What To Do If Bed Bugs Have Stayed In Your Home After The Holidays

After a busy season, the holidays have finally wrapped up. You’ve exchanged all the gifts that weren’t quite right, put your decorations away, and sent your guests back to their homes with promises to get together again soon. But have all your house guests left? It’s possible that some uninvited bed bugs have stayed in your home after the holidays.

How Bed Bugs Get into Your Home

Bed bugs are year-round pests that don’t take a season off. Although they are most active in the summer when the weather is hot and vacationing is at its peak, they remain active throughout the entire year. After the activity of summer, fall often sees an uptick in bed bug infestations as the bugs make themselves comfortable in their new homes. When the holidays roll around and traveling picks up again, bed bugs return to their active lifestyle.

These pests don’t just walk into your house from outdoors. Instead, they travel around with people. They might hitch a ride on someone’s clothing, a purse, bag, or backpack, or in someone’s luggage. When they have a chance they will crawl off of whatever they were riding on, and start to make themselves at home in a new location.

If you had guests over the holidays, it’s possible they inadvertently brought a bed bug or two along with them into your house. It’s unlikely that they took those bed bugs with them when they returned to their own home. If those bed bugs remained in your home, they will end up settling in and eventually reproducing, making the small problem of just a few bed bugs quickly become a much larger problem.

What to Do if Bed Bugs Get into Your Home

If you end up with bed bugs in your home, the sooner you treat the problem, the better. A female bed bug can lay between 1 and 5 eggs per day, and it takes about 10 days for an egg to hatch. That means that, even if you only have a few bed bugs in your home, their population can grow rapidly.

Unfortunately, regardless of the number of bed bugs in your home, they are notoriously difficult to treat. They are fantastic at hiding. Many have become pesticide-resistant, making many DIY chemical treatments ineffective, not to mention a health hazard for your family.

Get Help from the Professionals

The best thing you can do in the event that you discover any signs of bed bugs, is to call a professional pest management company like Russell’s Pest Control.

Russell’s offers bed bug treatments that involve three steps.

• A thorough inspection to make sure your bed bug problem is actually a bed bug problem and not the result of another pest.
• A review of our findings to discuss available treatment options based on what we discovered.
• Appropriate heat remediation treatment to eliminate every bed bug in every stage of development, from the eggs right on up to the adults.

If you think you have bed bugs in your home, contact us immediately. The sooner we can take care of the problem, the easier and cheaper it will be!