Bed Bugs

Bristol Bed Bug Control

Say goodbye to bedbugs with Pale Horse Pest Control in Bristol. Our extermination process is safe, efficient and affordable.

Bed bugs are a growing problem in homes and hotels and can be difficult to eliminate once they've infested a property. Early action is key; book a professional inspection as soon as possible to get rid of bed bugs.

Our expert technicians will spot the signs of bed bug activity and provide the most effective methods for removal. Trust the experts at Pale Horse Pest Control for all your bed bug elimination needs in Bristol and Bath. Book today.

What Are Bed Bugs?

Bed bugs (Cimex lectularius) are a smart bunch of blood-sucking ectoparasites that go in search of a blood meal each night while you are sleeping. Clothing offers little protection. Many of the people we speak to think these insects are microscopic when in fact they are 1-5mm in length.

People quickly learn that are no laughing matter and bed bugs feed regularly but may go without a meal for many months, making surveillance essential. Scarring and trauma from bed bugs bites can last a lifetime. Associated infections and allergies may need medical intervention, but the mental scars of severe infestations might last years.

Killing bugs without professional guidance can still cost you a fortune, disrupt your sleep and even your family's health. This is why we always recommend expert pre-inspections.

How Thin Are Bedbugs?

Let's imagine you have a piece of paper. If that piece of paper can slide into gaps, cracks and crevices of walls and furniture, so will bedbugs, and their eggs.

Unfortunately, bed bugs like to feed on warm-blooded animals like us. These small bugs are usually introduced into our homes when bugs hide on clothing, luggage, infested second-hand furniture and ourselves, etc.

Most commonly of all, bed bugs arrive on people and in luggage following trips away from home where people have spent time in hotel rooms, hostels, or other people's houses! Visitors also pose a risk of infestation, so it's wise to ask if they have experienced any bites before arrival!

Bedroom furniture and upholstered furniture are among the worst affected second-hand finds. Bed bugs will usually hide inside the cracks and crevices of these used items, and continue to live there successfully!

How Can You Identify Bedbugs?

A well-fed bed bug will often be found quite blatantly situated on the wall directly above its host (victim) and its stomach contents will be seen to be very obviously full of fresh human blood.

A fresh blood meal will give a bed bug a reddish-brown colour, while a bedbug that has not been fed for a long time will be orange in colour.

Bed bugs are about the size of an apple seed or lentil. Bed bugs feed by injecting you, piercing the skin with a sharp feeding tube resembling a straw.

Carpet beetles are similar in size to a bedbug. Accurately identifying these bugs is vital to reduce costs and avoid excessive pesticide use.

White or light coloured bedding and bedsheets will make it easier to spot the smallest bedbug. Insects on light coloured sheets have nowhere to hide. It would be best if you gave the creases on the edges of bed sheets and seams of mattresses particular attention.

Aggregation or clustering of bed bug populations will also help you spot insect concentrations and improve the focus and efficacy of any pest control treatment carried out.

This infestation was concealed within the headboard frame of a bed frame and caused significant discomfort to the occupants over a considerable period.

Bed bugs hide in places like this near and around beds or on mattress seams, and even curtain seams are common infestation sites. We call these hiding places points of harbourage. Bed frames need to be dismantled to expose all of the frame joints to be confident of successful elimination.

Signs Of Bed Bug Activity

Some of the most visible and distinctive signs of bed bug activity, giving you a valuable opportunity to assess your premises.

• Bed Bug droppings and shed skins on a bed, headboard fitting.
  
• Blood on bed sheets from bed bug bites
  Grey-brown droppings consist of digested blood, staining sheets and providing a very simple activity identifier.
• Blood staining from the bed bug bites of bedbugs looks very similar to the black mould seen in properties with damp and high humidity.

Because they penetrate human skin to feed, they are often attracted to areas where blood flow is greatest. In a resting human, this is in blood vessels close to the skin surface.

As a result, they often puncture rich vascular areas of the skin. Bleeding is an inevitable consequence of direct tissue trauma and will show on clothing and bedsheets.

In the following image, you can see where the victim has bled following a puncture wound caused by recent feeding.

Bed Bugs and Disease

Bed bug Bites

Bed bug bites are red, itchy and often bleed out!

The image above shows a typical maculopapular rash on a male sleeping in a bedroom with an infested bed and mattress. In most cases, these discoloured blotches of skin disappear. However, the bed bug bites and rash in others could leave permanent discolouration and scarring.

Sensitivity to a bed bugs bites gets worse with every bite. The bodies reaction to the first bite will typically take 7 days or more. After repeated exposure, it may take only seconds. This is important when trying to establish where you were when you were first bitten.

Sensitivity to bed bug bites can lead to bedbug dermatitis that is often misdiagnosed by health professionals as eczema or psoriasis.

Horrifically, bed bugs can take so much blood from an infant during a night's feed that the child will show signs of iron deficiency or anaemia over a short time. This highlights why a bed bug infestation and bedbug bites should be taken so seriously. A bedbug infestation of this nature makes a strong case for professional pest control intervention at the earliest opportunity.

Tests carried out in the US show these smart insects crossing a ceiling, then dropping onto a person's bed to feed – so even protecting your bed might not provide enough protection.

Bites most commonly appear first on the face, neck and arms. This indicates bedbugs at the head end of your bed. Bites on the feet and ankles point to bedbugs on the foot end of the bed. As the name suggests, these parasites will be found around the bed.

Disease laden bed bugs have been well documented as vectors of disease, but this is not common in the UK. Bed bugs often get the blame for other parasites, especially fleas that cause similar-looking bites on humans.

Over the past year, our pest control treatments helped many Bristol residents wipe out their bed bug infestation. A bed bug-free home is a blessing!

You can often spot that you have a bed bug infestation simply by looking around the edges of your mattress under the folded Seams.

If you find small, oval, flattened insects in cracks and crevices with dark speckles around them or nearby, then you need to get things treated or, at the very least, inspected.

Two massive infestations we tackled last year in Bristol presented a huge challenge, but as usual, we succeeded in taking control and eliminating them.

Infested bedsits and hostels will often leave infested bed bases and mattress sets outside for collection by waste contractors. Unfortunately, these beds are often swiped by unscrupulous traders who sell them on the second-hand market and cause infestation and misery to the purchasers who will be oblivious to what they have just taken into their homes!

Where Do Bed Bugs Come From?

Because bedbugs can survive without feeding for months at a time (under favourable conditions), secondhand furniture and effects are the most common way that infestations arrive in the bedroom of a house. Your mattress is not always the culprit!

They are a parasite naturally found in the environment and associated with warm-blooded animals. Having them does not mean you are dirty; it just means, in most cases, you have been unlucky.

Most infestations involving these small pests begin with contaminated luggage, so those who travel regularly and stay in hotels tend to be most at risk. This is why September and October are the busiest times for pest control treatments. People go away on holiday, pick them up on luggage, and some weeks later discover they are not alone at night!

Another common cause is of pest infestation is where an adjoining property is affected. Here the bugs migrate through the structure of the building. We see this in blocks of flats and terraced housing.

Outbreaks caused by a neighbour who has the problem are the most difficult to eliminate. This is because the person responsible may not care and ultimately won't pay for a solution.

When Are Bed Bugs Most Active?

Bedbugs are most active at night, especially in the early hours when your bedroom is dark and cool. At this time, your body is producing enough heat and CO2 to stimulate bed bugs to feed. Bedbugs will travel to you quite rapidly and feed for no more than fifteen minutes before returning to their chosen crack, crevice or hiding place to digest their fresh meal.

Keeping a light on won't help you avoid bites. If the bedbugs have not been fed in many days they will happily feed during daylight hours. This is a huge reason an infestation will involve seating areas in your home and not just the beds.

Beds need to be checked for bedbugs every day and have some sticky tape available to catch and remove the bed bugs without causing unsightly, bloody stains on bedding, walls and mattresses.

How Do You Control Bedbugs?

The first step to tackling this pest problem is a deep clean of everything in an affected room, and this might include checking that bugs have not become established in electrical outlets that can be treated with insecticide dust. Infestations will often invade almost every item of furniture in a room.

A combined, integrated and professional pest control approach is the only way to crush a bed bug infestation. A bed bug treatment could include heat, residual sprays with Insect growth regulators (IGR's), fumigants (bug bombs) and diatomaceous earth.

Treatments, when done properly, ensure you succeed in killing bed bugs quickly. Ignoring a bed bug problem only leads to more suffering for you and your loved ones.

Large infestations affecting entire properties will end up costing hundreds or even thousands to treat effectively. Extensive infestations also take a couple of months at best to eliminate.

You must pay particular attention to beds and all items near beds to be sure that every possible bedbug has been located and subjected to the chosen treatments. Also consider chairs and sofas where people might also spend time resting and sleeping for long periods.

Can I Get Rid Of Bedbugs Myself?

10 Steps To A Bed Bug-Free Home

1. Use a vacuum cleaner & deep clean the floor area, mattress and bed frame intensively.
2. Place curtains, bedding & laundry into dissolvable bags or plastic laundry bags for washing.
3. Ensure items are dried thoroughly at high heat and placed into clean, unused bags for reintroduction into the room after treatments have been completed.
4. Carry out a fingertip search of every item in and around the room and bed for bugs.
5. Dismantle bed frames to ensure all gaps where bugs hide have been checked.
6. Use a portable steam cleaning device or hot water to sterilise surfaces and kill bugs as you clean.
7. Apply pesticides if required or pesticide-free alternatives like diatomaceous ear
8. Buy bedbug monitors to check for any ongoing activity.
9. Re-check items as they are reintroduced into the room and start using the room as usual. Staying away from the room will encourage any remaining bugs to migrate through the building, searching for food.
10. Don't delay follow-up treatments if further activity is found. You never want to let an infestation recover following all your hard work.

How Long Does Bed Bug Pest Control Take?

It depends on many factors, but if carried out properly, a single treatment should have a massive impact on an infestation. Every infestation in your home should be considered an ongoing problem until monitoring has proven activity has ended completely.

If more than one room or multiple areas in your home have been implicated, it will take longer, especially If bugs are given sufficient time to reach such numbers that the whole property becomes infested.

If you're being bitten a couple of times a night and only one room is affected, then your pest treatment should be straightforward.

Pest control treatments become more expensive when people report bedbug bites in more than one room. Usually, health concerns will provide the motivation to seek professional pest control help early.

The Bed Bugs Life cycle

The common bed bug life cycle starts as a tiny, creamy white egg laid by the female individually up to five or more per day. Over her lifetime, the adult female could lay over a hundred eggs during her lifetime.

Under optimum conditions, the bedbug population will double every 16 days. This is why a single adult bedbug can be all that is needed to establish bedbug infestations in under three months!

The bed bug eggs hatch after 5-10 days and it takes a further four to six weeks for the juveniles to become adult bugs capable of reproduction. This assumes they have a host to feed reliably on during this time period.

Mating takes place by a process called traumatic insemination, where the male literally pierces the abdomen of the female with his mating organ called a paramere into her Organ of Berlese.

Once mated, the female will feed and produce 1-7 eggs per day for a period of up to ten days before she will need to successfully feed again.                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Bed Bug Case Study

What's the worst bedbug job we have dealt with?

We were called to a property in the City where we received gruesome reports of a hospitalised bedbug victim receiving treatment for dozens of bites all over his body. The elderly gentleman was being treated after being asked by his son to paint the bedrooms of a rental property that had been left empty for three months.

The victim or host was sat on the floor of the front bedroom, slowly and carefully painting the skirting boards. After a few hours diligently working around the room, he started scratching and noticed he was covered in tiny insects. He also noticed he was bleeding!

He was rushed by a relative to the local hospital where he undressed and to his horror and that of hospital staff he was covered in bedbugs and fresh bedbug bites that were quickly becoming inflamed.

Medics set to work cleaning up the most obvious bite sites and started the man on a course of steroids.

On arrival at the house, it was clear that the customer was badly shaken by these events and he was ready to dispose of the house and not just the bugs that had been feeding on his elderly dad.

We immediately set to work treating the property with residual insecticide to provide the fastest and most cost-effective treatment available to us at such short notice.

The next day we revisited the property to find hundreds of dead bedbugs scattered around every bedroom. Three further treatments over three months tendered the same results!

Finally, we discovered that the adjoining house (semi-detached) was also infested. The customer decided to cut his losses and put his house up for sale.

Conclusion

The history of this house was very telling. For three years the house had been lived in by temporary workers from overseas. Properties with a high turnover of occupants often have the worst bedbug infestations. This is because the cost of treatments can be prohibitive to many peoples budgets.

Issues like this almost guarantee the landlord will not return your deposit until treatments are deemed successful and the costs are deducted from deposits. It would seem better for people to keep quiet and leave the bedbug legacy for someone else to sort out! Harsh but that's the reality of bedbug control in temporary housing and alike.

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