Preventing bed bugs in the apartment

Perhaps the first thing to know about preventing bed bugs in an apartment is that without elementary measures to protect a room, even the minimal threat of bedbug infection often leads to this very infection. Simply put: if your neighbors have bugs, and you do not take preventive measures, the parasites will appear with you almost 100%, it is only a matter of time. If your relatives have bedbugs, and you go to visit them (or they come to you) and, again, do not take protective measures - well, get ready for regular night bites.

Surprisingly, many people seriously believe that bugs appear, like cockroaches, only in unscrupulous families, in the mud and unsanitary conditions. This is understandable: most people in life have not seen bed bugs and are absolutely sure that they will definitely pass away their apartment.

It is interesting

When the bugs are still reliably settled in the apartment, the owners are often embarrassed to tell their neighbors and relatives about it, for fear of disgust on their part. Sometimes it comes to the fact that all the apartments on the floor are infected, but the neighbors are silent about this in front of each other. And the situation is clarified only when the SES, whose employees assess the degree of infection at home in detail.

Meanwhile, without proper preventive measures, bugs can appear even in the cleanest family, and here it is absolutely not important, if you have an elite apartment, or a standard “Khrushchev”. Blood suckers do not stop neither the cleanliness of the room, nor the number of cleaning carried out, nor the high cost of decoration. For parasites, only one factor is important - food should be regularly in the room (that is, people should live, as bedbugs feed exclusively on blood).

About the fact, with the help of what methods and means of prophylaxis you can reliably protect your home from the appearance of bed bugs in it, we will go on and talk in more detail ...

On a note

Bedbugs today are very actively distributed in developed countries. In London, for example, every year a greater number of visits to the processing of premises from bedbugs are recorded than in the previous year.A significant number of old residential apartments and houses in the United States are infected with bedbugs, and in a seemingly prosperous Florida, according to experts, over the past 10 years, the population of bed bugs has increased almost 10 times. In Zurich, every second apartment ever sheltered bedbugs.

Do you still think that your apartment is so clean that bed bugs do not threaten it?

 

Ways to bedbugs in the room

In order to effectively protect a room from bedbugs, it is necessary, first of all, to reliably block the main pathways of infestation of parasites into it.

There are several such ways:

• Electrical sockets - this is especially true for panel apartment buildings. The socket located on the wall separating your apartment from the next one can serve as an excellent way for the migration of parasites from one room to another (especially if neighbors start hounding bugs). You can seal the hole behind the socket with alabaster, non-combustible mounting foam, or even just clog a piece of glass wool;
• Ventilation shafts. On them, bugs are also able to move between apartments, especially when people are poisoned from them or people move out of their houses for a long time (if there is no food source for a long time, the parasites begin to crawl in search of more suitable living conditions).Instead of a standard grille, it is recommended to put a very fine mesh on the vent;
• Cracks and crevices in the floor, ceiling and walls. The little body of bedbugs is so flat that even adult individuals easily penetrate through narrow gaps and gaps, not to mention the larvae. Therefore, an important preventive measure, especially in old houses, is a thorough repair of such defects (plaster, alabaster, assembly foam);
• Windows and doors. An adult bug in a second crawls 2-4 cm. To overcome the distance from the window of one apartment to the window of another on the outer wall of the building it will take less than half an hour. The same with the doors. Only modern plastic windows reliably protect against bugs - thanks to rubber seals. Ordinary wooden frames have cracks, and parasites can penetrate through keyholes in the doors;
• Furniture and even household appliances can become “hotbeds” of bedbugs if they were brought from an infected room. There are cases when parasite nests were located in the system blocks of computers, laptops and TVs. However, the main thing that should be paid attention to in the framework of prophylaxis is the examination of furniture (sofas, beds, armchairs, etc.);
• Clothes, shoes and accessories that have been in the contaminated room are one of the most common and underestimated sources of bedbug infestation. Sometimes it is enough just to visit the apartment infected with bloodsuckers once, in order to bring them to your home.

When there is an understanding of how the bugs get into the apartment, it becomes well understood and what preventive measures should be taken in each appropriate case.

Feedback

“I have a girlfriend, and she also has a girlfriend who has house bugs in the dormitory. And once I saw a pair of red dots on my hands. Thought it was an allergy. Then the brothers began to appear. A friend said it was bedbug bites, she had already seen that. Nightmare! I woke up at night, turned on the light, and on the sheet the beetles crawled, two big ones and three more small ones. I crushed them all with a napkin, it was so bloody, horror. Since then, for two months now, together with my mother, we have been trying to bring out bedbugs, but for the time being it somehow fails ... ”

Asel, Kazan

 

The main rules for the prevention of bedbugs

There are a number of universal rules, the observance of which allows in most cases to ensure sufficiently reliable prevention of the appearance of bedbugs in an apartment.

So, to protect the room from bed bugs you need:

1. Eliminate the maximum possible shelters in which the bugs can hide. To do this, it is worth replacing the parquet with laminate, removing or replacing it with new baseboards, sealing the gaps between them and the floor, as well as between the baseboard and the wall. It is advisable to change the wallpaper, if the old many tears and detachments from the wall. It is recommended to remove the carpets from the walls, replace the old, loosely adjacent to the wall sockets with new ones, closing them with a special plug. With the threat of infestation by apartment bugs, books can also present a problem, often literally stored on the shelves;

On a note

According to the observations of specialists who are engaged in professional breeding of bedbugs, parquet is lying on the floor in almost 80% of the infected rooms. Only about two out of ten infected apartments have another flooring.

2. As part of the prevention of infection of the apartment with bedbugs, it is necessary to carefully check the imported furniture. The same applies to clothes, shoes, household appliances, luggage and bags. There are cases when the nest of bedbugs was in what seemed to be new, just bought furniture from the store;
3. If you are visited by a person from a knowingly infected apartment (for example, a relative came to visit), then his shoes and outerwear should be placed in bags, after which they are tied. If you yourself visit a room infected with bedbugs, then on arrival home shoes and outerwear should be treated with an aerosol insecticide (Raptor, Combat, Dichlorvos, etc.), and the rest of the clothes should be washed at a temperature not lower than 60 ° C;
4. In no case do not use furniture thrown out by someone and mattresses. Even sitting on them just to try may be fraught with hit of larvae and eggs of bedbugs on clothes. According to statistics, in every fifth case, old sofas and armchairs are thrown away precisely because bugs live in them;
5. It is useful to know your neighbors in the apartments at the side, top and bottom, keeping in touch with them. If in several apartments there are bugs, then solving the problem together is easier and more effective than fighting alone, suspecting that the neighbors have a hotbed of parasites.

And yet, an important point: bedbugs are easy to bring into the apartment on clothes or shoes from hotels during trips and business trips.Cheap hotels in general are the classic incubators of parasites in megalopolises (especially when the owners do not particularly care about pest control). As a rule, these are hotels of the level of 1-2 stars, but sometimes quite respectable hotels can “delight” guests with various parasitic animals.

Especially dangerous in this regard, apartments and houses in the resort area, illegally leased to tourists. If in such a holiday place bed bugs crawl into a bag or suitcase, then there is a big risk to bring them into their own homes. Therefore, during the rest you need to carefully check the rented room when you check in, and at the slightest suspicion of infection with his bedbugs to require replacement rooms or (better) look for another hotel.

 

Check apartment for the presence of bedbugs

If there is an increased threat of bedbugs in the room (for example, when you recently got rid of them successfully, when neighbors or relatives have bugs but systematic arrangements.

With each general cleaning of the apartment (but at least once a week), it will be useful to carefully examine:

• mattresses and internal cavities of sofas and beds;
• carpets on the floor and on the walls;
• under the bed floor;
• bookshelves;
• baseboards.

During such checks, it is necessary to search for both the bugs themselves and their chitinous integuments remaining during shedding, as well as feces - tiny black dots, usually found in abundance at the places of entry of the parasites into the shelter and generally near the nests.

The appearance on the white sheet of small traces of blood may also indicate the presence of a number of bed bugs. And, of course, the presence of bloodsuckers give marks on the body of their bites, although many of them are often blamed on mosquito bites or an allergic reaction.

 

Means for protection from bedbugs

Here, perhaps, it makes sense to once again emphasize the following important thought: before applying any prophylactic agents for bedbugs, it is necessary to concentrate on blocking the paths of possible penetration of the parasites into the room. A simple example: if only one individual of the parasite penetrates into the apartment every month - there is every chance not to allow the apartment to become a klopovnik.And it is quite another thing when every day 5-10 individuals penetrate into the apartment - in this case, very soon you will have no time for prophylaxis, but a total disinsection of the entire room will be required.

So, for the effective prevention of the penetration of bedbugs into the room, in most cases, the same means are used as are used for the destruction of parasites. Everything is simple - if you locally process the paths of possible penetration of parasites into an apartment, then individual individuals will be successfully exposed to the insecticide even “on the approaches”. It is only important to use the agent of prolonged action.

In general, the means of prevention from bedbugs can be divided into three types:

• folk remedies to scare away bedbugs;
• modern insecticidal means for the destruction of bugs;
• and bed bug traps (including self-made).

Let's look at these means of prevention in more detail ...

 

We protect the apartment with the help of folk remedies

The main problem of folk remedies used to repel bedbugs is their low efficiency.

The main folk remedies for preventing the appearance of bedbugs in the house are infusions, decoctions, as well as fresh and dry bunches of such famous herbs as wormwood, tansy and wild rosemary.Brooms from these plants are usually placed in the ventilation ducts, on the balconies and window sills in the apartment - here they are designed to scare away the smell of trying to get into the room bugs.

Broths of these herbs are sometimes added to the water with which the floors are washed in the apartment, and once a week they smear the inside and outside parts of the entrance door boxes, ventilating passages and window frames on the outside around the entire perimeter.

In the same way you can use special aromatic sections from moths with the smell of lavender. It is believed that the bugs also do not like this flavor.

On a note

Previously, in the villages, bunches of fresh wormwood were placed under the bed to protect against bedbugs. Sometimes tansy was used with the same purpose. Such a technique allowed a person to sleep peacefully even in the case when bed bugs were already firmly established at home.

However, as practice shows, it is not worth relying on folk remedies for the prevention of bedbugs, because they do not always give the desired effect.

 

The use of insecticides for prophylactic purposes

To prevent the appearance of bedbugs in an apartment, some modern insecticidal products can be used quite effectively.It is important that they have a contact action and do not decompose for a long time on the treated surfaces.

For example, for a long-term protection of a room against bugs, various powdered agents can be used, which should be scattered in places of possible movement of parasites. For these purposes, for example, the following drugs are used:

• insect dust Clean House;
• Phenaxine;
• pyrethrum powder;

and etc.

If a small population of bedbugs has already been found in the room, then insecticidal powders can be used as shown in the photo below:

In an attempt to reach the sleeping victim, the parasites will inevitably get dirty in the insecticidal powder and will rather quickly die. Such non-standard preventive treatment sometimes allows in a fairly short time to reduce the number of bedbugs in the room to zero (however, in advanced cases, the measure is ineffective).

For prophylactic purposes, the use of microencapsulated insecticidal preparations, especially those without a strong unpleasant odor, can also be a good option. These include Xsulat Micro, Delta Zone, Get, Lambda Zone and some others.Their advantage is that after processing, microcapsules of the means remain on the surfaces for a long time, and they easily stick to the chitinous covers of the bugs if the parasite runs through them.

Using these microencapsulated preparations, the so-called barrier effect can be realized: the treated surface serves as a kind of insurmountable barrier for parasites (a bug that crosses the “barrier” will be doomed to death).

It is interesting

Insecticide crayons (pencils), the most popular of which is Masha, from insects, with proper use, can also be a good preventive measure against bedbugs in the house. These pencils do not smell, can be applied on vertical surfaces (which is not true of powders) and at the same time are very affordable. And although it is customary to use them mainly against cockroaches, nevertheless, insecticidal pencils are also effective against bedbugs, domestic ants, fleas (more precisely, their larvae), silverfish and other crawling insects.

 

Traps for bed bugs

Industrial applications of sticky traps for cockroaches, with standard use, are ineffective as a prophylactic agent for bedbugs - the lures of bloodsuckers used in them do not attract at all.However, the sticky bug for bedbugs can be made independently, adapting for this a trap for cockroaches.

The bottom line is to put all four legs of the bed in the center of the sticky trap. Then, if a bed bug gets into the room (for example, from neighbors), then at the very first attempt to taste the blood of a sleeping person, the bloodsucker will fall on a sticky base, from which it will not be able to get out.

An example of using such a trap, in which any viscous liquid can be used as an adhesive base, is shown in the photo below:

If your neighbors are actively struggling with bedbugs, sticky traps under the legs of the bed can give an idea whether your dwelling is securely isolated from the neighboring one (from which some individuals of parasites will necessarily try to escape).

On a note

There is a whole set of tools that will be absolutely useless in protecting the room from bedbugs. For example, poison gels - they work well against ants and cockroaches, but against bugs do not give any result. Ultrasonic and electromagnetic bug repellers are also ineffective - as practice shows, their effectiveness is close to zero.

In conclusion, it is worth noting that the prevention of the appearance of bedbugs in a room will only be as effective as possible when it is complex. With the proper implementation of all stages of protection, your apartment will remain free from parasites, even if the rest of the multi-storey building will be full of bugs.

 

What you need to know about bed bugs to successfully combat them

 

Useful video: how to deal with bedbugs in the apartment