Whether you are a frequent flyer for business or commute into the city every day by bus, bed bugs can hitch a ride right into your Nassau County, NY, home on your clothes, backpack, or suitcase. Here are some ways a bed bug exterminator would suggest keeping your home free of these pests.
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What Are Bed Bugs?
Bed bugs are tiny brown bugs the size of an apple seed, and they stay alive using human blood as food. They come out at night from their hiding places around the bed to bite the arms and shoulders of those who are asleep. The cleanliness of a home has nothing at all to do with the bugs, but instead they can arrive on ordinary items that you carry with you every day.
Able to crawl over ceilings, walls, baseboards, and through electrical outlets, these tiny pests can also invade your home when you live in multi-person dwellings and a neighbor has an infestation. They cannot fly but they do multiply rapidly and can be quite difficult to remove without the expertise of a bed bug exterminator.
Tips From an Exterminator
Declutter: The more clutter your home has, the less likely you are to notice these pesky creatures. They love to hide in dark, cramped places such as closets with clothes and other items filling the floor, as well as in corners of a room where it can be easy to throw clothing, books, and other items to let them accumulate. An exterminator may tell you to remove any clutter that is on the floor to remove the places that these bugs love to hide the most.
Check furniture: When buying second-hand furniture, look carefully at the seams and cracks for any evidence of bed bugs. Most likely all you would see is the shed skins or tiny dark spots underneath the cushions that indicate bed bugs were there.
Look at the joint of drawers and any place where the edges meet to look for evidence of bed bugs. If you decide to take a piece of second-hand furniture into your home, vacuum it well and let it sit in the garage or outdoors for a couple of days to ensure that bed bugs are not present.
Seal cracks: Sealing any cracks in the baseboards or walls can be wise to keep out many pests, but for those in a multi-unit dwelling, sealing the cracks, edges, and outlet edges can help to keep bed bugs from migrating into your home from the nearby homes. Adding a sweep to your exterior doors can prevent the bugs from traveling into your home from the hallways.
Secure mattresses: Encasing the mattresses of your beds can also go a long way toward prevention—after all, they are not called bed bugs for nothing. Their favorite places to hide tend to be mattresses, bed frames, box springs, and bedding pads.
How a Professional Exterminator Can Help
Your bed bug exterminator has two secret weapons—dogs and Cryonite freezing. They use highly trained dogs to locate the bed bugs within minutes. Because these dogs have a 96%-98% accuracy rate in finding bed bugs, you can rest assured that if there are bed bugs, the dogs will find them.
Once the bugs have been identified, your exterminator will treat the areas with a non-toxic carbon dioxide snow that literally freezes bed bugs in their tracks. It leaves no residue, and you can return to your home soon after with the confidence that your Nassau County, NY, home is bed bug free.
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