Bed Bugs Come Home for the Holidays: How to Check Before You Unpack

Thanksgiving is three weeks away, and a lot of the New River Valley is about to be on the move. College students in Blacksburg and Radford pack up for the break and carry a semester of dorm and apartment life home with them. Families head out to see relatives, sleep in guest rooms, on pull-out couches and in hotel rooms along the interstate. Then everybody comes back, sets their bags down on the bedroom floor, and starts unpacking.

That is exactly how bed bugs travel. They do not fly and they do not jump. They ride. A bed bug in a hotel headboard or an apartment couch crawls into a suitcase seam, a backpack or a fold of clothing, and a few hours later it is in a new house with a new bed to hide in. Bed bugs are found anywhere people sleep or sit for long stretches, from hotels and hospitals to dorm rooms and single-family homes. They do not care how clean a place is. They care that someone is there to feed on.

Why the holidays matter

A single pregnant female is enough to start a problem. A female bed bug can lay one to five eggs a day in the cracks of a mattress, a box spring, a nightstand or even the back of a picture frame. The young pass through five stages in about three weeks, feeding every ten days or so, and an adult can live six months to a year. They can also go dormant for months when nobody is around to feed on, which is why a guest room that sits empty until Christmas can still have a problem waiting in it.

So a bed bug that comes home in a duffel bag the Sunday after Thanksgiving has a good chance of being a houseful by the middle of January, right about the time someone finally notices the bites.

Check the room before you unpack

Whether it is a hotel, a relative's spare room or a friend's apartment, take two minutes before your bags go anywhere near the bed:

• Pull back the sheets at the corners and look along the seams and edges of the mattress and box spring.
• Look for dark specks or smears. Bed bugs leave their droppings near where they hide, and it looks like tiny dots of black or rust colored marker on the fabric.
• Check behind the headboard and along the edges of the nightstand if you can.
• Look at the bugs themselves. Adults are flat, reddish brown and about the size of an apple seed. The young are smaller and paler but still visible if you look closely.

If you see any of that, ask for a different room, and not the one next door.

Keep them out of your bags

• Keep suitcases on the luggage rack or a hard surface, not on the bed or the carpet beside it.
• Keep clothes in the suitcase or a sealed bag instead of spreading them across the dresser.
• When you get home, unpack somewhere other than the bedroom if you can, a garage, a laundry room or a hard kitchen floor.
• Run the clothes you brought, worn or not, through the dryer on high heat before putting them away.
• Look over the suitcase seams and zipper tracks before it goes back in the closet.

Students coming home from a dorm or apartment should do the same with laundry bags and backpacks. If roommates or neighbors have had bed bugs this semester, assume the bags have been exposed and treat them that way.

Signs they came home with you

Bites are the sign most people notice, but they are not reliable. Some people react badly, others do not react at all, and plenty of rashes get blamed on bed bugs when bed bugs had nothing to do with it. The better evidence is the same as in the hotel room: dark specks or smears on the mattress seams, the box spring edges and nearby furniture, tiny pale shed skins, and sometimes the bugs themselves tucked into a seam or a crack in the bed frame.

If you find something, do not start moving the mattress to another room or sleeping on the couch. That spreads them. Leave things where they are and call for an inspection.

What we do

Every bed bug job starts with a thorough inspection, because how far an infestation has spread decides everything else. That is also why we quote after we look, not before: the price depends on how bad it is, how many rooms, beds and pieces of furniture are involved, and the size of the place. A treatment can take anywhere from an hour to two days.

We use a combination of methods depending on what we find, including steam, liquid treatments, dusts, along with mechanical recommendations for the room itself. Every bed bug treatment includes at least one or two follow-up inspections, because bed bugs are not a one-visit pest. You will also get a list of what to do before and after treatment. Getting rid of bed bugs is a joint effort, and skipping the prep or the follow-up steps is the most common reason they come back. There is more on how bed bugs live and what we look for in our bed bug control guide.

Home for the holidays, not the bed bugs

If you are in Blacksburg, Christiansburg, Radford or anywhere else in the New River Valley and something came home from a trip that should not have, give New River Pest Control LLC a call or text at (540) 818-9375. We will find out how far they have spread, treat it, and come back to make sure they are gone. The trip was supposed to be the only thing you brought home.