Original Article: http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2010/aug/19/bed-bugs-know-no-income-class-and-theyre-moving-so/
Bed bugs know no income class, and they’re moving into Southwest Florida homes
It’s very hard to sleep tight when the bed bugs bite.
You may think bed bugs are like the monster in the closet, something that doesn’t actually exist. But an entomologist at the University of Florida estimates bed bug populations have increased by about 500 percent in the last three years.
Beatriz Hernandez, 26, was shocked when her three daughters started waking up with dozens of bites. The girls ages 2, 4 and 7 were covered, especially the 2-year-old, who had bites on her face, hands, feet, arms and legs.
“Just like this,” Hernandez said, lifting up the sleeve of her gray T-shirt and showing dozens of bites on her own arm.
“I was so scared,” she said. “I took them to the emergency room two times.”
The bugs probably came into Hernandez’s home at College Park apartments off Rattlesnake Hammock Road when she purchased second-hand beds for her daughters, said Will Rogers, service manager with BugFree Services in Naples. Rogers said there were probably eggs in the beds when she purchased them and the eggs recently hatched.
When Rogers saw Hernandez and her daughters on a TV news show, the company he works for decided to treat her apartment for free. Usually an apartment would cost about $300 to $500 for the treatments required to eliminate the bugs. A house costs about $500 to $700.
In the past, Rogers said he received about one call a week about bed bugs. These days it’s about four to five calls a week. People are often surprised when he tells them that their problem is bed bugs, Rogers said.
“ ‘Oh, isn’t that a mythological thing,?’ ” said Rogers, mimicking the response he generally gets. “They don’t think they’re real.”
In Hernandez’s home, there were splotches of blood on the baseboard from the bugs, which live by biting humans and drinking their blood. There were also visible bugs on her roommate’s pillow. BugFree Services’ treatment involves lining the baseboards with a dust, spraying items with a chemical that contains mostly alcohol and fumigating the bedrooms.
After the treatment, the family can move back into the rooms as long as they put special covers on their mattresses, Rogers explained. Those covers keep any bed bugs still in the mattress inside, and after a year any bugs inside will be dead.”
“It was about 10 to 12 years ago we started seeing bed bugs coming back into the United States, and most of it was associated with high-end hotels and international travelers,” said Philip Koehler, professor of entomology at University of Florida.
Visitors and employees of those hotels became inadvertent carriers, taking the bed bugs home. They spread everywhere cushioned products, primarily seats and mattresses, are: movie theaters, offices, airplanes, hotels, cruise ships, apartment complexes, houses.
Bed bugs thrive in environments where people sleep, Koehler explained. Their most active time is around 4 a.m. when people are fast asleep and the bugs can get a good meal without any danger. Most people don’t feel the bites, but notice the itchy bumps the next morning.
Koehler recommended using heat to attack bed bugs, a method he said researchers have found successful.
“It doesn’t take much heat to kill a bedbug, they start dying right around 106 degrees Fahrenheit,” he said. “But it will take probably more than two hours to kill them at that temperature, so if you get up to 115 or 120 degrees they can die within minutes.”
Clothing and fabric can be cleaned by putting it in the dryer on high, but the tricky part is the mattress, he said. Koehler recommended building a box around the bed, using styrofoam for insulation and then turning on a space heater to heat up the mattress.
Insecticide dust is more effective than spray, and fumigation kills every stage of beg bugs, according to a species profile written by Koehler and other scientists. But bed bugs are resistant to many insecticides, which can make it difficult to get rid of them.
St. Matthew’s House homeless shelter in East Naples has been struggling with bed bugs for about four years, said Vann Ellison, the charity’s president and CEO.
They’ve paid about $80,000 trying to get rid of them, and have tried many different strategies. Chemicals seemed to knock the bed bugs out for awhile, but they came back, Ellison said.
Now, they’re using special mattress pads and trying heat treatment donated by local company, BBDR Services. The challenge has been the size of the shelter’s dorm area — it’s difficult to heat the large room hot enough to kill the bed bugs, Ellison said.
“Heat really does seem to work but you have to get it right on the creature and then you have to use wire bristle brushes to clean off any eggs that might have been left behind,” he said.
John Mazzarella, owner of BBDR Services, has been working in bed bug remediation for about a year and a half in Southwest Florida and he said he’s getting a lot more calls these days. The company’s heat treatment involves heating affected areas to about 130 degrees and keeping it there for about three hours to kill the bugs. They don’t use any pesticides.
Heat treatment for bed bugs costs about twice as much as standard chemical treatments. For a standard living area it costs about $1,000, but usually only requires one treatment and no furniture needs to be discarded or chemicals used, said Chad Easley, a partner of BBDR.
To keep your house bed bug-free, Mazzarella recommended that you be very careful when returning home from traveling. He suggested that if you live in South Florida, you leave your luggage in your car for 24 hours so the hot car heat-treats it. Then take all your clothes out, dry them on high, and then wash and dry them again, he said.
St. Matthew’s House has started requiring incoming residents to heat-treat all of their belongings before moving into the dorms.
A few years ago, people wouldn’t want to admit they have bed bugs, or they may not even know what it was, said both Mazzarella and Rogers from BugFree Services. Sometimes people thought the bugs in their beds were ticks, or dust mites. Or, they would live with them because they were too embarrassed or didn’t have the money to deal with it.
Back at the apartment with the bed bug problem, Hernandez breathed a sigh of relief when Rogers told her that the pest control company could treat the rooms the next day. She and her three daughters could move back into their home that evening.
“I’ve never had this problem before and it’s so scary when you have babies,” she said.