Can Bedbugs Climb Walls and Metal in Brent?

Every bedbug that bites you has walked there. It has crawled out of a seam, a joint or a crack, along a surface, and up onto the bed. That is useful to know, because the surfaces in between decide how easy the trip is, and a few of them make it hard.

What They Climb Easily

Bedbugs have small hooked claws that need something to catch on. Anything with a texture gives them grip. That includes wood, especially raw or rough timber, fabric of all kinds, paper and cardboard, carpet and rugs, and most painted walls, whose surface is rougher than it looks.

So yes, they can climb walls. They can walk up the wall behind a bed, along the top of a skirting, behind a loose picture frame or into a gap round a light switch. They can also climb bedding that trails on the floor, which gives them a ladder straight onto the mattress.

What Stops Them, or Slows Them

Very smooth, hard surfaces are difficult. Clean glass, glazed ceramic, smooth plastic and polished metal give their claws little to hold. A bedbug on a steep section of any of these tends to slip back down.

That does not make a metal bed a barrier. Paint, dust, scratches and rust all give grip, and a metal frame usually has fabric, wooden slats or a mattress resting on it. Bedbugs also hide inside metal frames, in hollow tubes, screw holes, joints and the gaps where parts slot together. We find them in metal beds as well as wooden ones.

Bed Legs and Interceptor Cups

Interceptor cups use that weakness. Each bed leg sits in a cup with a smooth inner wall. A bedbug can climb the rough outside of the cup, drop into the gap, and then cannot climb the smooth inside to reach the leg. Bugs trying to leave the bed can be caught the same way.

They are good for one thing: showing whether bedbugs are still moving around a bed, which is useful before and after treatment. They are not a treatment. Bugs already living in the mattress or frame are untouched by them, and the cups only work if nothing else joins the bed to the room.

Moving the Bed Away From the Wall

Pulling the bed a little away from the wall, tucking in the bedding so nothing touches the floor, and clearing things from under the bed all take away routes up. Combined with interceptor cups, they leave a bedbug only one way onto the bed, which is the way you are watching.

• Do it while you wait for treatment, not instead of it.
• Do not drag the bed out of the room, or move it into another bedroom.
• Keep bags and clothes off the bed and off the floor beside it.
• Carry on sleeping in the bed. Leaving it empty sends them looking elsewhere.

These steps matter most where a bed stands against a shared wall or in a room several people use. The Brent page explains how we plan treatment for a shared room.

What Treatment Does About Climbing

Neither treatment relies on bedbugs climbing anywhere. Heat raises the whole room, including the inside of metal frames and the wall behind the bed, to a temperature they cannot survive. Chemical treatment places a residual insecticide in the joints, seams and skirtings they have to cross, so the ones that hatch later walk through it.

Since the whole point is that bedbugs live close to a resting person, our guide on how bedbugs find you is the natural next read.

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