How To Get Rid Of Bed Bugs

What Do Bed Bugs Look Like?

An adult bed bug is 4 to 5 mm long — about the size and shape of an apple seed. Flat and oval before feeding, reddish brown, with a segmented body and short golden hairs that give it a banded look under good light. After a blood meal it swells, lengthens and darkens to a deeper red, which is why the same insect can look like two different ones.

They have six legs, short antennae, and no functional wings. Bed bugs cannot fly or jump. They crawl, at roughly the speed of an ant on a flat surface, which is the single most useful thing to know when someone tells you they saw something leap.

Younger bed bugs, called nymphs, are a different problem to spot. They start about 1.5 mm — the size of a poppy seed — and are translucent straw-coloured until they feed, at which point a dark red line becomes visible through the body. In a newer infestation the nymphs outnumber the adults, so the insects you can actually see are the hardest ones to recognise.

Eggs are about 1 mm, pearly white, and cemented into cracks in small clusters. They are roughly the size of a grain of salt and very difficult to see without a torch held at a low angle.

Signs of Bed Bugs

Most people find the evidence before they find an insect. In rough order of how often it shows up first:

• Dark spotting. Ink-like dots on the mattress, sheets, or the wall behind the headboard. This is digested blood, and it smudges if wiped with a damp cloth — which is how you tell it from dirt.
• Shed skins. Translucent amber casings in mattress seams and bed frame joints. Bed bugs moult five times on the way to adulthood, so an established population leaves a lot of them.
• Small blood spots on bedding, from a bug disturbed while feeding.
• Live insects in the piping and seams of the mattress, the joints of the bed frame, and where the headboard meets the wall — in that order.
• Eggs and eggshells in the same cracks, in clusters.
• Smell. A sweet, musty odour in a room with no other reason to smell that way usually means a large, established population rather than an early one.

Do I Have Bed Bugs? Bites Are Not Enough to Tell

Bites are the least reliable signal, and it is worth being blunt about why. Reactions vary enormously: some people develop obvious welts within hours, others show nothing at all, and two people sleeping in the same infested bed can wake up with completely different skin. A line or cluster of itchy bumps on skin that was exposed while sleeping is consistent with bed bugs, but it is also consistent with fleas, mosquitoes and several skin conditions.

Confirm with physical evidence — the spotting, skins, eggs or live insects above — before anyone treats anything.

Insects Mistaken for Bed Bugs

Several insects get sent to us as bed bugs and are not:

• Carpet beetles. Rounder, patterned, and they fly. Their larvae are fuzzy and leave shed skins that genuinely do resemble bed bug casings.
• Bat bugs. Very close relatives and nearly identical to the eye. They indicate bats in the structure rather than a bed bug problem, and the treatment is different.
• Spider beetles. Shiny, humped, longer-legged, and often found in stored food rather than bedding.
• Booklice. Much smaller, pale, and associated with damp rather than with beds.

Bed Bugs in an Apartment or Rental

In a multi-unit building the insect you find is rarely the whole problem. Bed bugs travel along baseboards, through wall voids and around plumbing and electrical penetrations, so a neighbouring unit is often the reservoir. Treating one apartment while the units either side go untreated is the most common reason an infestation appears to come back weeks later.

In Ontario the landlord is generally responsible for pest control in a rental unit. Report it in writing, keep a copy, and ask whether adjacent units are being inspected at the same time — that last part is what decides whether the treatment holds.