Ordinary bed bug behaviour is basically invisible. Bed bugs will typically feed when people are sleeping and stay out of harms way when there is human activity. After chemical treatments the bugs begin to lose control of brain function and and begin acting in very uncharacteristic manners such as wandering around during the day or […]

I questioned my chemical supplier who has 30 plus years experience in the exterminator business and he stated that before carbamates and organophosphates were banned there was no difficulty in getting rid of bed bugs. A single application was sufficient to kill the bugs. When Pyrethroids became mandated for bed bugs the same “single treatment” […]

Pyrodust PCP # 13074 is a common pesticide dust applied by homeowners for bed bugs and can be purchased in many stores. Unfortunately when people use this product they often apply it inappropriately causing more harm than good. For example, I often see about a line of dust around the baseboard about a quarter inch […]

I was given the privilege of touring a rooming house room that had been unsuccessfully chemically treated for over a year. The tenant commented that he observed the bugs climbing the walls. The tenant input was initially ignored due to the improbability of that observation but then out of desperation the landlord inspected the light […]

The very first suite I ever treated came with a complaint that there were bed bugs in the bed room door. At the time I could not understand why there would be bugs in such an odd location. I treated the door just to make the caretaker happy and soon discovered bugs pouring out of […]

Rooming houses, at least in Winnipeg, are large old houses divided into small rooms/suites with a common kitchen and bathroom. The rents are very cheap and the quality is typically very low. These buildings are dismal places to live – no one lives there by choice (I know of two exceptions to the above but […]

My clients are often concerned about bed bugs hiding in the carpet fibers. To date I have yet to find a harbourage in a carpet and, as such, find myself reassuring the clients that carpets do not typically harbour bed bugs. But which types of floors are best and worst for bed bugs? The following […]

Bed bugs are typically found in the folds of the mattress and box spring at the head of the bed and in areas where the bed touches the wall. When I inspect a bed for bugs those are the first places I look. Sometimes the bed is located under the window and the pillow actually […]

As an exterminator and a landlord I have noted many occasions where tenant panic caused bed bugs to spread to other areas in multi family complexes. Notably people immediately treated their bed bugs with non residual pyrethroids (RAID, KONK, etc) which caused the bugs to move to other suites, dragged their mattress down the hallway […]