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WHAT WORKS: The Real Desperate Housewives
14 May, 2009 By: Paul J. Bello PMP Buzz Online eNewsletter
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You’ve probably heard of the television show "Desperate Housewives," and The Real Housewives series (which is kind of like train wreck it's hard to turn away from watching. So far, they've visited Atlanta, Orange County, New York and New Jersey). Based on a recent trend, there ought to be another show named The Desperate Homeowners of Bed Bug County.
Pest management professionals (PMPs) who’ve been to bed bug ground zero-type locations see many desperate measures bed bug victims employ to get some relief from these nasty bloodsuckers.
In many ways, it’s surprising what you might see when working the bed bug beat on a regular basis. I was never alarmed when I observed these things, but I recently started considering all I’ve seen and was astounded.
That people would resort to some of these methods underscores the toll that bed bugs take on their victims. At a basic level, some of these methods make sense, but others are a tad questionable — and all are derived out of desperation.
In one case, homeowners who had been battling bed bugs for more than six months searched the Internet and learned about using heat to kill bed bugs. As a result, the husband constructed a “hot box” in the back yard with the intention of heat-treating everything in the house suspected of harboring bed bugs.
This hot box was well built and heated with an electric heater. When I visited, he was proud of his finished product (and rightfully so as it was structurally sound and could likely withstand an F-3 tornado) but it couldn’t kill bed bugs. I immediately knew I had to communicate this to him carefully.
It’s commonly known that heat treatments can be 100 percent effective in killing all life stages of bed bugs, but sufficient heat must be uniformly delivered over a required period of time. Some variables were not considered in this man’s hotbox design, mostly related to thermodynamics. For example, his hot box was constructed directly on the lawn with no floor, so that items placed in it rested directly on the lawn. There was also no insulation used, and the electric heater, combined with the use-pattern he described, were also problems.
Sufficient heat could not be delivered in a uniform fashion within this hot box. The soil served as a significant heat loss area, the plywood didn’t effectively insulate the heated area within and the heater cycled off to keep from overheating.
After using his heat treatments on furniture and other items placed in the box, the homeowner then placed the items directly back into the house. He assumed these items were now bed-bug free. He also never considered that bed bugs could re-infest these items from other “untreated” areas in the home.
These homeowners expended a lot of effort on a less-than-effective home remedy, and their bed bug battle continued.
Another home remedy technique I’ve seen is wrapping mattresses and box springs in plastic. In one apartment I visited, the mattresses and box springs were covered with plastic shower curtains, tightly wrapped and sealed with duct tape. Anyone who’s ever slept on a plastic air mattress can imagine how uncomfortable it must have been to sleep on that set up.
In other apartments, I’ve seen residents line the room’s walls with double-sided tape, duct tape and packing tape in an effort to catch the bed bugs. Others have coated their bed’s legs with petroleum jelly to prevent bed bugs from crawling up when they’re sleeping.
I visited another apartment recently where the resident had lined the walls with a single row of tape that was allowed to “flap over,” forming a hidden area under the flap that was about 4 feet off the ground. He told me he did this because he’d seen the bed bugs climbing up the walls, and this arrangement provided a place for them to crawl up and hide under the flap so he could easily see and collect them for removal.
I’ve also seen victims place bed and furniture legs in jars or bowls filled with water or liquid soap to keep bed bugs from climbing up to bite them — sort of a home remedy version of the commercially available bed bug traps such as the Climbup Insect Interceptor.
Certainly, extreme cases may lead to extreme measures, and bed-bug victims — who desperately seek immediate relief — may yet come up with a viable method. In the meanwhile, stay tuned as the professionals — the pest management industry — seek out and develop successful technologies for PMPs to use in the battle against bed bugs.
You can reach Bello, president of PJB Pest Management Consulting, at pbelloconsulting@earthlink.net.
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