Today (28/5/14) Mel carried out a Bed Bug treatment in a multi occupancy house in the centre of Reading for a Lettings agency. The preparation prior to a bed bug treatment is vitally important: clothes have to be removed from the bedrooms, washed or briefly tumble dried before going back into the treated room(s) while objects that can’t be treated with an insecticide, washed or tumble dried must be put in a freezer overnight before going back into the treated rooms. In this case one of the rooms had a new bed.
It was still in the wrapper so Mel had to unwrap it and treat the bed. She found that the headboard was heavily infested with bed bugs so contacted the letting agent for permission to through it away but advised them that this should not be replaced until the tenants were sure that the infestation had ceased. This can take between one and two months, depending on circumstances. 
If you look at the photo’s you will see bed bugs as well as their droppings or ‘spotting’ which are tiny drops of partly digested blood which the bed bug secretes after feeding. Unfortunatley the smaller the rooms and the more clutter in the rooms the harder and less likely is a bed bug treatment liable to work. The reasons are that bed bugs will live in clutter and the females will live away from the bed to avoid the males (they get damaged while mating as bed bugs don’t have ‘normal’ sexual organs and the male penetrates the d=females body to fertilise her) and in small crowed rooms the clutter is quite near the bed while in larger rooms the bed bugs have to cross a larger expanse of treated surfaces to reach the food source, which is the sleeping person.
BPCA Bed Bugs
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