Bed Bug Information

Keep your enemies close - a different approach

It's really common sense - but it's not so common

In the past it was possible to kill bed bugs by applying chemicals to places the bedbugs would cross to reach their food (the person sleeping). However, due to increasing chemical resistance, most bedbugs can easily survive the few minutes or seconds they spend crossing the residual pyrethrin or neonicotiniods chemical lines. The bugs, despite surviving the residual contact, don’t like those surfaces so they tend to migrate to areas that have not been treated.

Bed bugs also have very distinct preferences for where they live (harbour). Their preferred home (harbourage) is smooth raw wood with cracks and crevices, or cloth with tight folds (such as the area under mattress ribbing) near a sleeping host. An ordinary bed with a box spring and mattress offers tremendous amounts of preferred harbourage, so the bugs naturally live there. When the bed is covered with mattress encasement's most of the “good” harbourage is removed so the bugs migrate elsewhere. This phenomenon, together with chemical resistance, makes a disaster for treating bed bugs. Bugs are "pushed" away from the bed into other areas of the home and simply avoid chemically treated areas.

The Collect-a-bed-bug approach turns the standard approach on its head. Instead of pushing the bugs off the bed, the bugs are given disposable harbourage near the sleeping host and the bugs naturally live there. In fact it is entirely possible, in correct circumstances, to surround the bed with disposable harbourage, regularly discard and replace, and the bugs disappear. Don’t scatter the bugs – use their natural instincts against them. Entice them to come to where you can find them! In other words “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.”