Phone:
(701)814-6992
Physical address:
6296 Donnelly Plaza
Ratkeville, Bahamas.
About
Welcome to “Bedbugs 101”
And in case you’ve been wondering, no, we don’t use an actual giant hammer. That’s just metaphorical for “how hard we hit ’em”.
Bedbugs: Where They Come From, What Their Habits Are, and Why They’re SO Dang Hard to Kill (for most people – not us)
Everything you could possibly want to know about them, and frankly some things you probably don’t.
The first thing I want to do is debunk the idea that having bedbugs is a sign of, or a result of, poor hygiene or a lack of cleanliness in your house. That is simply not true. Getting them does not reflect poorly on you. If anything, bedbugs are considered a “rich person’s parasite” (it affects everyone), because the single most common way of getting them nowadays is by bringing them home from traveling, and from staying in hotels, motels, Air BnB’s, et cetera. In fact, that’s how I first got them. And how I was first put on this long road of learning everything there is to know about them, in order to eliminate them from my home, once and for all.
It’s also possible that you can get them from friends visiting your house or apartment, who have an infestation of their own that they might not know about yet. This is one reason why it’s so important that if you find out you have bedbugs, you react quickly to get rid of them. That being said, once your abode is treated for them, I highly recommend that you frequently clean the area that was treated – that makes it easier to check for signs that they might not be fully eradicated.
You know why that old “good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite” saying is so universal? Especially given that most people nowadays don’t even know what a bedbug actually looks like? (by the way, this is what they look like – except think “grain of rice” size) It’s because bedbugs used to be a LOT more common. Ubiquitous, even. Then, in the 1950s and 1960s, people started treating their infested houses with poisons to get rid of them. Well, we DID wipe out most of them. But just like with bacteria and antibiotics, what we accidentally did was create an evolutionary Arms Race. We’d use poison A on them, and it’s super-effective on 99% of a brood. But that dastardly 1% that survived did so because it had a natural genetic resistance to Poison A. Which made all of those surviving bedbugs’ descendants naturally resistant to Poison A. So people started using Poison B. Then the 1% that survived Poison B gave all the survivors a natural resistance to poison B. So on, and so forth.
This is not to say that poison doesn’t work AT ALL anymore – it still does – but the best poisons that’re commercially available have about a 70% effectiveness at killing all of the bedbugs in a home. You can probably see where this is going. “70% effective” translates to “30% still survive,” and stay entrenched. As well as the survivors becoming more poison-resistant This is precisely why there is not a poison-based pest-control company anywhere (that I am aware of) who will offer any kind of warranty for their service. Basically, if you have them treat your house, there is no guarantee the bedbugs will be gone. And if they survive, you’ve got to pay the full price (usually around $1500 per treatment, from what I’ve seen) all over again.
The most obvious sign is that you’ve seen the bugs for yourself. You’ve seen a picture of them above, so now you know how to positively identify them. However, that’s not the only way to tell if you have them or not. The easiest way is to simply lift a corner of your mattress up (see adjacent picture), and look under it (especially if you have a box-spring under it). If you see a bunch of little dot-sized black or rust-colored specks all over the place – that’s their poop. And yes, that is the digested remains of your own blood (sorry, I couldn’t resist). Another way to tell if you have them is if you see little “flakes” of their exoskeleton here and there. That’s something they leave behind whenever they molt (and they molt fairly often, as they grow out of their previous carapace). Their “flakes” of carapace look a bit like the outer husk of a kernel of popcorn. You know, the annoying little shards that get caught between your teeth, after you eat a bag of popcorn? That. They look a lot like that (sorry if you were eating when you read this – especially if you were eating popcorn). However, this is not by itself a foolproof way to tell, because most insects molt. If that’s the ONLY sign that you find, you may have a different kind of insect infestation.
Well, the short answer is: because when you get the ambient temperature hot enough – nothing can survive. But the mechanism behind this is that the cellular functions of every living thing have a certain window of heat tolerance. Above or below which the cells of their body simply cannot continue functioning. It just so happens that bedbugs cannot survive temperatures of 118°F (20 minutes for adult bedbugs, and 90 minutes for their eggs). However, because they like to “nest” in tiny cracks in your bedframe, the seams of your mattress and your box-spring, and in the cracks under your toe-molding around your walls, simply heating your room to 118°F for 90 minutes won’t do the trick. Because heat spreads, and dissipates. For that reason, we heat your room to 128°F for a full 8 hours at a time. That’s long enough to ensure that the ambient air temperature can reach into your bedframe and walls themselves. We make it so that when the treatment is done, NOTHING living can survive inside the room (or even an inch or so inside the walls).
It’s simple, really. It’s a system of seven separate heavy-duty heating elements nestled inside a large frame; one powerful fan to drive the heat around the entire room, so that it doesn’t just heat up the immediate area around the machine; an internal thermostat that regulates the output of the heat and holds the temperature at whatever we set the machine at; and a safety mechanism that automatically shuts the machine down if any one of these things happen: 1.) the machine tips over and falls, 2.) the thermostat ceases functioning properly, or 3.) the supply of electricity powering the machine changes in some way, whether there is a power surge, or a cable becomes disconnected, or if the machine draws more electricity than any one circuit can handle (in which case your circuit breaker also trips).
It’s because, while we fully stand by our method of killing bedbugs as the best-possible treatment option (look around online, and you’ll see agreement on that point), there is always the possibility that a few survive, if they are nestled deep inside your walls, where the heat from our machine simply cannot penetrate. This is highly unlikely. But it’s possible. This is why we offer the “2nd treatment free within 18 months” policy. We recognize that, as good as our service is, we cannot promise the unknowable. However, we CAN promise this: that it is unlikely to the point of absurdity that a bedbug will evolve the ability to survive temperatures that virtually all other living things succumb to – and even if they somehow do, we can always turn the thermostat control on our machine higher.
The short answer is: we really don’t know. The answer is lost to antiquity. All we know for sure is that bedbugs must be ANCIENT. They’ve been around for at least 35,000 years, and very possibly longer than that. Because we have fossil evidence of them in Asia, South America, Mexico, and Texas. As well as the Middle East. And the first historical mention of bedbugs (the oldest surviving mention, at any rate) is from Ancient Greece, in 400 B.C. Given that humans crossing into the Americas had to have happened at least 35,000 years ago, and that the Americas were cut off from the rest of the world for the next few dozen millennia, it’s likely that bedbugs have been around for as long as humans have been migrating around the globe. Which is a very, very, very long time.
Well the good news is, you’re not actually all that “screwed” if you have bedbugs – aside from the fact that using any method other than heat-treatment probably won’t work. Fun Fact: bedbugs are one of the extremely few parasites that affect humans (and there are a HUGE number of parasites that affect humans) that do not carry or transmit any diseases, whatsoever. So. Er. I guess there’s that. But they are damned annoying. And creepy. And it’s pretty hard to get a good night’s sleep knowing they’re there, and that are going to feed on you. Some people get a (minor) allergic reaction to bedbug bites, similar to an allergic reaction to a mosquito bite, but most people don’t. That’s one reason why bedbugs spread as rapidly as they do. You’re not really aware of when they’re feeding on you, because for the most part they do it while you sleep. Which translates to you (typically) not really realizing that you have an infestation until it’s quite a big infestation.
The short (and only) answer is: whenever you travel, the FIRST thing you should do is pull up a corner of the mattress (like we’ve discussed before) and look for those tell-tale little black and/or rust-colored specks that indicate bedbug-poop. If you see ANY sign of speckled discoloration on, in, or under the bed, ask the manager for a different room. And if you want to be polite, also politely inform them that they probably have a bedbug infestation, and that they’ll need to deal with it soon. The good news here is that bedbugs tend to spread from room to room relatively slowly (unless you’re unwittingly carrying them from room-to-room). So the chances of an infestation being hotel/motel/apartment-wide are actually pretty small (unless the problem has been untended for a significant amount of time. So – if you find yourself traveling, and you discover signs of bedbugs – don’t freak out and look for another place to stay entirely – just ask for another room, and then do the same inspection in that new room, too.
DON’T GET ME STARTED ON THAT.
That’s been a sore point of contention of mine for YEARS (I was a customer, before I was a service-provider). Because, if it’s as well-known in the pest-control industry as it is that heat-treatment is singularly the best way of treating bedbugs, then … why WOULDN’T they?? My first and still best guess is because a policy of “we can’t warrant that this poison-based treatment will definitely work – and you’ve got to pay for it a second time if it doesn’t” is a pretty good way of getting plenty of repeat business for them. At an average of $1500 a pop, no less. Borderline unethical, when there’s a better method available, I know. But I should note that that’s my own speculation. In any case, suffice to say – at the risk of repeating myself – our goal is to eliminate them the FIRST time (and do it for free the second time, if we don’t). Lovely people as I’m sure y’all are – we’re here to provide a service. And if it’s done right, you’ll have no reason to have to call on us again.