BED BUGS

oh god that just sounds like a hellish month, hairdrying your whole fucking apartment. i mean, it's just so awful.

the most telling sign of bed bugs is when the bites are several in a row, about an inch or so apart. Apparently they start biting you while you're sleeping, you get restless and move a bit, it knocks them out, they move an inch away and bite again, and this repeats.

it doesn't look at all like flea bites. very distinctive

Hmmm...well then I feel better. I sometimes have allergic reactions similar to the current itchiness, but I've been living in squalor for the past couple months (at least sort of--haven't done laundry in over a month b/c the laundromat is far away and the weather's been shitty) and I got worried.

(My laundry pile is now higher above my dresser top--about 4-1/2 feet. Just been buying new clothes and handwashing some.)

jesse! just drop it off!!

I should. But also I work a lot and (yet, somehow) I've been broke.

My life sucks a little bit right now.

=/ winter doldroms

the bites usually appear in groups of 3. it's not so much that they get knocked off, rather that they're feeding more than once as i understand it.

(bites appeared in groups of 3 for me, anyway.)

oh, and it's possible to have no reaction if you're not allergic to the saliva. i was waking up with itchy spots, and my bf wasn't. as far as he knew, nothing was wrong. we thought i had an allergic reaction to something until our neighbors mentioned it to us.

yes

this is what is happening to my friend -- her hsuband has no reaction

I've actually been told that men are far less likely to have a reaction to the bites than women are.

Sorry about that, ladies.

i guess, living as i am with my gay male lover, maybe we won't react

That would be pretty awkward if he were straight

you're right it would.

ha!

okay but what about clothes like stored away -- is it necessary to wrap/wash those too?

how are they stored? how close to the bed?

i think they're like in a dresser in the same small bedroom, in drawers

bedbugs love that shit, they're all over it. Empty out drawers. Deal with clothes, clean dresser.

so the friend i started this thread about, she moved recently. and in nyc they offer bedbug moving services, where they take all your stuff, put it in some space overnight and fumigate it. they also treat the new space. and she STILL FOUND ONE at her new apt.

but wanna hear the kicker? she's not sure whether or not she just saw one on her DESK AT WORK. WHICH IS IN THE SAME ROOM AS MINE. i'm on the fence as to whether or not i should be petrified. i don't have thousands of dollars with which to deal with this problem right now in my life.

yup, still kind of freaking out. she keeps telling me she's getting bites, this and that, baby bugs BLA. she's like my best friend and i've been supporting her throughout the process but at some point, if this happens to me, it's going to be hard not to feel bitter and i hate that.

Whoa, bedbugs are real? I thought it was just a cute thing moms said. I know absolutely nothing.

lol "sleep tight"

last night at 3:30 in the morning, my roommate and i found a couch curbside and needing a couch decided to take it. it sat in our apartment for about 10 hours before we figured out that it had bed bugs. we have hardwood floors, it wasnt touching any furniture and we dont appear to have any bites, but how worried should we be about them spreading and what measures should we take?

and yea, we're pretty stupid

If it was me, I'd assume they were everywhere already and I'd get a giant sack of DE and a steamer and never sleep again.

(ymmv)

Take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

maybe ill just fill the apartment with water for a few days and hope they drown

i got these in my apartment a few years ago when my downstairs neighbor brought in a used couch that was infested. getting rid of them required two visits from the exterminator, and putting everything i owned into giant ziploc/vacuum-sealable bags for three weeks. i threw out my mattress too, but i still got bites sleeping on the carpet.

it wasn't that bad because i spotted them pretty quickly and took action. i knew they were bedbugs because i knew what to look for. so with me it was a matter of killing the existing ones and making sure they didn't breed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K22mwRcx1gQ

bed bug

how fast moving bed bug

fuck that video

hopefully these ones were happy where they were

so gross

one apt in our building got infested last year and it created a total panic. ultimately the situation was contained but not until every apt got inspected by bug-sniffing dogs. twice. I was home for the inspection -- wild. a couple times the dog just FROZE in position for endless minutes and I thought oh shit but it turned out to be false alarm.

cool dog sniffing bedbugs

U already put the couch back on the curb and plastic-bagged the clothes you wore to carry it, right?

Borrow a high-powered steamer if you can (a friend of mine just bought one for all kinds of cleaning, and apparently it'll work to steam floors & baseboards to kill bedbugs too). If no steamer, at least vacuum (and throw out the bag or empty the compartment or w/e right after). Vacuum or steam all the furniture nearby too.

Then get diatomaceous earth from...wherever you get it, maybe a neighborhood hardware store or Home Depot or something? and sprinkle it all around the baseboards. If yr paranoid abt that 10-hr window, vacuum throughout the house & sprinkle the d. earth at will.

Wash the clothes from the bags in HOT water, then dryer-dry them for a WHILE, so they get super-heated.

You can put like books and stuff into plastic bags and freeze them for a few weeks too, if there were piles of books on the floor or etc.

I wd vacuum & repeat the d. earth a week from now, and then two weeks from then, and so on for like the next month. You never know if some eggs might have been laid and then will later hatch. Don't leave any clothes, books, furniture, or soft stuff (pillows, blankets, etc) in that area for at least a few weeks just in case any bugs got in the floors or baseboards.

Is that paranoid enough?

Also if the couch is still there, do the next passer-by a favor and spray paint "bed bugs" across the upholstery or stick a sign on it or something.

Laurel, I want to be on your bedbug destroying team plz.

If hardware stores don't have DE, pool supply places carry it (used as filter medium) and you can buy it on-line. Get generic DE though, or food-grade if you want, but don't fall for the special $$$$ bedbug powders, it's just repackaged and super-spendy.

i can't remember the brand of DE i got but i ordered mine from an online garden supply. it was "food grade" rather than the harsher stuff (for swimming pools, etc) you can get at home depot.

xp

i recommend food grade because it's a thin powder and you WILL inhale it.

I've never had them please God but some friends did! I guess the details of their treatment stuck with me cos I am mega-afraid of getting hit myself. I think I could handle the destroying team duties, but it's a shitload of work if you get a real infestation, you have to segregate and bag and wash and dry-clean and wrap EVERYTHING and you have to do it all again in expanding windows (1 wk, 2 wks, 4 wks, etc) and vacuum and stuff constantly.

Have also known people who got them and got overwhelmed and just threw everything out and it's so sad & wasteful & EXPENSIVE, and no one I know can rly afford to be throwing out new mattresses and couches and shit! Hell, I don't even HAVE a couch. And my apt is way too small to keep anything away from anything else, so I'd be screwed.

i also got a bunch of sealable plastic crates from the container store that i could keep my books and paperwork safe in (they can hide out there).

There is a company here that will put all your stuff in a special storage thing and heat it up! I'm sure it is $$$$$ though. Maybe not so much as throwing everything out.

I have been researching neem for a bunch of various reasons lately, and even though it reeks to high heavens, I would try the "legs of the bed in large cans of neem oil" trick in addition to steaming, sealing the mattress in one of those bags, and DE.

Probably, I'm not recommending it as anything other than a way to instantly get rid of the bastards. Professional help would be preferable.

so i take it the boxspring/mattress covers are in the bedding store

Bedding, Bathing & Beyond has them.

Bed, Bath & BED BUGS

tore the bed apart, found nobody.

spread the d-earth around.

so my landlord's exterminator refused to spray for them bcz i had no "evidence"

ie i didn't save the one i pulled off my butt at the beginning

now i have psychosomatic itching and am determined to move

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/10/bed-bug-madness-the-psychological-toll-of-the-blood-suckers/381447/

the new bed i bought in April is still in the box, of course.

who has a freezer big enough to put all their books?

fuck this, had a scare which, yeah, posted about up thread about a thousand years ago.

now it's the real deal, not def infesting, maybe coming from neighbors apt. dealing w/ our own pest control company we called and managements, someone's coming friday. start some treatments as well as super going to use silicone to plug up gaps around floorboard.

in the meantime box spring and mattress and pillows are covered. bed pulled away from wall. Was recommended to temporarly put masking tape covered w/ vaseline around the bed so doing that now.

bugs have no effect on me. wife is covered in huge itchy bites. we'll start drying and bagging clothes shortly but don't know what to do with all the books in the bedroom. And my entire home studio. mangement's people do the spray, they say is fine for electronics. that makes me really really nervous.

fuck this. was about to make a snarky comment about bringing back DDT but went and read about that and decided that's a stupid thing to say.

I used diatomaceous earth round the bed frame (You get special plastic cups that you put the legs in and the diatomaceous earth sits in a little moat around them). Put any fabric that can withstand being put in the dryer on high in the dryer for 90 minutes or so. Vacuum like crazy, dumping the bags immediately if you have that type of vacuum. If you have the time look through your books, I literally found a bug sitting in a book. And threw the book out. Can't think of anything else other than the spraying.

in the most horrific apartment i ever lived in, i think only reason the bedbugs went away was because ants came in and killed them

where can i get these ants you speak of?

this is a nightmare of mine. best of luck

That sucks. Does Marie Kondo have a chapter about this?