How Can You Tell If You Have Bedbugs or Something Else?

Almost everyone who rings us starts with bites. It is completely understandable and it is the least reliable evidence there is, so the first useful thing is to stop looking at your skin and start looking at the bed.

Why Bites Cannot Settle It

• Reactions vary enormously. Two people in the same bed, bitten the same number of times, can produce a row of welts and nothing at all
• Reactions are delayed, sometimes by days, so the night you were bitten is not the night you noticed
• The classic 'line of three' is real but far from universal
• Plenty of non-bite conditions produce something that looks identical

If a skin reaction is bothering you, a pharmacist or GP is the right person for that side of it. For working out what caused it, the evidence is in the furniture.

The Ten-Minute Check

Wait until the bed has not been made for a few hours, take a bright torch — a phone torch is fine — and work in this order.

1. The mattress seam at the head end. Both sides, along the piped edge, and into the label pocket. Hold the torch at a low angle rather than straight on; the shadows are what show you the spotting.
2. Under the mattress corner. Lift it and look at the top of the divan base and the underside of the mattress.
3. Inside the divan. Most bases have corner vents or a fabric underside you can look into. This is routinely the biggest population in the room and the most commonly missed.
4. The bed frame joints and screw holes. Screw holes especially — they are exactly the right size and they are the last place anyone looks.
5. Behind the headboard. Pull it forward or run the torch down the gap. A buttoned headboard is close to perfect habitat.
6. The two metres around the bed. Bedside drawers and their runners, the carpet edge, the skirting.

What You Are Looking For

• Dark spotting — small ink-like marks on the seam that do not brush off. The commonest first sign, frequently mistaken for mould or dirt
• Shed skins — pale, translucent, bedbug-shaped and hollow. These matter more than a live insect, because they prove something has been growing there rather than just visiting
• Live bedbugs — flat, oval, reddish-brown, about the size of an apple pip. Rounder and darker after a feed
• Eggs — about a millimetre, pearl white, glued into a crack. Hard to see and worth knowing exist

If It Is Not Bedbugs

Four things account for most of the alternatives, and each has a tell.

Fleas

Bites round the ankles and lower legs rather than on the torso and arms. Usually a pet, and you can often see them jump. They are also much more likely to be seen alive in the open, which bedbugs rarely are.

Carpet beetle larvae

The reaction comes from the hairs rather than a bite, and it looks very like bedbug bites. Look at the carpet edge and under furniture for small bristly larvae or their cast skins, not at the mattress.

Bird mites

Almost always a nest in a soffit, a chimney or a loft, and usually seasonal — it starts when the young birds leave and the mites go looking for a new host. A very tiny, fast-moving speck rather than anything you could describe.

Skin conditions

Eczema, hives and reactions to a new detergent, a new mattress protector or a change of medication all get read as bites, particularly after somebody has stayed in a hotel or read a news story. This is more common than people think and there is nothing embarrassing about it.

If You Find Something

• Do not spray it. A shop aerosol scatters them into wall voids and makes professional treatment harder and dearer
• Do not strip the bed before someone has looked
• Do not move to another room. You take them with you
• Photograph it where it is, with the torch at an angle
• Catch one if you can — a sealed bag or a small pot. It settles the question instantly

Then send us the photograph on WhatsApp. A clear picture of a seam is usually all we need to tell you what you are dealing with.

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