How To Tell If It's Bed Bugs In Your Lynchburg Home

Bed bugs are gross! Just the mention of them makes most folks itch all over. And the name, bed bugs! They are in your bed! Most readers will be checking their beds tonight before they crawl in and close their eyes. These disgusting creatures were first reported in Ancient Egypt, yet another plague to be sure. By the 1950s, the advent of vacuum cleaners and electric dryers put a huge kibosh on the bed bug population. In 1990, a resurgence of their numbers made headlines. A survey of pest control companies nationwide reported that 99% of those that responded, had treated an infestation. Luckily Virginia has not made the top ten worst bed bug states list, and the team at All Pest Control & Solutions wants to keep it that way.

Mistaken Identity

You’re on the right track. Educating yourself can save you money in the long run. You need to be able to tell the difference between a bed bug and any other bug before you start any treatment. For example, carpet beetles are oftentimes misidentified as bed bugs. This can be a costly and time-consuming mistake. The longer it takes to make the correct identification, the more time they have to multiply and spread. Descriptions vary from region to region. All Pest Control & Solutions has compiled a list that should help you properly identify bed bugs common to Lynchburg.

Description Of Bed Bugs

Knowing what you are looking for is half the battle. This list should help you:

• About the size of an apple seed (5-7 mm or 3/16 - 1/4 inch long).

• If NOT fed recently, they are long and brown, with a flat, oval-shaped body.

• If fed recently they are balloon-like, reddish-brown, and more elongated.

• The bugs in Virginia normally have modeled appearance on their backs. Brown with black modeling.

• Smelly, with a “musty-sweetish” odor produced through glands on the lower side of the body.

• Young bed bugs (also called nymphs), in general, are smaller, translucent, or whitish-yellow; and if not recently fed, can be nearly invisible to the naked eye because of coloring and size.

• Bed bug eggs, in general, are tiny, the size of a pinhead, pearl-white, and marked by an eyespot if more than five days old

The All Pest Control & Solutions team is experts at identifying and locating bed bugs. Don’t worry about finding them all, we will do that for you.

 Where Do The Bed Bugs Live?

The two easiest ways to discern that you are facing a bed bug infestation would be the bite marks on your skin coupled with tiny blood specks on your sheets, mattress cover, and pillowcases. Once you suspect you have become infested most people will attempt to search them out. They are notoriously difficult to find and you shouldn’t let the name bed bug fool you into thinking they will reside only in your bed. You will find them hiding in any of these locations:

• The seams of the mattress and between the mattress and box spring.

• In bed frames or headboard joints.

• Behind baseboards and in seams between baseboards and carpeting.

• Behind lifted edges of wallpaper.

• In your dresser drawers or your linen closets.

• In your wall outlets.

They are hitchhikers, which is why you seem to spontaneously have an infestation. They are easily picked up in hotels, dorm rooms, public transportation while visiting a friend or riding in their car. You really can be exposed almost anywhere.

Get Them Out!

After you contact All Pest Control & Solutions for a free estimate, we will schedule a service time to go over the necessary procedures to begin treating your property. We offer both conventional and steam methods, depending on the infestation. Completely eradicating bed bugs can be a bit tricky, so we always do a follow-up inspection just to make sure the treatment was 100% effective.