An adult bed bug can survive without blood in a cold environment for over four-hundred days. They are capable of surviving even longer in a lab environment without any blood at all. Nymphs in their late instar stags can also survive for a long time without blood and the eggs of the bed bug are nearly invincible. Killing bed bugs is a process that is not just complicated and involved but nearly impossible. This is because bed bugs are capable of evolving rapidly due to their size and reproduction speed. In 1947 North America defeated the bed bug. It was permanently made extinct in the west. This continued to be the case for another 40 or so years. While we enjoyed this freedom from bed bugs poorer countries still had them and were trying to kill them with far less potent insecticides. This caused them to evolve and in 1997 the bed bug returned to the west with a vengeance. None of our chemicals worked on the new breed of bed bug and treatment using a massive and expensive machine was devised in a hurry. This machine does something called a heat treatment which can cost upwards of ten thousand dollars for a small home. Being financially unfeasible for most people the future of bed bugs was looking grim until some skilled pest control exterminators devised a method using the only pesticide and boiling steam. This will kill the bed bugs but not the eggs. How did they deal with this issue? They waited. Bed bug eggs take one week to hatch and four weeks to reach a stage where they can drink blood. By performing a second treatment at the two-week mark it ensures that all present eggs have hatched and there are no bugs at the adult stage yet so no new eggs can be layed. The treatment then kills the nymph stage bed bugs and resolves the issue without the need for heat treatment.
Now if you want to deal with bed bugs on your own, without the help of licensed exterminators then you should prepare yourself for a large amount of work. You will have to take everything you own and store it either in a freezer, having a deep freeze or two in the garage would make this process much easier, or in double wrapped garbage bags that are sealed tightly and stored somewhere where they won’t be touched for at least two weeks. This will suffocate them and temperatures below zero will kill the bugs and the eggs. So this is the first step, suffocate and freeze them out of clothes and bedding. Then you will need to take everything made of fabric outside into the bright summer sun. This cannot be done if the sky is overcast or if it is cold outside. You need hot bright sunlight that makes you sweat just by standing in it. You will need to lay down everything you own that won’t fit in a garbage bag or a freezer, onto the ground in direct sunlight. Bed bugs are killed by powerful UV light and in the daytime retreat deep into the mattress to avoid death. This will kill them but you must rotate and flip everything every hour and make sure it all stays in the sun. Any shadows will stop the bed bugs from dying.
You can then get a powder-like material called diatomaceous earth and spread it all over the house and puff it using a crack and crevice device from home hardware into every opening you can find in your home. You can also use vinegar and bleach to kill them. If you do all of this then you have a very good chance of getting rid of the bed bugs. But if you fail you could have just made the exterminator’s job much harder.
