Can Bedbugs Live in Houseplants in Westminster?

People ask this for two reasons. Either they have seen something small crawling in a pot and are frightened it is a bedbug, or they have booked a treatment and want to know what to do with a flat full of greenery. Both are fair questions, and the answers are reassuring.

Why Soil Is the Wrong Home

A bedbug lives on the blood of a sleeping person. Everything about where it hides follows from that: it wants to be close to the bed, in a tight, dry crack with a hard surface either side, where it can wait between feeds without being disturbed.

Damp compost is close to the opposite. It is loose, wet, full of other small creatures, and usually nowhere near where anyone sleeps. Bedbugs do not eat plants, do not lay eggs in soil, and have no reason to climb a stem. A plant in a sitting room window is about as uninteresting to them as a kitchen cupboard.

What People Usually Find in Pots

If something is moving in a pot, it is almost certainly a plant pest rather than a bedbug. The usual suspects are small black flies that lift off the compost when you water, tiny pale creatures that jump when disturbed, and white fluffy patches on the leaves. None of them bites people.

A bedbug looks quite different: flat, oval, reddish-brown, roughly the size of an apple pip when grown, with no wings and no jumping. If what you caught matches that, keep it in a sealed jar and ring 0800 955 1018. If you are not sure, the London guide on telling bedbugs from other insects goes through the common mix-ups.

When a Pot Does Matter

The plant is never the issue. The container can be. A pot kept on a bedside table, a woven basket used as a cover pot, a wooden plant stand pushed against the headboard wall: each of these offers dry joints and folds within a short walk of a sleeping person, and in a heavy problem the edges of the bedroom fill up with hiding places of every kind.

• Look at the rim, the underside and any saucer of pots kept in the bedroom.
• Check the weave of wicker or seagrass baskets, and the joints of wooden stands.
• Ignore the soil itself; you do not need to dig through it or repot anything.
• Pots in other rooms are very unlikely to be involved at all.

Finding dark spotting or pale shed skins on a basket beside the bed tells you about the bedroom, not about the plant. That is useful information to give us when you ring.

Plants Before a Heat Treatment

Heat takes the whole room to a temperature bedbugs cannot survive and holds it there. Plants would not survive it either, so they are on the list of things that come out of the room first, along with aerosols, candles, medication and some electronics.

1. Move every plant out of the rooms being treated before we arrive, including any on windowsills and shelves.
2. Take them somewhere with no signs of bedbugs: a kitchen, a balcony or a room we are not treating.
3. Before carrying a pot out of the bedroom, look at its rim, saucer and outer container, and leave a basket behind if it shows signs.
4. Bring them back once the room has cooled and the job is finished.

In a flat where the living room is full of plants, that can mean a crowded kitchen for a day. Tell us when you book if there are large or heavy ones, and we can plan the rooms around them. The Westminster heat treatment page covers what the day looks like in a flat.

Plants and Chemical Treatment

Chemical treatment puts a residual insecticide into seams, frames, skirtings and joints, not across open surfaces, and each visit is one to two hours. Whether a plant needs to leave the room for that depends on where it stands, so mention them when you ring and follow the instructions you are given on the day. The chemical treatment page explains the visits.

← Bedbug Control Westminster · Bedbug Control London