You may continue to sleep in your bed after treatment. Encasements should be put on mattresses and box springs. Any surviving bed bugs in the mattress or box spring will not be able to escape the encasement or bite.
Don't enter your home or treated rooms for at least 4-5 hours after treatment. If you or anyone in your family is sick or has a compromised immune system, talk to your doctor about when it's safe to re-enter your home.
Even pesticides registered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for bed bug use are linked to acute poisoning, cancer, hormone disruption, asthma, neurotoxicity, organ damage, and more. Use of these measures poses more dangers than any perceived short-term benefit.
How Long Do Bed Bugs Survive After Extermination? If your home is treated with insecticides/chemicals, any bugs caught by the spray will die in a few hours or less. Insecticides are incredibly effective and remain active for several days after use.
After a chemical bed bug treatment, you should see some immediate knock down depending upon the specific chemical that was used. There will likely be a residual up to 7 days. If you are still seeing live bed bugs up to day 14, then the treatment was unsuccessful.
Remove sheets, pillows, and any clothing, towels, stuffed animals, or textiles that may have been exposed to bedbugs, and carefully seal them up in heavy-duty garbage bags. When you're ready, remove these items and loosely pack them in the dryer. Run it on the hottest cycle for 30 minutes to kill any bugs or eggs.
Some sprays leave behind chemical residues that are meant to kill bed bugs after the product has dried. Unfortunately, bed bugs don't usually die just from walking across a sprayed area. They need to sit on the dried product – sometimes for several days – to absorb enough to kill them.
Check in the places where you found them before and look closely to see if any are still moving. If you see no movement, it might mean that the treatment was 100% successful, but don't assume. It's still wise to check every day for the next few days to ensure they have been completely eradicated.
If you find bed bug, don't spray them yourself. This may cause them to move around and infest other areas.
People can also bring bed bugs into their home on infested clothing, bedding, furniture, and luggage. Bed bugs can go without feeding for 20 to 400 days, depending on temperature and humidity.
A bed bug cannot fly, they can only crawl, so chemical treatment makes the most sense. The University of A&M has shown that chemical vs. heat when properly prepared for and carried out by a proficient certified applicator both have a 97% kill rate leaving 3% behind to proliferate.
Dangers of Bed Bug Pesticide Chemicals
The severity of effects depends on how long and how concentrated the exposure was. Prolonged exposure to high concentrations of these chemicals can do permanent physical damage or even lead to death.
Wash your bedding, curtains, and clothing in hot water and dry them on the highest dryer setting. Put stuffed animals, shoes, and other items that can't be washed in the dryer and run it on high for 30 minutes or more. Use a stiff brush to scrub mattress seams to remove bedbugs and their eggs before vacuuming.
Avoid bringing worn items into bedrooms or placing items on furniture. Showering using soap and water is sufficient to remove bed bugs from your person.
I can't sleep because I just found a bed bug after our first treatment. Answer: Whether or not the first treatment works depends on the extent of the infestation. Keep in mind that it is rare to solve this kind of problem on the first try. An average number of three treatments are needed for bed bug control.
Do Bed Bugs Usually Stay In One Room? Since bed bugs do not have wings and do not jump, some people incorrectly assume that they tend to stay in one room and not travel much. However, this is not true. Bed bugs move around quickly and seek any place where they can find their next blood meal (i.e. humans).
Spraying over and over, whenever you see a bug. This type of application may not actually violate the label, but it is unlikely to eliminate the infestation and can cause the bugs to become resistant to the pesticide so it will no longer work.
It is possible that during the application the bugs were not exposed to enough chemical or heat, causing the customer to find them 7 to 10 days after the treatment was completed. More times than not, they have received a fatal amount of exposure; it just takes time for the chemical or heat to work.
Bed bugs tend to hide as close to the bed as possible, so only launder the fabrics in the immediate area – your bedding, and clothing in dressers near the bed. Hanging clothes in closets can usually be left there, but wash anything on the floor.
Usually, staying out for about 4 to 6 hours is enough for the pesticides to completely dry. The use of bed bug sprays is the most common bed bug treatment that many people are using for decades now. Yes, the use of spray kills bed bugs. However, it may require a couple of treatments before the bugs and their eggs die.
The life span of a bed bug most commonly ranges from four to six months. However, some bed bugs may live up to a year under cool conditions and with no food.
You should treat every two weeks until activity is gone.
Even though bug spray is safe, it's a good idea to wash it off when you get back indoors. “You should wash the bug repellent off when you get home. There are probably other things on your skin like pollen and possibly even ticks that you would want to remove, too,” says Chon.
Spray on areas where bed bugs are hiding. These areas include box springs, mattress seams, dressers, closets, nightstands, carpet and rug edges, molding, and any place bed bugs would be hiding. Repeat in 2-4 weeks.
Bedding. Bugs can reside in your sheets, pillow cases, rugs, blankets as well as your mattress and box spring. Thankfully, it would be much easier to find the signs of the bedbugs on your bed than to look for them under your pillow.