceptor, because my next bed will be a folding bed that has long steel struts to hold up both ends.
My everyday clothes never touch my temporary sleeping area, and I always check for bugs in the bathroom (a short walk from either room). Whatever I wear outside, goes into the room where I had the bugs, and I can check there or in the bathroom (for which, if by any chance I had maybe a baby bug, I hope none jump off my clothes before I reach the bedroom or bathroom). I always check my shoes.
In my temporary sleeping area, I wear socks that I always check. My pajamas never leave that area.
Should I check anything else before I bring another bed inside?
Hi Jules,
I recently discovered these nasty critters sometime this summer as a friend spent the night and I have been fighting with these bugs every since! I’ve purchased mattress protectors but my bed sits on a platform(no bed frame). I believe a lot have scattered because I’ve found them in the guest bed of my 2nd room and random spots around the house! My landlord has a pest company spray every so many months and they have been here(sprayed) twice before I actually figured out what the bugs were. I’ve told her about the problem but all she did was have them come out and spray again which was ineffective! I’m thinking they scattered the first or 2nd time my apt was sprayed. I’ve recently tried your traps and caught about 14-20 bugs, majority baby ones that were just hatched. Thank you for your knowledge on this and I want to thank you for educating us on these bloodsuckers in a way that we can take matters into our own hands. Any other tips would be appreciated. Also how many traps should I put down in each room??
Hi Amy,
About six months living with bedbugs. Sprayed twice and then a third time to no avail. Bedbugs scattered and now can be found in other places than the bed. How about if we stop it all? These matters you can take into our own hands are real. You now know the CO2 bedbug traps work, you proved it by catching bedbugs with it. What you need to know now is how to use them.
Bedbug traps use CO2 produced by a bottle or a comtainer, which is the same CO2 we exhale when we breathe. That’s what attract bedbugs and always show them the way to reach us. Bedbugs are equally attracted to the warmth of our body. Their vision can detect us from the “glow” we have with our body at 98,6° F against the 70-80° F background of the room. It is called night vision, thermal vision or infra-red vision. Three different names for the same thing, the ability of bedbugs to see in the dark and spot the only warm spot in the room, which is the person trying to sleep peacefully on it’s own bed at night. Bedbugs can see the CO2 from the sleeper cascading down from the bed and mixing with the CO2 overflowing from the small glass pitfalls and on to the floor, where it attracts bedbugs and make them fall in the pitfalls.
There are many types of platform beds. Some are amongst the simplest and easiest to make bedbug-proof, while others have drawers and storage space that are more difficult to cover. Both types can be done, both need a bedbug shield. A bedbug shield is something that will stop all bedbug bites at once while the traps catch bedbugs at the foot of the platform bed. It is the first thing to do, stop all bedbugs from being able to bite. It is the key to their survival. Without our warm blood to feed on, bedbugs cannot molt and grow. Without our warm blood to feed on, bedbugs cannot lay eggs and multiply And most importantly, without our warm blood to feed on, bedbugs simply cannot survive and bedbugs die of starvation.
If you could send me a picture or the model of your platform bed, I could tell you how to make it absolutely bedbug-proof with a bedbug shield and bedbug barriers. Once your shield will be in place, all bedbug bites will stop immediately and then we will make the CO2 bedbug traps that go on the floor near the foot of the platform bed. It is best to put a trap in each corner of the bed, prefered paths bedbugs usually take. Different traps can be made placing only the small glass pitfalls at each corner of the bed and the container holding the sugar and yeast mixture somewhere else under the bed, out of the way and out of sight. While showing how to make your bedbug shield for your platform bed, I will also tell you about bedbug barriers I mentionned above, and what they can do to clear a whole room out of bedbugs.
That’s the simplicity of the trap, instead of repelling bedbugs and spreading them around, the trap waits for bedbugs that could be hiding somewhere in the room. Hiding bedbugs are not very threatening, they do nothing but wait, digesting the meal they took before. It is when bedbugs get hungry that they come out of their hiding places and go towards the bed to try to feed, and they all do that, from the tiniest instar nymphs to the adults, all bedbugs have to feed. That’s when we catch them. Bedbugs find out that they cannot climb up on the foot (or legs) of the bed because it is too slippery to hang on to, covered as you made it with a simple band of scotch tape which is a bedbug barrier. Bedbug barriers are amazing to block and control bedbugs. Bedbugs that were hiding are now in plain view on the floor, exactly where you put the CO2 bedbug traps that lure them to their deaths in the small glass pitfalls. Bedbugs can’t feed and they can’t go back to their hiding places, the room clears itself out of bedbugs by using their hunger against them and then denying them any food until they starve and die, when the traps do not suffocate them first.
This method is the opposite of what exterminators do. They spray poison that repels but does not kill all bedbugs, while the shield and the traps gathers them and attract them all, leaving no bedbugs behind. A pesticide treatment cost 500$ while the Shield and CO2 Traps are free, only the extremely low costs of local materials are needed. We do not chase bedbugs, it scatters them, but we attract them in inescapable traps and we block them and completely stop them with shields and bedbug barriers. No more bites, no more roaming bedbugs and no more worry about bedbugs. It is only an insect that we can easily defeat like all other insects.
Your thoughts.
JulesNoise