A couple in Dapto rang on a Thursday night, both of them on speaker. They'd been home from a fortnight in Bali for eleven days, their nine-year-old had a row of bites up the inside of one arm, and they'd flea-bombed the house twice. The dog had been washed, dipped and banished to the laundry. The bites kept coming, and now the parents had them too.
I asked one question: are the bites in lines or clusters of three or four, and are they on the parts of you that are outside the doona at night? Arms, neck, shoulders. Yes and yes. That's not the dog. Fleas go for ankles and shins, because they live in the carpet and jump. Something that bites your neck at 3 am is living in the bed.
Where I found them
The mattress looked fine, which is the usual story. People strip the bed, stare at a clean mattress and decide it can't be bed bugs. The bugs aren't on the mattress in daylight. They're within a couple of metres of where the person sleeps, in the tightest crack they can find.
I pulled the bed head away from the wall. Timber slats, screwed to the frame, and in the joint where the slat meets the upright there were the black ink-spot droppings, a scatter of pale shed skins, and four or five adults the size and colour of an apple seed. More along the piping seam under the mattress, where it sits on the base. A few had got into the back of the bedside table drawer.
The two flea bombs hadn't killed them. They'd pushed them. A residual fog in an open room is exactly the sort of thing that sends bed bugs deeper into a frame joint, or across the room into the wardrobe, which is where the third cluster was. That's the honest reason not to DIY this one: the failed attempt makes the paid job bigger.
Fleas, bed bugs or mozzies
Three things bite people in Illawarra bedrooms in the warm half of the year and the treatments have nothing in common, so this is worth ten minutes with a torch before anyone spends money.
Fleas bite low, ankles and calves, scattered rather than in rows, and you'll usually have a pet or a recent tenancy in the story. Walk across the carpet in white socks and look at your ankles. If that's your problem, it's a flea treatment, and the end of lease post covers the version where the pet moved out and the fleas woke up.
Mosquitoes bite whatever is exposed, singly, mostly at dusk and dawn, and you'll have heard them. Bites that appear overnight with no whine and no mozzie on the wall in the morning are suspicious. That's the mosquito post if the timing fits.
Bed bugs bite what's outside the covers while you're asleep, often in a line of three or four along an arm or across a shoulder, and they're silent. The tell is the droppings. Look in the mattress seams and piping, the bed frame joints, behind the bed head and along the skirting behind the bed with a torch. Black specks that smear rusty if you wet them. Pale, papery shed skins. If you find droppings, it's bed bugs whether or not you see a bug.
NSW Health's bed bugs page puts the medical side plainly: they're not known to spread disease, but they cause itching and loss of sleep, and the scratching can turn into a skin infection. Nobody needs the disease angle to want them gone. The loss of sleep is enough, and it's the parents who stop sleeping first.
How they got to Dapto
Bali, in this case, in the suitcase. It could as easily have been the Gold Coast, a share house in Wollongong, a couch off Marketplace or the flat next door through a common wall. Bed bugs don't come in from the garden and they don't come off the dog. They come in with people and their things, which is why the question I ask on every one of these calls is "who's been away, and what's come into the house in the last month".
The suitcase is worth a paragraph on its own. It sat open on the bedroom floor for a week after they got home, half unpacked, twenty centimetres from the bed. That's the standard route. Next trip, the case gets unpacked straight into the washing machine and the empty case goes in the garage, not under the bed.
What we do, and what you do first
The inspection comes before the quote, every time. A single bed with a few bugs in the seam and a whole house with them behind the skirting in three rooms are different jobs, and anyone who prices it over the phone is guessing. The bed bug treatment page has the prep list, but the short version is that your part decides whether it works.
Everything soft from the bedroom gets washed at 60 degrees or run through a hot dryer, then sealed in bags until we're done. Bedding, clothes, the kid's soft toys. Bedside drawers emptied, furniture pulled 30 cm off the walls, a thorough vacuum with the bag binned outside. And nothing, nothing, gets carried to another room "to be safe". Moving the doona to the spare bed is how a one-room job becomes a three-room job.
The treatment itself is a residual on every harbourage the inspection found, the frame joints, the base, the skirting, the back of the furniture, plus a direct treatment on what's visible. Then a second visit two to three weeks later. Eggs survive nearly everything, and the second visit catches the hatch. Anyone offering a single-visit guarantee on bed bugs is either treating a very small problem or hoping you won't ring back.
The mattress stays
The Dapto couple had the mattress halfway to the ute when I arrived. I put it back. Throwing a mattress out spreads the bugs down the hall and onto the kerb for whoever picks it up, and the bugs that matter weren't in it anyway. They were in the frame and the bed head, which were staying. A mattress can be treated and encased, and the encasement means anything left inside it starves. Save the money for the treatment.
Units and rentals
If you're in a unit block and the bugs have come through from next door, treating your place alone buys you a few months. The strata or the agent needs to know, in writing, because the neighbour's bedroom shares your wall. For rentals and short-stay places we'll inspect between tenants or guests and put what we found on paper for the agent or the platform, which tends to be the thing that gets the adjoining unit treated too.
The Dapto house was two visits, seventeen days apart. Bed head, base, skirting, the wardrobe, the bedside tables and a full go through the spare room the suitcase had briefly visited. The nine-year-old's arm cleared up in the first week. The dog, I'm told, has been let back inside and is not accepting apologies.
Need a hand with this in your home? Get a free quote or call 0430 007 651.