How to Inspect For Bed Bugs | Video Tutorial Step By Step

How to Inspect For Bed Bugs - (subtitle) Welcome everybody to bed bug TV I'm your host Jeff white and in today's episode I wanted to talk to you guys about the proper way to inspect a bed for bed bugs a lot of people are learning about bed bugs and fasting people's homes and hotels and whatnot and they say you know what if I have bed bugs in my house I just traveled I want to inspect my bed and it's not quite as easy as just taking a look at the top of the bed and see if you have bed bugs they hide very well and so I'm gonna point out some very common areas that you may find bed bugs if they did in fact infest your bed all right so what we're gonna do is we're gonna pop this bed up and we're gonna take a look at it I'm gonna show you some real common areas we find bed bugs but there's first two things that I want to say before we even get into this the first of which is that visual inspections can actually be relatively unreliable for detecting bed bugs these bugs hide very well and sometimes you can look real hard through everything that you have and not be able to find them and there is a chance that they may still be there and so if you think there's a real good reason that you may have bed bugs you may want to contact a knowledgeable professional to have them come out and do an inspection because these bugs can be very difficult to detect now the other thing that I wanted to talk about is if you are going to inspect your bed please keep in mind that when you're lifting a bed it can be very labor-intensive very difficult to do and if you are gonna do this please make sure you have somebody helping you if you think you may injure yourself while moving the bed around alright everybody so let's go take a look at this bed and we'll see what we can do here so the first thing that you want to do when you're inspecting a bed is take a look at the visible areas of the bed if there are bed bugs in your bed you may be able to detect them without moving anything and so the first thing you want to do of course is to remove the sheets and comforters on your bed when you are doing that you want to make sure that you do it very very slowly so that way you don't fling any bugs all over the place as you're doing it and you do want to take a quick look at the comforter and sheets to make sure there aren't bugs on and I don't have those on this bed this is one that we use for training purposes I didn't have any sheets available but just take a quick look at those put them in the laundry bag and then wash them or set them aside and then what you're going to have is what we have here which is an actual bed itself now the first place you want to look is what you can see right in front of you and so these bugs are typically going to sit seems and edges and so this ribbing that goes around the surface of the mattress is actually a very common area that you may find bedbugs and so you want to take a look all the way around the surface and see if the bugs are sitting right along this ribbing also in the corners where the ribbing folds over is a very common area you may find bed bugs you can see that that tip tends to fold over and the bugs will get right up inside of that so you may want to take a look in this area now the last place you can look at is this label right here this label provides a lot of nice little holes and edges that the bugs may sit in and so you may want to if this is your bed peel this label off to take a look under or just take a look around the outside surface and make sure there's no bugs sitting on it now that being said doing a visual inspection like that of the areas that are visible may not necessarily be a reliable indication of bed bugs are in fact there because remember these bugs want to inhabit areas of least disruption first they don't want to be bothered and so typically we will not find bugs on the top of the mattress like that they'll actually be on the underside of the boxspring and so we're gonna eventually get to that area but we're gonna work our way there and see if we can find anything as we go there so the next step we want to do is actually stand this mattress up so let's go ahead and do that and remember if you think there's any risk of injury in doing this you want to get somebody's help in doing so but we're gonna go ahead and stand this mattress up notice how I use just my hands I'm not getting myself underneath the mattress that have bugs are on it they fall off they fall on me so you're gonna stand this mattress up and now what we have here is the same thing we saw on the top but now on the bottom and again you're gonna look at where this ribbing meets the mattress up in these corners where it folds over and then over here on the side you're gonna have two pieces of ribbing that run down the side you're gonna check both sides of that make sure there are no bugs sitting along that ribbing now once you've done that you've pretty much covered the mattress but as I said the most common error you'll find bed bugs is actually in the boxspring so let's go and check out the boxspring now now again you have that same ribbing we've talked about twice now so I'm not going to be redundant and say the same thing over again but again you want to take a look at this ribbing make sure there's no bugs on either side of it and again you're gonna have the corners all the way down here the bugs may be sitting in that you want to take a look at that the real good area that we want to look for bed bug is on the underside of this so again let's go ahead and stand this up and again you can see I'm working away from the bed as much as I can and now we're gonna stand this up and now you can see this is like bedbug heaven in here you've got tons of good places for bedbugs to hide and this is an area that you hardly ever see you know before I started doing this I could probably count the number of times on one hand that I saw the bottom of my box spring when do you see the bottom of your box spring when you're moving or that's pretty much it and so we're gonna take a look at this and you can see that you had this dust cloth on the outside of it and where these bugs will typically sit is where this dust cloth is actually stapled right into the framework of the box spring you can see here there was a staple that was already pulled away that the bugs will actually sit right on that staple another common area is where these plastic end caps tend to protect the corners of the box rings they will actually get underneath these plastic end caps unfortunately sometimes the only way to properly inspect these is to take these off but please remember that once you take these off you may not get them back on the way they came off so that again is gonna be a personal decision you can inspect these to the best of your ability if need be now those are the two most common errors you will find them on the surface of the box spring but what I'm gonna show you is as I said heaven for bedbugs we're gonna take this dust cloth and peel it back and you can see all the really complicated wood framework that makes up the interior of a boxing ring lots of really good places for bugs to hide all types of cracks and crevices and to be honest with you if there are bugs up inside the framework of this box ring you may never be able to detect them because it's very difficult to see what's going on in here but again you're gonna do the best of your ability you're gonna take a look see what you find remember though once you start to disavow a ring it may not go on the way it came off so just be aware that before you do this and again you're gonna look for spotting and bugs and see if there's bugs there now if you've gone through this and you found bugs unfortunately you may have bed bugs and you may have to get a treatment done at this point now if you have not found bugs yet and you still want to continue on we can take a quick look at the bed frame but again the bed frame especially these traditional metal bed frames don't typically have bugs on them so what we're gonna do is the places you want to look on this metal bed frame are where the actual metal framework meats you can see you have a gap right here and here you can see we put a fell on this bed frame which I'll talk about a second but again the bugs are typically gonna sit right along where this framework meets but again this is not a common area that we find bugs just take a quick last look at it as you have it up and so basically at this point that's more or less the areas that you're gonna look for in a bed if you do think it has bedbugs now I want to go back to one quick thing which is that box we're gonna take another quick look at the box ring and say you can see how complicated this box spring was to inspect all this wood frame work really nasty area one thing that you can consider if you have you know a box frame your house and you're scared you may infest it at some point in the future but through travel or whatever the case may be here we have a box spring that's actually encased with a box spring encasement you can see that this drastically simplifies that complex area and makes this very easy to inspect in the future you know the fab bug gets on this it's really easy to see as opposed to that really complex box room that I showed you before so bed encasements are definitely something that you may want to consider if you think there's a chance that your bed may become infested in the future and this is not meant to be an advertorial for protecta bed but protective bedding casements are the ones that we typically recommend there are other good encasements out there such as mattress safe is another good encasement that we commonly hear people working with the bottom line is with encasements you want to make sure you have research that backs their claims and it's effective to keep bugs out so bugs can't get into the encasement and then if you do lock bugs in they can't get back out of the encasement you want to make sure they have research to back their claims alright everybody so that's the proper way to inspect a bed for bedbugs please remember visual inspection is do not necessarily mean that you don't have bed bugs if you don't find them you may want to contact a knowledgeable professional but either way that's a good way to inspect a bed so if you have any questions jeff dot white at bed bug central calm and please remember we're getting a blog up really soon that's gonna have a lot of these questions answered right on that blog and you can go and interact with other viewers of the show alrighty everybody I hope to see everybody soon enough