Bed Bug Treatment
It is creepy to think that a bed bug is crawling on your body at night while you sleep and sucking your blood like a tiny vampire. It makes your skin crawl and causes you to itch all over. The moment you realize that you have these little bloodsuckers, you want to set fire to your bed and never sleep in it again. Trust me, I understand. They are a horrible scourge to humans and serve no purpose in life except to feed off us and gross us out. But, torching your bed is not going to fix this, only one thing is going to fix it.
Warning: Here comes a completely self-serving statement.
The only truly effective way to exterminate bed bugs is by hiring a pest control company. Nearly every customer that we meet has tried something before calling us, so we have heard it all. What we have found is that not only do the do-it-yourself methods not work, but they make it worse! Here are the reasons why bed bugs suck and why you need to call in the professionals to take care of them.
#1- If you move, they will follow you
Since they are attracted to carbon dioxide, they will hunt you down within a few days if you sleep in a different bed or on the couch. If you think that the sound of momentary relief sounds good, think again. All you are doing is spreading them to different areas of your home and making them harder to kill.
#2- Using store-bought repellents is a mistake
Professional pest control companies use non-repellent pesticide sprays to treat for bed bugs. This means that the bed bug does not know that they are walking through the spray that will eventually kill them. The problem is that you cannot buy non-repellents at the store. Any product that you pick up off the shelf will carry a repellent which can drive bed bugs deep into cracks, crevices, and wall voids
#3- They are really tough to kill
Bed bugs have so many horrible qualities about them that it is hard to decide what is worst. But, one very undesirable quality is that they can live a long time without feeding (nearly a year) and they reproduce like crazy. Unfortunately, they are very hardy and can survive far better than other pests. This makes it hard to kill even with the best of pesticide products and techniques.
It is because of these reasons, that bed bugs are the very hardest pest that we treat in the Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington area. If I could give you just two pieces of advice, I think that I could save you a lot of grief.
First, the one thing that does work is a bed bug mattress cover. Buy good quality mattress covers for about a $100 (you get what you pay for) and put one on your mattress and one on your box spring. All the bed bugs on your mattress or box spring and mattress will eventually die. If that is the only place that they have laid eggs, you just solved your problem, but if not, you still got them.
Lastly, the best advice I can give is to call us as soon as you know you have them. The quicker we get started, the easier it will be to get rid of them.