Heavy, thought-provoking (sarcasm ahoy) musings on bed bugs

[flex]

If a person sleeps in the buff (sans bed clothes), are bedbugs less likely to cling to fabric, and thus less likely to go home with the "host"?  ::shudder::

Asking for a friend.

[isabel]

I hope this means you're just staying somewhere with bed bugs and that your home isn't infested. I'd seriously take anything that even went into that room to a laundromat and wash it on hot and then take several hot showers.

[sonrisa]

Don't they usually hitch hike on the luggage itself? So if you arrived naked, left naked, and took nothing with you, you;ll be fine.

[joy]

Um. They will get themselves covered in itchy bites by sleeping naked.

[flex]

Mar 1, 2020 8:42:26 GMT -5 joy said:

Um. They will get themselves covered in itchy bites by sleeping naked.

Yes, I know that.  The question was related to the little buggers clinging to fabric so they can spread.

[renna]

Bed bugs are efficient eaters. They come out to eat, have their meal, then go back to where they live. They are suuuuuuuuper thin, like amazingly thin, and can hide in the smallest of places. You can check a bed seam and there is NOTHING there, and then there is something there - where you already looked. SO THIN. GOOD HIDERS.

With regard to them avoiding naked people? Well, they don't like hair, but I think that's not really about arm hair or anything like that, I think they don't like head hair.

If you have slept somewhere there might be bed bugs you need to get all your clothes in the clothes dryer. Don't worry about washing them first. A standard home clothes dryer runs about 140-145*F. Bed bugs will die within 7 minutes of being at 120*F, but you should definitely run the clothes for longer, like an hour. Just let them spin and be hot. Bring the clothes to the dryer in a plastic bag, and throw the bag out after that use. Like, throw it out OUTSIDE in your garbage bin. They can move faster than people think.

Check the clothes when you take them out to see if there were any dead bugs in there (because the heat killed them).

Commercial clothes dryers run even hotter, usually, if you need to go to the laundromat.

With regard to your purse or luggage or anything else you had, if you can, get it in the clothes dryer. If it's not something you can heat like that, I guess do a very thorough check. If you can, quarantine your purse or luggage in a plastic garbage bag sealed shut. Not all shoes or plastics survive the dryer or that level of heat so consider what you're putting in there.

Bed bugs cannot jump and they cannot fly. They can only crawl, thus they are famous for hitchhiking when they find a host or a piece of luggage. Also, bed bugs DO NOT carry disease, so that's a good thing if you're looking for a silver lining.

I hope you don't have bed bugs! It is a terrible thing to have to deal with. We have no idea how we got them last year - NO IDEA - but had a small grouping in our son's room (sob!! our son's room!) and somehow my poor DH ended up with bites despite no infestation in our room, but my DH was extremely allergic. I can't even talk about all of it without tearing up. I'll spare you the details, but it changed our lives for a long time, and even still I think there is PTSD from the ordeal. And this was not a huge infestation!

So, my dear flexie, I sure hope nobody around you has them, but if so, call and get someone in to deal with it as soon as you can. I know it's not cheap. I can help with any other questions you might have. I feel like I have a Ph.D. in bed bugs right now. It sucks, but there we are.

Godspeed! Get your stuff in a dryer!

[renna]

Feb 29, 2020 10:05:50 GMT -5 flex said:

If a person sleeps in the buff (sans bed clothes), are bedbugs less likely to cling to fabric, and thus less likely to go home with the "host"?  ::shudder::

Asking for a friend.

To answer this further, bed bugs come out at night and are drawn to the CO₂ we breathe out. They go toward the source of the CO₂ and find their person. Whether the person is naked or not, they will find a way to get to the skin, have their meal and leave. So with regard to bites, I don't think it really matters if you're naked or in pajamas. They can find what they want.

With regard to the risk of picking up bed bugs if you sleep naked somewhere, I suppose if the ONLY thing in the room with the bed bugs were the naked person and not the naked person's belongings, yes. In general I think bed bugs have their meal and leave. They are not like a woodtick that will cling onto a person. They eat and leave. Apparently when the male bed bugs have had their meal they like to run back to their staying place and mate right away. (eww)

So bringing a bed bug home with you on your naked body is not very likely. But, assuming you're not leaving that place naked, if your clothes, shoes and other items were in the room, those are the items at the biggest risk of bringing bugs home with you.

Also, consider for the future buying a bed bug proof mattress protector and pillow protectors. These will prevent them from getting on your actual mattress itself and pillow. Not that they can't live on top of the protectors, but they can't live on the actual mattress and pillow. It would be a lot cheaper to re-buy a bed bug mattress protector and pillow protector than to buy a new mattress entirely.

There are varying reports on how often a bed bug needs to eat to stay alive, but they can go a long time without a meal so if you deny them access to your body they will eventually die, but man, nobody is going to want to wait as long as nature would take there (some say possibly a year and a half!)

[flex]

Mar 1, 2020 13:51:52 GMT -5 renna said:

Feb 29, 2020 10:05:50 GMT -5 flex said:

If a person sleeps in the buff (sans bed clothes), are bedbugs less likely to cling to fabric, and thus less likely to go home with the "host"?  ::shudder::

Asking for a friend.

To answer this further, bed bugs come out at night and are drawn to the CO₂ we breathe out. They go toward the source of the CO₂ and find their person. Whether the person is naked or not, they will find a way to get to the skin, have their meal and leave. So with regard to bites, I don't think it really matters if you're naked or in pajamas. They can find what they want.

With regard to the risk of picking up bed bugs if you sleep naked somewhere, I suppose if the ONLY thing in the room with the bed bugs were the naked person and not the naked person's belongings, yes. In general I think bed bugs have their meal and leave. They are not like a woodtick that will cling onto a person. They eat and leave. Apparently when the male bed bugs have had their meal they like to run back to their staying place and mate right away. (eww)

So bringing a bed bug home with you on your naked body is not very likely. But, assuming you're not leaving that place naked, if your clothes, shoes and other items were in the room, those are the items at the biggest risk of bringing bugs home with you.

Also, consider for the future buying a bed bug proof mattress protector and pillow protectors. These will prevent them from getting on your actual mattress itself and pillow. Not that they can't live on top of the protectors, but they can't live on the actual mattress and pillow. It would be a lot cheaper to re-buy a bed bug mattress protector and pillow protector than to buy a new mattress entirely.

There are varying reports on how often a bed bug needs to eat to stay alive, but they can go a long time without a meal so if you deny them access to your body they will eventually die, but man, nobody is going to want to wait as long as nature would take there (some say possibly a year and a half!)

EXCELLENT points!  Thank you so much for replying.  I've heard that they can live up to 18 months without feeding.  ::shudder::

Just an FYI: I have been told keeping your suitcase in the hotel bathroom is a way to avoid taking them home with you as the bugs are not drawn to tiling, etc.  Have you heard that?

[renna]

Mar 1, 2020 14:34:51 GMT -5 flex said:

Mar 1, 2020 13:51:52 GMT -5 renna said:

Just an FYI: I have been told keeping your suitcase in the hotel bathroom is a way to avoid taking them home with you as the bugs are not drawn to tiling, etc.  Have you heard that?

I haven't read that about tiling but I didn't look for that either. I think it's not a bad idea to put your suitcase in the bathroom because they don't hang out in bathrooms. They are drawn to where you sleep, so they hang out under mattresses and behind pictures that are by mattresses. Places by the beds.

So if I were staying in a hotel I would put my luggage in a large garbage bag I brought with me, or I probably wouldn't even bring the suitcase inside, but that's me -- that's the trauma from having them and what they did to my husband's body -- but the hotel bathroom would seem like a good place once I checked it over first.

Also, they do like porous surfaces. Right now we're on the no-bedbugs-in-sight/wait and see period. We have been sprayed 3 times, and they are gone. But we also have interceptors at the bottom of each leg of our beds (and we bought new bed frames just to make sure we could do this), but the interceptors are plastic and are like a bowl in a bowl. In order for bed bugs to crawl they have to be on something porous like wood (our bedframe is wood, and flat on the ground, no legs!). With the interceptors, IF IF IF a bed bug could get INTO the first bowl it CANNOT get into the second bowl and climb up the leg (the leg sits in the middle of the second bowl area). The interceptors are a slick plastic bowl-in-bowl, so bed bugs can't crawl up the slick surfaces to get to the second bowl to get to the bed frame leg to get up to the bed.

I would imagine with tiling it could be similar? Or with porcelain bathtubs. I'm not sure how porous that stuff is but again, the CO₂ isn't really there.

Our pest control guy has hotels on his client list. He heats the rooms for a few hours and the bugs die, so a good hotel will have a pest guy on contract (even for ants, flies, any pests), and a hotel room should be able to be heated, re-cleaned and ready for use again and okay for use again in short order.

Flex, the adult bed bugs look like skinny woodticks. Skinny from the side view. And the baby ones are white before they feed. I don't think we ever saw any eggs but those are white. For us, we'll be checking out any hotel room before we bring our stuff in there. And we'll only bring in what we need. I have no idea exactly how we'll do it going forward because we're just not there to trust all that, but I do know that we know the drill at home now, and we even own a bed bug oven now so all of our stuff would go right into that and they will die. Of course you still have to make sure nothing came in on your shoes or what you are wearing.

It's a big deal. We talked a long time with our pest guy (who is wonderful) about how the problem is so big and a huge part of that is because people don't have the funds to get things treated, or they have landlords who don't care...so many reasons these things keep cropping up when they can be easily treated at the source with heat.

[icedcoffee]

Why isn’t leaving this place an option? Lol

[renna]

Mar 1, 2020 15:15:15 GMT -5 icedcoffee said:

Why isn’t leaving this place an option? Lol

Are you asking me or flex?

[icedcoffee]

Mar 1, 2020 15:22:53 GMT -5 renna said:

Mar 1, 2020 15:15:15 GMT -5 icedcoffee said:

Why isn’t leaving this place an option? Lol

Are you asking me or flex?

flex

[renna]

Mar 1, 2020 15:31:28 GMT -5 icedcoffee said:

Mar 1, 2020 15:22:53 GMT -5 renna said:

Are you asking me or flex ?

flex

Sorry to be dense about it. As soon as I hit enter I knew you must've meant flex. Oops!

[flex]

Mar 1, 2020 15:31:28 GMT -5 icedcoffee said:

Mar 1, 2020 15:22:53 GMT -5 renna said:

Are you asking me or flex ?

flex

If there's actually bugs in there, it's not only an option, but it's a basic right to leave lol

My original question is totally theoretical.  I wasn't standing in a bug-infest hotel room and wondering if I should shuck my bedclothes before hopping into bed.  LOL

[SusanBAnthony]

I typically set my suitcase on the bathroom counter if there is room, or in the floor of the shower (and move it out of the shower after sleeping for the night, assuming if I didn't get bit I should be fine).

[flex]

Mar 1, 2020 15:36:06 GMT -5 SusanBAnthony said:

I typically set my suitcase on the bathroom counter if there is room, or in the floor of the shower (and move it out of the shower after sleeping for the night, assuming if I didn't get bit I should be fine).

Me too.  But I'm a solitary traveler (kids are grown) so there's plenty of room in the bathroom for my stuff.  

[hulley]

Mar 1, 2020 14:34:51 GMT -5 flex said:

Mar 1, 2020 13:51:52 GMT -5 renna said:

To answer this further, bed bugs come out at night and are drawn to the CO₂ we breathe out. They go toward the source of the CO₂ and find their person. Whether the person is naked or not, they will find a way to get to the skin, have their meal and leave. So with regard to bites, I don't think it really matters if you're naked or in pajamas. They can find what they want.

With regard to the risk of picking up bed bugs if you sleep naked somewhere, I suppose if the ONLY thing in the room with the bed bugs were the naked person and not the naked person's belongings, yes. In general I think bed bugs have their meal and leave. They are not like a woodtick that will cling onto a person. They eat and leave. Apparently when the male bed bugs have had their meal they like to run back to their staying place and mate right away. (eww)

So bringing a bed bug home with you on your naked body is not very likely. But, assuming you're not leaving that place naked, if your clothes, shoes and other items were in the room, those are the items at the biggest risk of bringing bugs home with you.

Also, consider for the future buying a bed bug proof mattress protector and pillow protectors. These will prevent them from getting on your actual mattress itself and pillow. Not that they can't live on top of the protectors, but they can't live on the actual mattress and pillow. It would be a lot cheaper to re-buy a bed bug mattress protector and pillow protector than to buy a new mattress entirely.

There are varying reports on how often a bed bug needs to eat to stay alive, but they can go a long time without a meal so if you deny them access to your body they will eventually die, but man, nobody is going to want to wait as long as nature would take there (some say possibly a year and a half!)

EXCELLENT points!  Thank you so much for replying.  I've heard that they can live up to 18 months without feeding.  ::shudder::

Just an FYI: I have been told keeping your suitcase in the hotel bathroom is a way to avoid taking them home with you as the bugs are not drawn to tiling, etc.  Have you heard that?

Anecdote - the one and only place I’ve ever seen a bed bug is a hotel bathroom. It was on the wall next to the toilet.

[ChillyMcFreeze]

renna Before I saw that you're dealing with personal experience I was going to ask if you happen to work in university housing lol

I am somewhat of a bedbug expert as well, having worked in residence life. Athletic teams LOVED to bring bedbugs back to their campus residences. Nightmare, let me tell you. All of the advice above is exactly what I'd recommend.