Bedbug Hunting

These were some of the many bedbugs that I squished on the walls. How do I get them to crawl up the walls for easy kills? Well, I'll tell you.

 

During the bedbug infestation period, I hunted bedbugs for sport.

 

My brother acted as bait for the bed bugs. He sleeps earlier than me while I tend to stay up through the night. He sleeps on an air mattress on the floor, so it was easier for the bed bugs to get to him and they have a better sense of where he is because he's low near the floor and breathing. Before going to sleep, he sprayed the bottom and the side of the air bed with Permicide plus insecticide which was diluted for safety. He waits maybe 20 minutes to a half hour for the insecticide odor to die down before going to sleep. He hits the hay at 12:30 am and I did two bedbug checks through the night; one at around 2:00 am and another at 4:00 am. Those are prime hours for bed bugs to come out. What happens is the bugs crawled to my brother's air mattress with the insecticide waiting for them. Now the insecticide doesn't kill them right away, the bedbugs will instead turn tails and head straight towards the walls. I don't know why they do this; either their sense of direction is screwed or they are trying to find the best place to breathe, but either case they crawled up the walls after getting to my brother's sprayed air mattress.

 

When I go into his bedroom to do the bedbug check, I only used a flashlight to check the walls. During the two checks, I search all around the walls for bed bugs to squish with folded pieces of paper or something flat like an old magazine. The bedbugs are easy to spot on our plain walls.   It was like looking for spots on a blank canvas. I had even killed a bed bug that had went up the ceiling. So pictures of the squished bed bugs on this site are the result of this very method. Now don't go using this method thinking you will kill all the bedbugs in your room because you can't. Instead, use this method as a barometer.  For example, when I first started, I was killing several bed bugs or more on the walls each night. The room I believe is now bedbug free (crosses fingers) because on my last couple of checks I could not find a single wall bed bug and we haven't gotten bit.  I gotten these results because of a combination of methods, including sealing the floors and getting the exterminators to come.