Subsidized housing invariably attracts tenants with mental health and addictions issues that makes cooperating with exterminator protocols problematic. And without cooperation the exterminator is given an impossible task of getting rid of the bugs. How is the exterminator to address bed bugs when the tenant refuses to launder infested clothing or declutter a hell hole? […]

A google search for killing bed bugs with freezing results in suggestions that are all over the map. Even the University sites differ one from the other.   I treated a severely infested suite in the middle of a Winnipeg winter a few years ago and we removed all the baseboards, door frames, etc to […]

  I was asked to confirm the presence of bed bugs in a 100 year old 2 story home before a full gutting and renovation. I did note the presence of bed bug excrement in several places along baseboards which were mostly the 100 year old oak boards about 10 inches tall but there was […]

The first instar bed bug appears very similar to the book louse with the naked eye and is impossible to positively identify without magnification. I started using a pricey 10x bosch and lomb loupe and it worked excellently. Unfortunately I lost this device so I ordered several cheaper Carson brand 10x and 7x and 5x […]

  Bed bugs were a common pest in North America in the 1930s. The use of DDT after world war 2 put a large dent in the bed bug populations until it was banned (for good reasons) in 1972. With the banning of DDT, organophosphate and carbamate class chemicals became the replacement of choice for […]

A few years ago some interesting research came out that bed bugs preferred to harbour (camouflage?) on black and red surfaces and avoided white and yellow ones. That was very interesting. Shortly after that the Climb Up Interceptor started being available with black tape on the outside. And after that a copy of the Interceptor […]

Government suggestions on what to do when bugs are found on clothing in public areas have been evolving over the last few years. A few years ago social service workers were afraid of entering infested suites and, to counter these fears, the powers that be suggested that bed bugs did not cling to cloth very […]

When inspecting a suite for bed bugs the most important place to look is on sleeping surfaces. Any bug imported into the suite, especially in small infestations, inevitably ends up there. How do they do that? We don’t know.     We know that Co2 is a primary driver with Robert Usinger suggesting the bugs […]

I have mentioned several times in the past that spraying aerosol pyrethrins (RAID, KONK, etc) tends to push the bugs further from the bed into odd locations. Last week I was involved in moving a RAID spraying family from their massive 3 bedroom 1000+ square foot bed bug infested apartment to their new home. The […]

Sometimes tenants will put a quarter inch of baby powder into the interceptors and it is then difficult to identify bugs. Or sometimes there is so much dirt that the bugs are invisible. The solution is dump the contents of the interceptor into the toilet. The dirt and dust will sink leaving the bugs floating […]