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Hello, Ben Sell here with Ben’s pest control. And it’s time for another one of our Ben’s pest control podcast. And today’s podcasts. I don’t honestly know how long it’ll be. But I kind of wanted to discuss a few things that we’ve been seeing recently. And I’ve done podcast before on bedbugs. But let’s consider this maybe bedbug podcast part two, I’m not sure. But we touch on a few things. And one of the things that we’ve seen recently as a couple of the people that we’ve been treating for bedbugs, got treated last year. And there’s always a common theme. And they’re like, Well, how did I get the bedbugs back? And or why do I still have bedbugs? And as we explained to these clients that when we were there, and we treated last year, in most cases that people have gone 3,4,5,6,7 months and not had a problem, and that the treatment that we do is good for 90 days. So if it’s after the 90 day period, a lot of them are like okay, well, you know, the bedbugs were good, but now they’re back and what’s going on. So it’s it’s very difficult because we obviously have no control or no say over what anybody does in their house. And rightfully so there’s no reason we should. But we do talk to people all the time about the situations that could cause bedbugs, and could be a problem in their home. And one of the things we talked about is knowing who you’re letting stay at your house, and where you stay. So let’s discuss where you stay. First of all, obviously, I tell people and I believe I mentioned this in my first podcast is if you’re staying in any hotels, what I normally recommend is to check in, get your key card, go to your room, and check your mattress for signs of bedbugs. If you’re not sure what those signs are, you can go to Google and search bedbugs signs. And you’ll easily be able to find things that tell you Okay, these are the signs look for for bedbugs. And that way before you bring anything of yours into the hotel room, you know that or you have some idea that hopefully the room you’re staying in is hopefully bedbug free. So when you go to stay places, that’s what I recommend. Now, I do realize that we live in a world now where a lot of people are doing Airbnb s and they’re staying at houses that people are renting out. And that represents a whole different problem. I mean, you can go into a house and and stay there and maybe you’ll find them on the mattress. But if it was as simple as the person who stayed there last week, the science may not be all that evidence. So you still kind of got to be cautious and careful where you stay and kind of take those extra steps to protect yourself. One of the facts that I don’t believe I mentioned that I’ve since read is bedbugs can go up to one year without feeding. So if you bought a house and the people before you had bedbugs, it is possible that after you move in those bedbugs could come find you and start all over again. So that’s kind of a scary thought that you could buy a house that’s already been established with bedbugs. Now, strangely enough, I talked about where it watching where you stay, but the other side of that was watching who stays at your house. I’ve been a little frustrated for people, not with them, but for them because we’ve had three clients who we treated last year for bedbugs and everything had been going great. And now they’re months out and all sudden they get bedbugs again and now they’re having to pay to treat their house. And in each situation after talking to them, I said well, you know, who did you let stay in your house? Was there somebody you knew? And we had one situation where the the lady let her nieces and nephew stay and she knows her sister has bedbugs. Well, obviously we want our family be able to come and stay but we have to draw the line somewhere if you’re going to keep having to treat your house over and over and over again. For bedbugs. You’re either accepting the costs or you’re going to choose to make a change because the bedbugs are a very real problem and if you know somebody’s got them and you you invite them to stay in your house, now you’re reintroducing them. And for the most part, any treatment you choose to do that is highly effective. It’s not going to stop those bedbugs when somebody reintroduces them. And so let’s let’s go through that first or let’s go through that next. So today’s treatments if you want to fumigate your house fumigation will kill every stage of the bedbugs. Once they come in, they put a tent over your house you have to get out of your house for three days.
You leave the house, but if you come back or you take anything out that has bedbugs, or you invite somebody back into your house that has bedbugs once They finished a fumigation and all the gases out of your house. There is nothing there to prevent bedbugs from starting up all over again. And the money you just spent is all gone to waste because within a few weeks few months, you could be right back to having a full blown infestation. The next treatment that is pretty popular is heat treatments. heat treatments are great. They heat up a room to a certain temperature and the bedbugs can survive and I do believe there is even a temperature that the bedbugs their eggs and stages will will not survive the heat treatment. Once again, it’s a pretty expensive process. But as I mentioned with the fumigation, the problem is if you leave and you take something out of the house that have bedbugs, or then you invite somebody back in your house. After the treatment is done. All you’ve done is taken that whole area that you’ve just treated and killed all the bedbugs, and you’ve reintroduced those to your house. Now we use a product called apprehend, which is a bio fungus Spore. And apprehend is very effective for killing bedbugs. It does have a residual for up to 90 days, but over time it does start to diminish. And no matter what happens is if you get outside of that 90 day period, once again, anything that you allow to come back into your house or any item that you bring into your house that could potentially have bedbugs is just starting that whole infestation back over. So it’s it’s a vicious cycle. And people have to start to protect themselves because it’s not something that I see going to end anytime shortly. Bedbugs just appear to be getting worse and worse. Now, the reason for this is one of the things that we have seen here in the last couple of weeks while we’ve treated numerous houses for bedbugs is that we also recommend to our clients to consider getting bedbug mattress and boxspring covers the good bedbug mattress and boxspring covers are normally going to be white, white is very easy to inspect for bedbugs. And so when you have those on your mattress in your boxspring, if you’re stripping your bedding, it will make it pretty easy to tell if there’s something going on because there’ll be stains on those covers. And so the other thing it does is it makes it very easy to then treat those areas. Because what you’ve done is your mattress cover has in essence eliminated a lot of the grooves that a normal mattress has all those rims around it, the tags, it’s taken away, it’s those hiding spots. And now with the with the bedbug mattress covers, you pretty much just have the zipper, which is where the bedbugs will will hide or they’ll just stay in the middle of the mattress cover underneath the sheets. So it makes it pretty easy to see. Now, what I tell people is and I’ve said this before on my podcast is an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. I like to use that statement. Now. Let me just state that. I’m also a firm believer that you’ve got to be smart with your ounce of prevention. I’ve had people say to me before things like well, you know, there are certain medicines you take, but if you take medicines and they’re full of side effects, I’m not sure that’s really an ounce of prevention in my personal opinion. However, when it comes to bedbugs, this ounce of prevention is a positive because it makes it very easy to inspect that mattress. I had a lady just the other day that we went out and she had a mattress cover a bedbug mattress cover. And when we pulled her sheets back we saw an adult bedbug running, we are able to grab it collected bring it back to the office look at it under a microscope. But she didn’t have a cover over her boxspring. And when we pulled the box spring back and we set the box spring up to treat the underside of it. You could see where the bedbugs had been hiding. So we had to make the recommendation to her to buy a box spring cover also. And that would take away a lot of the harbor edge where they were surviving this time. So again, this has been with Ben’s pest control and hopefully you got my point. I believe that if you’re at all concerned about bedbugs buying a bedbug mattress protector, buying a bedbug boxspring protector, and good ones that are usually white are going to be in your best interest. And so hopefully if you do end up with something, you can address it sooner than later. The sooner you address it, hopefully there’s less bedbugs and it’s easier to get control of.
So if you’re worried that you have bedbugs and you’d like a free inspection, please give our office a call at 772-878-1972 or feel feel free to check out our website at WWW dot Benz pest stop is and we’ll be happy to give you one of our free 58 Point PEST analysis and surveys and take a look at your house. or if you just have any questions please feel free to email or call us I’ll be happy to answer anything I can otherwise I hope you have a great day thank you
