Be on high alert when traveling and staying at different hotels/motels. Even the nicest 5-star hotels are prone to bed bug breakouts! If enter a hotel with the knowledge on what to look for, you will better protect yourself. When checking into your room, the first thing you will want to do is strip the entire bedding off the mattress.When we travel, we try to bring our own sheets & pillows. Inspect the mattress for any type of blood spots. This is a HUGE indicator of bed bugs, since they feed on our blood while we sleep.
Also, check all crevices of the mattress & box spring, flip & check bottom side as well. Bed bugs look very similar to a tick and are often misidentified as one. Bed bug outbreaks are becoming more known because of the amount of people who travel these days. Bed bugs can actually hitch a ride on you or in your suitcase when traveling back home or to another hotel, which is how the outbreak spreads.Bed bugs leave dark fecal stains on mattresses and other places they infest. If you don’t see any bed bugs, you still might see their feces.
Bed bugs move through 5 stages of growth on the way to maturity. At some point during each stage they will become too large for their current exoskeleton. When that happens, they will shed their exoskeleton and grow a new one that is larger. You may see these molted exoskeletons close to where bed bugs hide.
Here are the facts about Bed Bugs:
- Bed Bugs are flat, brown, wingless and about 1/4 of an inch
- They have 6 legs, shiny reddish-brown but after a good serving of your blood, they appear dark brown and swollen as in the picture below.
- They can be seen with the human eye, but do a great job at hiding
- Bed bugs are not known to carry diseases as of yet
- They feed on human blood preferring to do it in the dark when you’re sleeping
- Simply using chemical treatments will not remove the infestation
- These bugs love to hide in the seams of your mattress including:
- Sofa seams,behind wallpaper, picture frames and other dark areas, backpacks, sleeping bags, cloths, cracks in the bad frame and or head board, under chairs, couched, beds and dust covers, under rugs, edges of carpets, drawers, baseboards and window casings, behind light switches, electrical outlet plates, cracks in plaster, televisions, radio clocks and phones
Another good tip we recommend is to not take any type of free furniture/mattresses on the side of the road without thoroughly inspecting it first. Be aware, though, just because you do not find any sign of bed bugs, microscopic eggs can be attached in the crevices.
If you think you might have bed bugs and you live in Roseville, CA, Rocklin, CA, Lincoln, CA, Auburn, CA, Meadow Vista, CA, Grass Valley, CA, Nevada City, CA, Colfax, CA, Alta, CA, or any other areas of Placer and Nevada counties. Please give us a call and we can do a inspection.
I didn’t know that bed bugs can actually hitch a ride on you or in your suitcase when traveling back home. My husband and I think that we might have bed bugs because we’ve noticed little bites on our body and small brown stains on our sheets, but we don’t know where we would have picked them up. Since we traveled recently I wonder if we picked up bedbugs at the hotel we stayed at. Either way, it would probably be smart to look into getting professional bed bug removal done so we can stop worrying about them and so we can make sure to get rid of them.