Reviews on how to get rid of bedbugs in an apartment
Hi all! During one of the evening gatherings with a neighbor, she talked about her student years.
There was no hostel; she lived in rented apartments. And she was constantly unlucky. Sometimes I came across an apartment with cockroaches, sometimes with bedbugs.
As a result, she overcame the bedbugs. Then she shared her method wherever she could. It has helped many people cope with these parasites. Do you want to know how to get rid of bedbugs in an apartment and study other people’s reviews? In the article below you will find all the information you need.
Who are bedbugs and why are they needed?
Before this adventure, I assumed that bed bugs were a thing of the past. You can only read about them in classical Russian literature - mattresses in shabby roadside hotels were often infested with them. Well, in the village as a child, I heard that sometimes they can spawn somewhere in the floorboards of a house.
A bed bug is a small brown bug (relatively speaking, they are not actually beetles) up to eight millimeters long. Unlike the cilantro-smelling bugs that you get on raspberries or sometimes swoop down on your head in the summer, they don’t smell much. And in general, they do not immediately announce their presence. And one could put up with them, but bedbugs need blood to reproduce and develop. And we become its source. Fun (not really) fact: a small animal like a rat can be eaten to death by a large enough colony of bedbugs.
These parasites crawl out in the dark, usually between two and five in the morning, bite warm human bodies and hide as if they were never there. But hungry beetles can crawl out at any time. This is what both adults do and just hatched bugs, which you can barely see at all. And because they are small and flat, they are almost impossible to crush when tossing and turning in your sleep. And their bites are painless - they won’t wake you up. They can chew even when you are not sleeping at all.
Adult bedbugs
Hot steam has no residual effect
This problem is perhaps even more significant than the first. Once the steam hits the surface, condenses and cools, it ceases to pose any danger to bedbugs. Consequently, it can only kill those parasites that are visible and that can be directly sprayed with a 20-30 cm jet of steam.
In this case, a completely reasonable question arises: if bedbugs are right in front of your eyes and can be scalded, then why do you need steam at all? Bedbugs that are under your hands can simply be crushed with your fingers. Only if you are very squeamish can you boil them, but buying a steam generator specifically for this is not the most rational idea.
The fact is that in our practice, we often come across exactly this question from clients: if in order to destroy bedbugs you need to open all their nests, then why bother with any additional means and tools, including professional exterminators. If all the nests are opened, then the bedbugs can be destroyed simply mechanically. And people are looking for steam generators and other means precisely so as not to have to deal with such a painstaking search for bedbugs in the apartment.
Bedbugs in the socket - it’s unlikely to scald them here
In reality, it is usually not possible to find all the hiding places of bedbugs in an apartment, especially one that is heavily infested. And in those of them that remained unfound, the bedbugs die precisely from the action of the insecticidal agent that got there with the air, or after running over an already dried product with a residual effect - such a product poisons the bedbugs, even when dry.
Steam does not allow you to kill bedbugs that run around the apartment at night. This is its main drawback and that is why it can only be used as an additional, but not the main and certainly not the only means for killing bedbugs.
How to get bedbugs in your home?
It’s very simple - just bring home one fertilized female. She will lay eggs almost all her life, about five eggs per day. Within a couple of months, a whole colony can form. You can bring bedbugs from anywhere, but the likelihood of picking them up is especially high in rural areas, on farms and farms (as was the case in my case). Bedbugs don’t care whether your home is clean or dirty, dry or damp, cold or hot. The main thing is that there is a source of blood. They can also crawl from their neighbors, but in general they don’t like to walk a lot and often change their habitat, just like people.
Bedbugs settle in any secluded places. Most often in the sofa or bed, where the owners sleep. They can be in the joints and under the casing. But old clothes on shelves and baseboards suit them just as well. They can also find a place for themselves under wallpaper - and also in books and even equipment. Their survival rate is extremely powerful. They can live for more than a year without food, hibernating. The only thing these creatures definitely don’t like is sudden temperature changes. Bedbugs die within an hour at temperatures above fifty degrees. Or you can try to freeze them, if the house stays at minus twenty or below for a couple of months, the parasites will die. In the villages this is how they used to deal with them: they went to stay with relatives and left the house open. My grandfather also told me a story about a gentleman who put the legs of his bed in buckets of water so that bedbugs could not climb on them. They say it didn't help - bedbugs can swim.
How I got rid of bedbugs
The bedbugs attacked us when the neighbors made repairs. Crowds of refugees poured towards us. Reviews of bedbugs on the Internet promised many years of exhausting war with the use of chemical weapons. In fact, I didn’t have to try folk remedies, meanwhile the situation was getting worse, I had to make serious efforts not to itch in public places. However, for a long time we could not decide to call the SES: we were frightened by the need to breathe in the fumes of pesticides after treatment. I set up a tent in the middle of the room and my wife, son and I slept in it, hoping for a mosquito net. Small bugs crawled through the mesh, large ones attacked the cat. When the new, light wallpaper was covered with black products from the processing of our blood, and the population of bedbugs was already comparable to the population of the city of Mytishchi, we still called the SES. I read in a book about cancer that mixing pesticides greatly enhances their effect, which is extremely dangerous for humans, so I asked the exterminator if he mixes drugs to treat an apartment. He said that according to sanitary standards it is impossible to mix, but everyone mixes, “it’s safer that way.” Naturally, after all, all companies promise free re-treatment if there is no result, and exterminators do not want to do the same job twice. The house was still treated, after treatment I, according to the exterminator’s recommendation, slept in a smelly apartment, playing the role of bait for bedbugs, which were destined to poison me on the way. A few weeks later, when my bronchitis went away and my home was finally more or less ventilated, the bedbugs returned. We weren't ready to be treated with pesticides again, so we bought a professional steamer. It turned out that after steam treatment, adult bedbugs die, but after a few days new ones hatch: the bedbugs lay eggs in places inaccessible to the steamer. I continued to research non-chemical methods for killing bedbugs and came across Hector, a silica-based product. This is a powder, like sand, which, according to the manufacturer, sticks to the chitinous cover of insects, causing them to die from dehydration. The apartment began to resemble a beach, but the bedbugs did not die. I was already seriously thinking about bringing a cylinder of liquid nitrogen into the apartment, and then I remembered that Polysorb is also silicon dioxide and it feels not like sand, but like snow, and sticks to surfaces much better. I threw a couple of bugs that came to hand into a glass with Polysorb, they immediately got stuck, after a few minutes they were covered with white powder and could not move, after a few hours I crushed two completely dry shells with a crunch. Then I once again treated the beds, cabinets, walls, floors and baseboards with a steamer, then covered the areas of the apartment with polysorb that young bugs cross before making their first bite. No more bugs appeared...
Bedbugs will turn you into an itchy paranoid
Each bug comes out to eat regularly once a week. It leaves a trail of bites on a person - from three to eight, but depending on your luck. If you are completely unlucky and you are allergic to bedbugs, each bite will swell like a healthy pie, like after a Mantoux test. Most often, their bites are similar to mosquito bites, but they itch many times more. In addition to the itching, there is also a burning sensation, as if you fell from a bicycle into nettles. And the main bonus is that bedbugs love to bite fingers and hands, the most unpleasant places for bites in principle.
A newly hatched bug immediately goes for blood, otherwise it will not be able to grow
Each bite lasts about two weeks. At the beginning of a relationship with bedbugs, there will be only a few of them - not a tragedy. But at the peak of the war I had more than a hundred of them. Arms, legs, feet, back and even neck were bitten. All this burned, itched and aesthetically looked rather creepy. It is almost impossible not to scratch the affected areas. I had to get a soft hair brush to comb it neatly. Well, spend some money on soothing ointments, but these are minor things.
At some point, bedbugs become so overwhelming that you start looking for them everywhere. You check your legs and arms every minute to see if a bug is running? Every breath of summer breeze that tickles your skin becomes a signal: it’s a bug! It’s difficult to get rid of this paranoia - I feel like it will stay with me for a long time.
Hoping for the effectiveness of steam, people do not take proper measures to protect the premises
In this regard, hot steam is no different from any chemical means. Not understanding how bedbugs get into a room, people do not even try to find routes for the insects to move from their neighbors and expect that it is enough to destroy these parasites once to forget about them forever. As a result, even after complete extermination, bedbugs often appear in the apartment again.
A bug and its excrement on the ceiling in the corner
Moreover, such re-infection can occur within just a few days after removing the bedbugs with steam. There is nothing dangerous for the new “migrants” left in the room, and they climb in here without harming themselves and begin to bite people. When using effective insecticides, such a development of events is unlikely: the bugs that enter the apartment again are poisoned by the already dried preparation and the product protects the room for at least 1-2 weeks.
Bedbugs have to be poisoned - preparing for this process is similar to a search
In theory, everything is simple. The master will come and fill your home with a fog that kills all living things. In places where bedbugs are most likely to live, powdered poison will also be poured. But before the master arrives, you need to literally pack your whole life. All clothes (they will definitely have to be washed) and books, CDs, small equipment - everything is in bags. TV, computer, consoles - everything needs to be hidden. Move the furniture away. It is advisable to tear off the baseboards. And God forbid you have an old house with wooden floors: it is likely that you will have to remove the covering and then fill all the cracks with sealant.
With God's help, one treatment may be enough. But more often this procedure has to be repeated two or three times with a difference of a couple of weeks. The best part is that the bedbugs don’t die right away, but you can’t move out of the apartment. Surviving parasites must come out and come into contact with the poison. You literally have to sacrifice your flesh to them. Each treatment will cost about three thousand rubles, but it’s impossible to calculate the nerves spent. For an ideal result, you need to persuade the neighbors above, below and on the floor to do the same exterminatus - good luck!
I was especially lucky: although two treatments reduced the number of bedbugs, they did not kill them completely. And this is a normal phenomenon; back in the mid-1990s, American scientists reported that they were finding more and more colonies of bedbugs that were generally immune to most poisons - that’s evolution for you. I was absolutely sure that they lived in the sofa and even found one of them under the armrest - with beetle shit and chitin dropped by nymphs. As a result, we had to take extreme measures, but statistics say that they are required in approximately half of the cases.
What do bedbug eggs and larvae look like?
Stages of development from egg to adult
Female bed bugs lay eggs that are shaped like an elongated oval with a cap and are pearly white in color. They barely reach 1 mm in length. In warm conditions (at a temperature of +20...+35 oC), after 10–14 days, one bug larva (nymph) appears from each egg. She leaves behind an empty egg shell with a hole at the end.
Bedbug larvae look similar to adults (imago) and differ from them only in their small size. Their length after appearance is 1–1.5 mm. The body of the larvae has a flat oval shape, 3 pairs of legs, one pair of whiskers, a proboscis and a brown color.
Bedbug nymphs feed on blood and grow quickly. Under favorable conditions, they reach sexual maturity within 30–40 days. By this time they grow to 5–8 mm and go through 5 stages of development. At the end of each of them, insect larvae shed their old shell and form a new one. The shell formed by an individual after completion of stage 5 remains forever.
I've been sleeping on an air mattress for a couple of weeks now because of bedbugs.
I threw the sofa in the trash. An absolutely beautiful sofa that was only three years old. There was only one alternative - to remove all the upholstery and find the nests, but it was cheaper to throw it away.
If bedbugs remain in the apartment, they will happily set up a colony in the new sofa (and new sofas can come from the factory with their own bedbugs - this happens). Therefore, a strategic decision was made to buy an air mattress for a while. If parasites are still living in the house, they will almost certainly soon be found under the mattress. But so far they are not visible, and the bites have finally passed. After I threw out the couch, I only caught a couple of bugs in the first two days - perhaps they came from the couch itself while I was tearing it apart and tearfully kicking it to get it into the elevator.
The war lasted all of August and now seems over, but I am not relaxing. A control treatment is planned for the near future - the room will already be devoid of baseboards and linoleum, just to be sure. And only then will I decide to add a new sofa to the house. I wish you never to face this misfortune!
How to remove bedbugs? - Adviсe
Nastena : With the purchase of a new sofa, these bloodsuckers started up, we tried karbofos (although it is toxic to humans) it doesn’t help, everyone says dichlorvos is “a waste of money”, well, what else?!!!!
ennina : we had such “happiness”. The children and I left, and my husband sprayed everything (some kind of insect repellent spray from Dr. Klaus), in all the rooms, coated everything wooden with varnish, so they threw everything away without washing, washed all the linen with 90 grams, ironed everything. And then for a long time they collected the dried and dead ones. Yes, they also threw away the mattresses. In short, complete Atas. There's enough work. I also read that they go into suspended animation, so I’m still on the alert. In winter, I ventilate everything in the cold. Diana Beska : They were crawling from our neighbors, but we brought them out with an ordinary raptor (literally “Professional extermination of crawling insects”), and not to say that we strained ourselves? It is almost odorless, although I still felt it, but is it the nostrils? It took about 3 cylinders in three days. And fsyo, t-t-t. I haven't seen it for a year now.
Latika : it looks like some kind of misfortune started with these bugs. My friends recently bought an apartment, but even the previous owner didn’t warn them that bedbugs lived there, and they found out about it on the day of the move by accident from a neighbor.
We quarreled with the former owner and called the sanitary service to combat these parasites at her expense. The move also had to be postponed for several days, because... if things had been moved, then the guard would have started because these bugs love to settle in sofas and armchairs, from where you can’t kick them out later. Attention! Right now there are no more of them. The neighbors actually came running and asked: “What are you doing here? All the bugs came rushing to us!”...although initially they crawled from these neighbors. In general, it seems that we also had these monsters before, only I was very little then and don’t remember. But the parents say that they bred it with karbofos.
Shoma : We also had these “pets”, so I bought some special smoke bombs at a hardware store, I think they are from Raptor, you don’t need to set anything on fire, you pour a little water into the bomb and smoke starts pouring out of it these creatures die, and people need to leave the premises for several hours (well, so as not to die in a heap with bedbugs?)
Natalya Ivanova : We moved to a new apartment, it turned out to be infested with bedbugs, we tried to remove it ourselves with Corbafos, but it didn’t help. They called specialists, the bedbugs died out, but the smell of the drug remained. Whatever they tried to clean the furniture didn’t work, so I had to throw it away. The worst thing is that the walls in some places still stink so much (a year has already passed) and the plaster was torn off along with the wallpaper, it doesn’t help.
Nadezhda Pimenova : Oh, well, here I am in this topic. Since February, my child began to break out in red blisters. They last for 2-3 days, then they turn pale and gradually go away, and new ones immediately appear. I don’t even want to remember how we visited dermatologists, how many tests we took and how many medications we took/applied. And there was no point, blisters kept appearing and appearing.
And on Friday I caught some kind of beetle in the room. I put this animal in a jar and took it to the laboratory for analysis. At the end of the day, the biologist called back and said: “Congratulations, you are the proud owner of bed bugs!” And he immediately warned that it is better not to waste time on home control methods, but to order special treatment.
Girls, I have one big message for you. Anyone who has encountered this problem and ordered special treatment, please share your experience.
- Do they process everything at all? That is, clothes in the closet, papers in drawers, books on shelves, kitchen cabinets, etc.?
- Does the treatment agent then need to be washed off throughout the entire apartment? That is, walls, ceilings, carpets, furniture. And what to do with the clothes? Well, it’s clear that dresses and T-shirts should be washed, but what about fur coats and sheepskin coats? And with blankets on the beds...
- How long does the smell last after treatment?
- I strongly suspect that the source of this “joy” is the neighbors behind the wall; a group of comrades of Tajik nationality rent an apartment there. Well, let’s say we remove the bedbugs, and then they won’t come to us again from the neighbors? Or - oh horror! — will this procedure have to be carried out periodically now?
Oh, my head is spinning. One joy: now it is clear why the child has blisters. We didn’t know what to feed them; we barely subsisted on bread and water. But it turned out that he, poor fellow, was simply bitten around the perimeter by such bastards...
Olga . I will answer in order:
- The entire apartment is being processed. Things and papers are at the discretion of the disinfector.
- As a rule, treatment is carried out with means of hazard class 3-4; you do not have to wash the entire apartment.
- It all depends on the product; you can order treatment with odorless products.
- The disinfector should advise you on methods for protecting the apartment. As a rule, if the recommendations are followed, re-infection does not occur.
elena nikitcenko . We also poisoned them with karbofos, they ruined all the walls, but for a while they disappeared, then the infections appeared again, thank God at least they didn’t bite the child. Important! They called the service, treated them with poisons, so even the cockroaches didn’t die, nothing helped, and then I read somewhere about a service that poisons bedbugs using American technology with high temperature and poisons, in short, they called them, they arrived, heated the rooms with some kind of guns and then poisons, well, thank God they have been gone for a long time. I even had a nervous breakdown because of bedbugs, and plus all the time it seemed like something was crawling on you, and I still work in the canteen and all my hands were covered in bites... in short, the guard... but thank God they are no longer there, but I’m afraid God forbid they come back, we have a lot of Asia in our entrance. In general, hang in there girls, it’s very difficult to get them out.
Svetlana Taitskaya : I will have very unexpected advice - install WiFi! Insects are afraid of this radiation, so in apartments where there is a lot of equipment and Wi-Fi, cockroaches quickly disappear forever, I think it will work with bedbugs too)))).
Elena : I'll tell you about my epic. These reptiles were brought to us, I think, by my mother’s friend (as it turned out later, these creatures were found in her son’s apartment). We didn’t immediately understand what was happening, because only my son had bites; others had nothing. I thought maybe it was some kind of allergy. But one day he got sick and fell asleep on his grandmother’s sofa; in the morning it was scary to look at him. Then I found one in the bathtub and an epiphany came, and with it a great desire to get rid of these creatures. It was not our plan to throw away the furniture, since we purchased it only a year ago and for a lot of money. I started by buying Raid and Raptor aerosols. We sprayed it everywhere we could. Nothing helped. I covered all the drawers and cracks with wormwood, it was also complete garbage, it didn’t work. The psychosis intensified (those who are faced with this problem will understand me, you constantly jump up at night, look at the child, at yourself, at the walls, but I didn’t see them often).
The next step was a steam cleaner (bought by Koerner on Avito) and steamed everything I could, including things and furniture. The bites became fewer, but they did not disappear. Finally, we decided to contact a special service (I won’t write the name), if you are interested, write, I will answer.
Measures to combat bedbugs in the house
There are several ways to remove bedbugs from an apartment yourself, without contacting the sanitary and epidemiological station. For this purpose, simple and effective folk remedies, proven over the years, as well as modern insecticidal preparations are used.
In some sources you can find various conspiracies, prayers and whispers to get rid of bedbugs in the house. But the effectiveness of such methods is questionable, so when fighting blood-sucking parasites it is better to trust more effective means.
