How To Avoid Bed Bugs On Spring Vacation

Are you planning to take a vacation from your Atlanta home? Are you going to cash in on some much needed time off? If so, we’d like you to consider adding bed bug prevention to your vacation plans.

Are you familiar with this quote from Edmund Burke? “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Well, the only thing necessary for bed bugs to ride back to your home and create an infestation is for you to do nothing. Bed bugs are hitchhiking bugs. When you take a trip anywhere, you have a chance of picking these pests up, especially nowadays with infestations cropping up everywhere. Fortunately, there are a few easy things you can do to keep your home and your family safe.

3 Easy Things You Can do To Avoid Bed Bugs

  1. Check bedbugregistry.com before you travel. This is a great resource for finding out if someone has had a bed bug experience at the place you’ll be staying. While one bed bug incident should not deter you from staying somewhere, several incidents, or reviews that describe inhospitable responses to bed bugs, should be used as a gauge to determine where you stay. It is also a good idea to call ahead and ask what their bed bug plan is. If they have a quick response, there is a good chance they have put the necessary protocol in place to safeguard against this growing problem.
  2. Check your room. It may seem like a big hassle, but checking your room for bed bugs can be as quick as 3 minutes. Put your bags on the bathroom floor while you use a flashlight to check the seams on all the mattresses and box springs in the room. If you find black residue, black streaks, brown stains, shed insect shells, white eggs, or tiny six-legged insects crawling around (especially if you see more than one or two of these together) you should bring it to the attention of the management. For added protection, you can also check the baseboards, outlets, and upholstered furniture for similar evidence.
  3. When you get home, wash all clothing, and any bedding you brought with you, on the highest temperature, and run those items through the dryer. Heat kills bed bugs in all stages of development. If you accidentally brought eggs home with you, this could get them before they hatch into a problem.

If you ever see bed bugs, or signs of bed bugs, in your Atlanta home, call Active Pest Control. We have the solutions for all of Georgia’s pests. Help is just a call away.

What You Don’t Know About Bed Bugs

We live in the information age. The way we access knowledge is unlike anything humans have ever experienced before. You can literally take out your phone and ask it, “How far is it from the Earth to the moon?” And depending on what phone you have, it may even speak the answer back to you. By the way, the answer is 230,100 miles. This is absolutely amazing technology! But, there is a danger in thinking you know what you’re doing, because what you don’t know can hurt you.

When it comes to eradicating bed bugs from your home or business, you may be tempted to see if there is a quick fix on the internet, after all, who doesn’t want to save a few bucks. In going to the internet, you are sure to find page after page that says heat can kill these bugs, but a little bit of knowledge can be dangerous. Sure, heat can kill bed bugs. In fact, it does a fantastic job of killing them. But, looking at one self-help DIY blog or two isn’t likely to give you the entire picture.

Here is what you need to know about bed bugs and heat treatments:

  • When the heat rises too quickly, bed bugs run; and they can move quickly. That is why many DIY heat treatments simply drive these bugs into wall voids, where they sit and wait till it is safe to come out. Pest professionals have the education, experience, and products to corral these pests so they don’t escape the heat.
  • There are a lot of things that can go wrong during a heat treatment, especially if you use the wrong heaters. There are countless stories of businesses catching ablaze because of an improper heat treatment. Just recently in the news, employees of a certain motel took furniture out into nearby sheds and attempted to use heat to kill the bed bugs inside the furniture. A fire broke out that nearly caught the motel on fire. Many other businesses have not been as lucky.
  • In order to kill bed bugs, an entire structure must be brought up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit for over an hour. This is no easy task. To get the job done, professionals use self-regulating industrial heaters, heat sensors, and industrial strength fans. Setting an oven to 500 and leaving the door open is not only dangerous, it is completely ineffective.

If you have bed bugs, please don’t attempt a heat treatment on your own. Reach out to the professionals here at Active Pest Control. We are trained and educated in the safe removal of these and other pests.
What you don’t know can hurt you and your property. Stay safe, and get Active Pest Control.

Bed Bug Dangers

It is a simple fact: if you leave your home and go out into the public for work or pleasure there is always a slight risk that bed bugs may come into contact with you or your belongings and that they could accidentally be introduced into your home. We aren’t telling you this to scare you or make you want to live as a hermit; we are just trying to make you aware. Being aware will help you to take some necessary steps to help protect yourself and your family from bed bugs and reduce the chances of an infestation occurring in your home!

Bed bugs can be found in any place where there are large groups of people. Common places to come into contact with bed bugs include libraries, movie theaters, shopping centers, schools, airports, bus stations, hotels, motels, and even hospitals. In fact, just recently a hospital in Salisbury, North Carolina, became infested with bed bugs after a patient introduced them into the hospital. However, due to the hospital’s quick action the infected areas were treated by an experienced exterminator and all bed bugs were eliminated.

Since bed bugs have the potential to be in so many public areas, it is best to always be vigilant and try to protect yourself against them; just like you would try to prevent yourself from catching a cold from the grocery cart! Some tips to protect yourself and your family from bed bugs include:

  • When out in public keep your belongings with you (coats, bags, purses). Don’t place these items on the floors of public places.
  • Inspect upholstered seats for bed bugs before sitting down on them.
  • Before bringing luggage into a hotel room inspect the room, mattresses, and box springs for bed bugs.
  • Keep your luggage up off of the hotel floor.
  • Wash all clothing in hot water immediately after returning home from a trip.
  • Vacuum and wipe down your suitcase before storing it away in your home.
  • Routinely wash outerwear that you and your family wear on a regular basis.

It is important to remember that bed bugs don’t care about the cleanliness of the environment that they are in. They will live in a cluttered home, a budget motel, a 5 star hotel, or even in a sterilized hospital environment as long as one thing is available- a blood source. Bed bugs solely feed off of the blood of people; so as long as people are present they will be able to feed, breed, and thrive. The only true way to get rid of bed bugs whether you are a homeowner or business owner is with the help of a professional pest control specialist.

If bed bugs do ever hitchhike their way uninvited into your home, the best defense against them is to take quick action, don’t be embarrassed, bed bugs can infect any business or home. Active Pest Control can get rid of bed bugs from your home through our experienced and effective bed bug control program. Our professionals will inspect your home locate where the bed bugs are and then provide treatment services that include conventional methods and/or bed bug heat treatments. After an infestation is eliminated having routine inspections performed by our professionals will help to stop future problems with bed bugs from occurring!

For more information about bed bugs and how Active Pest Control can help you to control bed bugs in your home contact us today!

Bed Bugs And Your Summer Vacation

Summer is only days away. You’re already seeing the signs in the weather forecast, it might even feel like summer is already here. Are you planning a summer getaway? Maybe a trip to the amusement park or perhaps you’re planning on sinking your toes into a the sand and not budging for a few days. Whatever your plans, vacation is a time to relax and recharge your battery. It can also turn into a disaster if you find that you brought bed bugs home.

For many pest control companies across the country, calls about bed bug infestations increase during the summer months. That’s because people are traveling more and that means they are increasing their chances of encountering bed bugs.

Here at Active Pest Control, our Tennessee pest control experts are here to help make sure that you’re not making a bed bug SOS call this summer. Listed below are some helpful tips to help prevent bed bugs from coming home with you as a summer vacation souvenir.

  • When traveling and spending time in airports, train stations, or bus stations keep bags, coats, and suitcases up off of the floor. Inspect your seats for signs of bed bugs or actual live bed bugs in the cracks or crevices of seats.
  • Before booking your hotel research it for incidences of bed bugs and read the reviews from other customers.
  • At the accommodation you choose, conduct a thorough inspection of the bed. Pull back sheets to inspect seams, search the box spring for blood, excrement and bugs.
  • Inspect furniture in the room too. This includes sofas, chairs, nightstands etc.
  • Keep your suitcase up off of the ground and keep items that are not being used in sealed plastic bags.
  • When returning home, do not bring your suitcase or bags inside. Rather unpack in the garage or even driveway.
  • Wash all clothing in the hottest temperature the fabric will permit.
  • Vacuum out and wipe down your suitcase before storing it.

Though bed bugs are not a threat to your health or your home, they are a very stressful pest problem and can be difficult to eradicate. A single, pregnant female can become a major infestation quickly. Be proactive before, during and after your trip and keep an eye out for these bugs.

If you suspect that bed bugs may have arrived home with you, contact Active Pest Control for help. Our trained bed bug control experts will inspect your home and treat for bed bugs if detected. We offer a few options in bed bug removal including bed bug heat treatment and will let you know what method of remediation would work best for your situation. Don’t stress about these biting insects this summer, give us a call instead.

Beating Jacksonville’s Bed Bug Blues

Bed bugs can show up practically anywhere, including here in Jacksonville and the surrounding suburbs. They turn up at hotels as people travel to and from major hubs, carrying their luggage from their homes and unknowingly spreading them through their infested clothing. Even top tier accommodations can’t avoid bed bugs when someone brings them from another country and they end up contaminating the hotel.

People can also pick them up from furniture at furniture stores, as two Jacksonville area families claim they did when they purchased rented or bought furniture from Aaron’s, Inc. in 2014. Most local furniture stores work with Jacksonville pest control specialists to perform quality assurance review, but sometimes this may not be enough as they rest in crevices, only to later infest your home.

Bedbug treatments are notoriously difficult and expensive, often running more than $3,000 for a single-family unit. And, unfortunately, once you have them, you almost always need professional help to ensure the problem is completely eliminated.

At the University of Georgia, entomologists studying bed bugs say that the critters are becoming more commonplace as they become resistant to certain pesticides, particularly here in Georgia. While these researchers are trying to find new ways to eradicate these pests, it’s hard to know if we’ll ever be able to eliminate bed bugs completely. Prior to the recent resurgence, they had been mostly eradicated throughout the developed world since the 1940s.

Bed bugs are typically elusive and may hide in cracks and hidden areas throughout your home or business. People often don’t know they have bed bugs until they notice the bite marks, which typically have a red, swollen area with a darker center, and are grouped together in a single area or are in a straight line. In addition to leaving painful bites, they can also carry disease, so if you notice them it’s important to call an exterminator right away.

If you’re concerned about the threat of bed bugs in your Jacksonville area home, schedule an appointment with Active Pest Control’s Jacksonville pest control specialists via our quick service contact form. Our team of pest control professionals will eliminate insects starting at the source, and can offer your tips and suggestions to prevent further infestations.