^ the dryer will kill them at all stages of their life cycle, including adults, nymphs and eggs, everything else you mentioned, I'm skeptical about, though finding bedbugs in any stage of life in clothing is atypical, as they usually find a place that's consistently a comfortable walking distance from where you sleep, i.e. tufts in your mattress/box spring, under baseboards especially if your bed is touching that wall, and sometimes even between cracks in picture frames adjacent to the bed, though running your clothes through a dryer is always a good precaution, especially if you feel your dresser's close enough to your bed to provide solid harborage. So go ahead and grab all the clothes you need, dry them at the place you're currently staying at or a laundromat and then bag them up before zipping over to the parent's place.
Using temperature as a cultural control won't be very useful, especially in an apartment setting. They'll find their ways into wall voids under the baseboards, through electrical outlets, or any other possible structural pathway they can before the room ever gets anywhere near the kill temperature. Even in a home where a company might be able to tarp off a house and heat it up, who knows how long it would take to heat the wall, ceiling and floor voids, attic and crawl space to such temperatures.
In an apartment setting using heat treatment, they'll just be spread to another unit and may come back.
The pest control company I work for has had incredible success using a combination of fumigation and residual insecticides, and often times also incorporating fogging apparatuses (different from bug bombs, as the technician will actually be walking through, targeting potential nesting areas, and eliminating the likeliness of bb's migrating to safer places.
Basically, you'd load up all of your material possessions and furniture into a U-Haul truck, we'd then fumigate the truck with all of your belongings in it with a chemical called Methyl Bromide. Meanwhile, we'd treat all possible cracks and crevices of the household with the aforementioned fogging apparatus. The fogging apparatus will kill them completely on contact in all stages of their life cycle, including the egg stage, and as I said before, the PCO will be targeting any potential hiding places- in extreme infestations we might even drill pinholes in walls to inject the fog into the voids. We'd then apply any of a number of residual insecticides labeled for use against bedbugs, which would nip in the butt any bb's that might have survived the assault in their egg stage.
As for identifying them by bite or bite pattern, that's impossible unless you have the bites examined by an entomologist. Generally, they're similar to mosquito AND flee bites, as they all possess piercing-sucking mouth parts, the difference in puncture size would be microns. Plus, everyone reacts differently to the enzymes all 3 of these insects release into a bite, so there's no real telling by sight, as the swelling and irritation that may occur isn’t uniform person-to-person, unlike observing effects of a spider’s venom. In theory the bed bug sometimes leaves behind a straight line of bites as it actually walks along your sheet, biting you without actually walking on your skin, though flees and mosquitoes also frequently leave behind a trail of bites, as the first bite they deliver might not be incredibly fruitful, and if you’re sound asleep enough as to not disturb them, the path they form might also be straight.
It's really important to find evidence that they're there, being either the bugs or nymphs themselves, the caste skins left behind after molts, or their excrement- near wherever they're nesting, they'll leave blackish red dots about 1/8th of an inch across as they shit out your blood. If you have a box spring mattress, it would be advised to remove the bottom cloth from the box spring and carefully examine it inside and out, as that's where I typically find them.
If you've found one nymph, odds are, there're more on the way, as one female can lay up to 12 eggs a day.
I know the methods I describe sound extreme, but these things really do fucking suck, as several pals on here can attest. It really does take professional help to eliminate them, unless you really want to execute maniacal search-and-destroy missions, nightly.
If it's an apartment, go door to door and ask other tenants if they've too been experiencing this, if they have, it's the apartment managements' problem to resolve- if they fail to take action, move. If you're already intending on moving, call around and see if anywhere would conduct the fumigation portion of what I described during the transition into the new place.
The company I work for provides this service typically for under a grand. I know it's a bit spendy, but it beats buying everything you had and owned all over again, I advise you call around and find a company that offers a similar service.
Sorry to all the pals that felt or were told that they had to discard all of their home furnishings.
Hopefully some of this info was helpful and not just completely redundant.
Topic: Bed Bugs (Read 3895 times)