If a home is occupied, and the occupants visit the rooms and closets off and on during the week, wouldn’t it stand to reason that there would not be dormant bed bugs present? I was always under the impression that if food is available it will be found even if it requires a bit of legwork by the bugs.
Ah! The infamous dormant bedbug. You are right into thinking that visiting the rooms and the closets will wake up dormant bedbugs, but not all of them. Bedbugs will detect your presence mostly by the heat of your body. We are the only thing that glows at 98,6F against a cooler room temperature background. Bedbugs do not have eyelids and detect heat through their thermal vision even when they are dormant. Heat always wake them up. But it has to be line of sight. If the dormant bedbug is on top of a high shelf, behind the trim of a door or hiding behind or between clothes, it will not visually detect our presence and remain dormant. We have to move everything around and look into every corner, making sure that the bedbugs will see us.
It is even better if we breathe on them as Co2 excites them even when they are hiding out of sight. That is the basic principle of the bedbug whip. Instead of breathing in every little corner and hyperventilate, it is easier to use dry ice and a fan. The Co2 content will be much higher and the fan will do the pushing in every crack and crevice. Meanwhile we have our two hands to move the stuff and articles around making sure that any bedbug will feel the sting of Co2.
If food is available, it will always be found but the bedbug must wake up first. Foraging bedbugs are bedbugs that do legwork, they are fully active after a period of dormancy that something woke them up from. A good example would be a bedbug that got into a closet looking for a place to hide away from the bed (on account of males aggressing recently feed bedbugs) and went between two hanging shirts at the back of the closet. It went dormant from lack of heat and Co2 stimulation. Having ample reserves of blood it easily survived over two months. One day, someone picks up one of the shirts and the dormant bedbug is exposed to the close presence of a human. The heat of the body instantly wakes up the bedbug and the Co2 from its breathing excites it even more.
When the person leaves the closet, the bedbug will remain awake for a little while and depending on its hunger will let itself fall on the ground. If you put a trap there, the bedbug will go into it.
If you do it like that a few times during the week, you can get rid of all dormant bedbugs in the closet without running everything through the washer and dryier. Dormant bedbugs hardly leave any traces or residues.
In the famous words of DonaldTrump:
“How do you catch dormant bedbugs?”
“You wake them up!”
