Chemical treatment usually requires several visits. Treatment of bedbugs is complex and can take weeks or months, depending on the extent of the infestation. Your likelihood of success depends on many factors, including how many bedbugs you have, how much disorder is available to hide, whether your neighbors have bed bugs, and whether every resident of a house or building will participate. This depends on the type of treatment you have chosen.
If you paid for heat treatment, you should notice an immediate and drastic improvement. When you check your home for bed bugs, make sure you don't contaminate rooms and introduce bed bugs where they didn't exist before. Perhaps you could talk to the block administration to see if there are any other cases of bed bugs near you. Whole room heat treatments include a Pest Control Professional (PMP) that incorporates specially designed equipment to raise your home's temperature and kill bed bugs.
You can manually inspect the same areas each day, or some customers find it helpful to place an adhesive sticky trap around the legs of the bed that would pick up bed bugs that are on the move. If you notice that they still itch you even after heat treatment, then it did not work completely. A bedbug can smell that pesticides or other “nasty” have been sprayed in their house, so they naturally want to find another place to live. This will increase the time between the start of the treatment process and the time when your home can be considered completely free of insects.
As bedbugs grow in number, they continue to spread from their original hiding places, which increases the number of places that need to be treated, further complicating the treatment process. Doing so helps protect your furniture from infestations and makes it easier to inspect the bed for signs of infestation. Now that you know how to detect bed bugs, put your skills to the test the next time you check into a hotel room. For more information about bed bugs, including their biology and how to recognize them, see other fact sheets on the Citybugs Bed Bug page.
Controlling bed bugs with insecticides is a difficult and time-consuming process that requires experience and, in many states, a license is required to apply insecticides that kill bed bugs. If a treatment process does not cover all infested areas, which can spread to several rooms of the house, successful control of the infestation will require repeat treatments. Before hiring an exterminator, ask him to clarify how long the heat treatment can last so that he knows beforehand.
