Checking For Bedbugs
These days, bedbugs can be found everywhere, even in 5-star hotel rooms and can be easily carried out in your luggage, souvenirs or in your children’s toys. It’s very important to know how to check for bedbugs when you stay in a hotel, when you suspect they may be in your home or when you are considering buying used furniture.
Checking for bedbugs in your hotel room should be the first thing you do once you check-in into your room. Be sure to place your luggage and other belongings in a clean bathtub or on a rolling luggage rack that is off the floor and away from walls or furniture while examining your room.
Start by inspecting the bed linen. Remove all bedding down to the bottom sheet. If necessary, use a flashlight to help look for excrement or bloodstains on the sheets. After you’ve checked the sheets, continue to the mattress. Look for excrement, blood stains, bedbug skins and eggs on the top surface of the mattress.
Use a credit card to run along the mattress seam, holding it open to look with your flashlight. Make sure to also check all buttons, straps and tags as well.
Once you’ve checked the surface of the mattress, flip it so you can to check the other side. Watch for fleeing bugs as you do. While the mattress is in the air, check the rails of the frame under it.
Once you’ve checked the mattress, move the bed away from the wall and quickly shine your flashlight on the wall behind, and if necessary, headboard behind it.
It’s also important to check all other furniture in the room as thoroughly as you did the mattress, using a flashlight and credit card.
It is important to be as thorough as possible when checking for bedbugs. Once they find themselves a home in your suitcases, clothing, personal items and eventually your home, it’s very difficult to completely get rid of them and often require treatment by a pest control expert.
The pest control expert may recommend forms of deep cleaning such as scrubbing infested surfaces with a stiff brush to remove eggs and dismantling bed frames and furniture, filling cracks in floors, walls and moldings.