“If there’s a decent infestation, you should be able to find them,” says Rajotte. You should also look behind the headboard, behind any pictures on the wall, and in any electrical sockets, which are all places bed bugs like to camp out. Pull back the sheets and check the corners of the mattress with special focus on the cord that goes around the mattress-a favorite spot for bed bugs, according to Rajotte-and around the head end of the mattress, as that’s where most people sleep. Since they’re most likely to be on the mattress, start by looking there first. “A good practice is to put the suitcase in the middle of the bathtub until you’ve had a chance to inspect the room,” he says. So whenever you go into a hotel or vacation rental-regardless of the price or quality-expect that bed bugs can be there, says Rajotte. “It has nothing to do with how good a housekeeper you are or what your socioeconomic status is.” “The insidious thing is anybody can get them,” says Rajotte. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to playĪnd don’t think just because you stayed at a five-star resort that means you’re exempt from getting bed bugs. But where do bed bugs come from? They are often brought into the home after travel, where the bed bugs might have crawled into your suitcase or backpack at a hotel, says Rajotte. The key to avoiding a nasty bed bug situation is to identify them before you bring them into your home. But should you encounter a bed bug situation, follow these steps to nix them from your home for good. That means the best way to get rid of bed bugs is to avoid bringing them home in the first place. “Because all you need is one pregnant female, and you get a whole new population going there rather quickly,” says Rajotte. Plus, in order to truly get rid of bed bugs, you need to banish all of them. It’s particularly difficult to get rid of bed bugs because they’re resistant to a lot of insecticides, including many of those you’ll find in bed bug treatments at the hardware store, says Gibb. “Once they find us, then they take their soda straw-like mouth part and stick it directly into a blood capillary and tap into their food,” says Haynes. and 4 a.m.-our body odor, body heat, and the carbon dioxide we emit stimulates the bugs to get close to us for feeding. Then, during the middle of the night-typically between 2 a.m. “They like to live near the host, meaning in our bedrooms, near our beds-as close as they can get to where we sleep as is possible,” says Haynes.īut another hard part of realizing you have a bed bug infestation is that bed bugs will remain hidden until nighttime, using a chemical signal to aggregate together in cracks, crevices, or other dark spaces, says Haynes. That need for our blood is why bed bugs are often found exactly where their name implies: our beds. What are bed bugs, anyway?Ī bed bug is what is called a blood-feeding ectoparasite, which means its only source of food is our blood, says Kenneth Haynes, PhD, a professor of entomology at the University of Kentucky who specializes in bed bug biology. That means you often won’t realize you might have a problem until the bed bug population has become especially pervasive, or until you start waking up with bites you received the night before. “They’ve had millions of years of evolution to fine-tune their feeding system and not wake the host,” says Edwin Rajotte, PhD, a professor of entomology at Penn State University. The reason bed bugs are able to stick around so long, often going unnoticed until they’ve become a bigger problem, is that they’ve evolved to become the “perfect parasite,” says Timothy Gibb, PhD, a clinical professor of entomology at Purdue University who’s studied bed bug infestations. It’s understandable why: Bed bugs can be difficult-not to mention expensive-to get rid of. Thinking you may have a pest problem is never fun, but most homeowners dread one infestation in particular: bed bugs.

Bed bugs pictures actual size