About a year ago I was given the privilege (and I mean that sincerely) of treating a severely infested room in a 100 year old rooming house during a gutting/renovation process. The room was located in a corner of the second floor with two exterior walls and two interior walls. The home was a typical […]

Last week I was interviewing a potential tenant, experienced in bed bugs,  for my own building.  She stated that she had looked at an apartment in a trendy/high price area of the city  and the caretaker attempted to block the view of the bathtub.  The potential tenant deliberately looked in the tub and saw a […]

Exterminators have many tools in their tool box to battle bed bugs and the bug sniffing dog is one of them. There are times and places where a bug sniffing dog can be very useful. But there are also times and places where other tools are cheaper or more effective. Perhaps the ideal use for […]

It is well known that bed bugs excrete a black liquid after a blood meal. The evidence is often noted in black spots on mattress edges or other areas close to where bed bugs harbour. When bed bugs are well fed they become elongated and quite fat with the blood volume. In starvation settings the […]

    We have learned in earlier studies that a large percentage of bed bug activity is host driven. That means the bugs will remain in their harbourages, even in starvation settings, until a host is made available. Therefore treating empty infested suites is problematic. The bugs just wait, protected in their little hideaways, until […]

My apartment block got it’s first case of bed bugs in 2007 and I knew nothing about the critters. But given that my favourite hobby was researching I took up my education on the topic with gusto. I soon learned that I had a big problem. My first foray into my education was google. I […]

My  bed bug experiment room is typically lit 100% of the time to enable my video camera to record activity. I realize that is not optimal but to this point my desire to observe behaviour has outweighed my wish for ideal conditions. I did purchase an IR illuminated camera quite a while ago but have […]

I was walking along my inner city back alley and I noticed a man going through all the apartment block dumpsters – some of which I knew had uncontrolled bed bug problems. The man seemed to be very pleased with himself and he began a conversation with me. The man stated that it was amazing […]

There have been a few lab experiments on how bed bugs react to heat. The experiments suggested the bugs would generally not venture far from the harbourage but would actually come out of the harbourage with foraging behaviour and when it became too hot they would return to the harbourage. This was good news for […]

I was asked to help an elderly man with his bed bugs. The home was very cluttered and I had to walk sideways when walking in the hallways due to the stacks of clutter. Less than 20% of the baseboards were accessible. The elderly man hired a whole home heat treatment from a local exterminator […]