If you are planning to travel soon and have booked yourself in a hotel, inn, motel, B&B, or any homestay then add one more item to your travel checklist – check the room for bed bugs. Bed bugs are everywhere. More so in places that may not be cleaned or used every day. Here, we will help you understand a bit more about the bed bugs menace and why it is important to keep them at bay when you are on the move for leisure or work purposes.
What are Bedbugs?
Bed bugs can be easily identified through their oval and small bodies. Brownish in color, these insects survive on the blood sucked from animals or humans. When traveling, Jordan Larson from CustomBedBug.com suggests inspecting your hotel room for bed bugs before you even bring your luggage into the room. The fully-grown bed bugs can be distinguished from the juvenile ones through their flattish bodies that are merely the size of an apple seed. Once they’ve fed on the blood of their hosts, the bodies of bed bugs attain a reddish color and swell up quite a bit.
Bed bugs aren’t capable of flying. However, they tend to move speedily on walls, ceilings, and floors. Across their lifetime, female bed bugs have the potential of laying hundreds of eggs that are only as large as a speck of dust. The bedbugs that are immature are known as nymphs. These young bed bugs are known to shed off their skin up to five times prior to attaining maturity. Each shedding session needs a meal full of blood prior to taking place. The bed bugs are capable of developing completely in just a few weeks. Thereafter, they may produce three-plus generations annually. Imagine what it would be like to spend the night in a room full of adult and immature bed bugs that may not have found a host in the last few days!
They Hide, Where?
Bedbugs have very small bodies and this makes it possible for them to hide just about anywhere until they reach your hotel room, car, or home. If you accidentally bring bed bugs home with you, then you will need to call in pest control services, such as Florida aptive pest control, or a company more local to you as such pests can breed rapidly. While you may not think this is a possibility, bed bugs can hide in your trolley bag or hand luggage and they can creep into your purse or laptop bag handle when you are traveling from one place to another during the course of your trip.
Couches and used beds are other favorite hiding spots of bed bugs. Extremely tiny in size and flattish in body shape, they can lurk in thin, narrow spaces until they find their hosts. These insects do not create nests as bees or ants do. They reside in the form of groups in different hiding places such as box springs, mattresses, bed frames, headboards, carpets, curtains, rugs, and picture frames. In fact, you can find them in all such infected places that are within accessible distance to their hosts.
Ask for Bed Bug Exterminators
Once you check-in, ask for a visual inspection of the room allotted to you before you move your baggage in. In case you find blood stains that cannot be explained or can find bed bugs hiding in the places mentioned above, choose a different room or accommodation facility. You may want to ask the hotel staff to call in bed bug exterminators to clear the space for those who check-in after you.
