The problem with moving to another room is that the bed bugs will just follow you there. So what you've effectively done is spread the infestation from your bedroom (more localized) to your bedroom and living room, making it more difficult to treat.

The way a chemical extermination works - the 1st visit, the exterminator will lay down chemicals that will accomplish several things 1) upon contact eventually kill live bed bugs; 2) if the bed bug walks through the powdery chemical, it will bring it back to the nest and kill other bed bugs (a residual effect); 3) when new bed bugs hatch, they will also walk through the chemical and eventually die (residual effect)

If you should move away from the bed bugs normal feeding spot (your bed), the bed bugs will not walk through the chemicals triggering residual effects and wiping out the entire generation in your home.

Basically - you would likely be advised by your exterminator to continue sleeping in your bed as bait to make sure all the bed bugs eventually get wiped out (also so you don't spread your infestation to other rooms).

Man, I just can't stand having to go back to the same bed.

Would it work possibly to put a cage with a live chicken or some other warm-blooded creature inside it on the bed just right before the day gets dark while you go somewhere else to sleep and just do the same routine until the bugs are eradicated.

Jin - the bed bugs preferred host is humans. Yes, totally creepy.

Is it ok to say proceed with your normal activities in the day inside the house, but sleep at your friends house or a motel somewhere away from your house while your getting the treatments done by a professional. I mean I know that the BB can live w/o feeding for a year, but will they leave your house if there's no human hosts to feed on at night.

1) Well, if there is no host in the home, the bed bugs won't crawl out to eat you and get the chemical pesticides on their bodies. So I mean, if you choose to vacate your home, I think it does increase the risk you don't kill all of the bed bugs.

2) I wouldn't wish bed bugs (as Nez pointed out) on my worst enemy. There are many precautions you can take to pretty much 100% guarantee you won't bring it to a relative or friend's home. You can search online to read about this but essentially it involves doing a very thorough washing and drying of your clothes (to ensure there are no eggs/bugs on them - dryer heat will kill them), changing right into these clothes, and then going away. (Oh, I suppose you could microwave your shoes as well.)

People will live out of ziploc bags (airtight, bed bugs can't crawl into them) to ensure they don't spread the bed bugs to their offices, stores, etc.

had them. they're ****ing miserable. will ruin your life. i am 100% certain they could take over the world if they banded together

most exterminators are not equipped to take them out. they can hide behind screws in door knobs!! if the infestation is bad enough you have to torch the place. you have to 100% get rid of the bed.

diamatacious earth will take them out. be sure to get the food grade, not the pool stuff. you could sprinkle a wring of that around your bed and it would kill them on contact.

another thing to do is get some dry ice, put it in a thermos with a little spout at the top, and make a ring of diamatacious earth around it. the bed bugs are attracted to carbon dioxide and will try to get at the dry ice coming out of the thermos. obv they die when they hit the earth. i hate those ****ers

If a hotel room has BB's and I look carefully, are my chances of finding them 100%

No.

The exterminators, on about visit 8, took everything in our room apart. When they were unscrewing the bed frame apart a couple bed bugs would come out underneath the screws. They can hide in ANY small crack.

However, the first place they normally hide is within ridges on the mattresses. So that's always a good start.

They can crawl behind wallpaper.

This math doesn't make sense. With just a handful of bugs you should be getting bit almost every night, and a full-blown infestation should be damn near killing you. What am I missing?

soah - hm, not sure I follow. If you google it, you'll see it's noted that a bed bug in the nymph or adult stage will feed for 3-5 minutes every 5-7 (maybe longer) days.

(Meaning the bed bug will come out at night, feed on you for 3-5 minutes typically leaving a "Breakfast-Lunch-Dinner" pattern of several bites, then crawl back to its hiding place for 5+ days, then come back out and feed again etc.)

Based on that, think it makes sense that during the beginning of an infestation, with only a handful of bed bugs, you wouldn't get bit every night. And in a full blown infestation - yeah, you would be getting bit a ton...

Maybe I've gotten confused about how quickly they multiply and (somewhat relatedly) how many there would be at the very start of an infestation.

we had these at our old apartment my gf and kid were getting bit every night (strangely i didnt get bit) we eventually just threw away all of our furniture and moved and took nothing with us except our clothes and some of my kids toys we had to wash everything we took in hot water and inspect it before we brought it into our new house.

they came and treated the apt once a month and tried the heat thing and nothing worked they kept getting worse.

i have lived in the new house since feb and have not seen one bug so (fingers crossed) i think they are gone.

I think for your typical infestation - it would begin with the introduction of very few bed bugs / eggs. (This makes sense I think based on how they are transmitted usually from travel and taking a hitchhiker back home with you.)

Additionally:

An adult female bed bug can lay between 200-500 eggs over her lifespan (~1 year).

I think it's easy to envision how the infestation starts off very small with limited growth the first month, then grows exponentially over time when there are many adult females laying eggs.

Super curious of a sure-fire way to put these BBs to death w/o sleeping on your own bed.

Thermal treatments, ftw (what Nez is currently undergoing).

Note this is typically used for a free-standing house, or smaller apartment building.

(Your landlord would be hard-pressed financially I'm thinking to tent/nuke his entire 10+ unit apartment complex!)

Everything I was referring to above was (to my knowledge) important in a chemical treatment with residual effects.

Not really, as I said earlier even having them in my house I only saw one. I look for the "sheddings", fecal matter, or blood spots on mattresses/sheets. Look in the creases of mattresses and box springs for the blood spots and fecal matter. It will look like little black spots. This is an almost gaurantee to be bed bugs there

I'm curious. I was reading about body lice. Is there an obvious bite pattern difference between them and bed bugs?

Body lice are virtually invisible and feed at night too.

I guess the biggest difference is that a body lice infestation is trivial to cure. While bed bugs are a giant pain.

What about fleas? I assume they don't "attack" while the target is sleeping.

did anyone see that clark howard episode when a black lady called in complaining about a company that had sold her a mattress with bed bugs? the way she said bed bugs had me laughing for days. they did a tease before the commercial break and she goes, "Dey so me a mattess dat heyd BEH BUH!" and then when i was making fun of it during the break im like i must be exaggerating the part where she said bugs, because her voice dropped so comically low. but then when i heard it again it was even more ridiculous than i had been doing it. so now whenever i see bed bugs i instantly think of BEH BUH!

omg i've been finding little black spot things on my bed with no clue what they are and also have had red marks on my arms. noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Fk man don't post pics in the thread, PLEASE. That last pic made me shudder.

You mentioned the hotspots are more tourist locations like NYC, what about Vegas and AC? Gonna be paranoid staying in hotels for the rest of my life thanks to this thread.

had them in an old apartment unit. place was super ghetto, lots of turnover and sketchy folks coming/going so it wasn't too surprising. pretty quickly realized that extermination was going to be impossible. went into research/survival mode and did the following:

1) clean everything. well.
2) bed management -- this is super important.
-wrapped the mattress/boxspring in plastic and sealed it to keep whatever was living inside inside.
-threw out the bedframe, installed these plastic legs on the bottom of the boxspring to keep everything off the floor.
-put double-sided tape around the legs of the bed, and put the legs in little plastic bowls of soapy water.
-moved bed so that it was sitting in the middle of the room, at least a foot from every wall. they can climb walls and fall onto you but they can't really jump.

so we had an island to sleep on. they probably went to some other apartment after that, by the time we moved out you could drive by the place and see 1-2 mattresses sitting out on people's decks any given month.

I wasn't kidding about raising the temp to 140 on your own.

My mother had them in the spring. So sad. They really tormented her. Was on her mind 24/7 and she was thinking of all these ways to kill them. Finally some exterminators with a dog search says they are gone.

One way she found out is to use Crystal Silica. It's those bead things found in those packages inside clothes/electronics to absorb moisture. It's also found in kitty litter. Basically you crush this **** up into a powder and lay it around somewhere where the bugs will have to walk through it. It's like microscopic glass shards to the bugs, and it cuts them and dries out their body. My mother though it worked really well, and it was cheap and non toxic. She just bought some silicia gel cat litter, and seperated the silicia and crushed it into a powder.

Would rigging up a hammock in your house to sleep in be effective? Not joking.