Okay, so why am I building a site called Bed Bug Facts and why should you be interested in anything that I have to say?

The answer is pretty simple. Like many other people I had a bad experience with bedbugs recently. The nasty little bloodsuckers found their way into our home and made life miserable.

Note: For full disclosure I will tell you right here that I am not a professional exterminator. All I have is my experiences and frustrations as I tried to get rid of the bedbugs that infested our apartment. While I might refer extermination companies from time to time that I feel are qualified for getting rid of bed bugs, at first, I was in the same place that you probably are right now.

You have gone online hoping to find a solution to your infestation problem and I hope that I can help. I have designed this website to try and put all the information in one place. If I designed this site correctly, my hope is that you will find all the ideas and solutions that are scattered around the net right here.

The Story

You see, I am a pretty typical renter in a building has bed bugs. I am luckier than most because the management does make an ongoing concerted effort to kill the bed bugs but like many buildings it is a lot easier said than done.

So let start at the beginning. My brother, whom I am very close to, lives in a low income building for the disabled and elderly. Like a lot of people I had never seen a bed bug before I moved in with him a number of years ago. The first night when I moved in I was surprised to find all his furniture and belonging piled in the center of the rooms.

When I asked why he had done this my brother showed me a notice from the exterminator saying that he need to have everything pulled away from the walls so they could spray the next day.

As a former apartment manager I had dealt with cockroaches but never had to deal with bedbugs before. Still I suspected that the notice meant a few inches but he insisted it meant the center of the room. But I soon found out that his over reaction was based upon his intense desire to get rid of the bugs and their bites. Something that I came to share after my first night experiencing them.

What followed was a fight to rid ourselves of them. They had infested the mattresses, the furniture, behind pictures, and the bedding. At night when they were feeding and you rolled over it would leave a blood smear on the sheets. The bug bites themselves are usually not considered an effective way to spread disease but they do make the skin itch. In fact, depending upon a persons sensitivity, the site of a bite can also become red and swollen.

Why Is Bed Bug Control So Difficult?

What followed was several frustrating years as we worked with pest control to kill the bugs and keep them out of our apartment. This can be a problem since most normal spray products that are used by professionals to kill an infestation are not effective. The products are even less effective on the eggs. If an apartment is treated and every bug is killed, even just one egg hatching can restart the infestation.

At one point the bed bug was all but wiped out in most of the industrialized countries through the use of DDT. But with that spray banned for health reasons, the bugs have started to make infested apartments much more common. They are very skilled at hiding in places where sprays and dusts cannot get into.

Each night they can travel up to twenty feet to reach you for feeding and then crawl back before the sun comes up. They feed at night when you are asleep and they can bite you to get your blood and scurry away before you wake.

The real problem is that as we become more urban and live in apartments, condos, and dorms where people live close together it makes it easier for the bed bug to find new hosts to feed upon. When we travel we can also inadvertently bring the pests home with us in our suitcases. They can even arrive in boxes shipped from warehouses that have been infested.

Recently our local library had to be fumigated and scores of books destroyed because they had been infested. With so many people living close together the bedbug is having a field day and spreading across the country.

In a typical building with multiple units and people moving in and out, the management can just get the problem under control when someone new moves in bringing the bed bugs with them and the whole problem starts again. In low income building the problem is magnified because many times people move into new apartments to try and get rid of the bugs in their old homes. Plus, this type or community is more likely to have used furniture bought or traded around which can also be carrying bed bugs.

The larger the building is the more likely it is that there will be one or more residents that won't allow pest control into their home. They do this for a number of reasons including fear of the sprays and powders that are used in treatments, a desire to be left alone, or some mental issue that makes them want to be isolated. When this happens, no matter how well treated a building is, as soon as the treatment wears off the bed bugs start re-infesting a building. Plus, even when the bedbugs are under control, the first thing that someone who is infested does is drag the infested mattresses or furniture through the hallways which can scatter the bugs in the common areas, making it easy for them to find new blood hosts.

Is There a Solution to Bed Bugs?

First, you have to know your enemy. I hope that the information contained on this site will give you ideas about what you can do to keep bed bugs from eating you alive. Just remember, the key is that it is not a once and done situation. My taking precautions and steps to control the bed bugs before they become a full fledged infestation, you can make your home a bedbug free zone.