Where Do Professional Pest Controllers Look for Bedbugs?

If you have read how bedbugs choose a harbourage, the logic here will be familiar: dark, tight on several sides, and as close to a sleeping person as possible. What follows is that logic applied to the places people forget are close to a bed.

Things People Sleep In That Are Not Beds

The single largest category of missed harbourage, because the inspection was booked for a bedroom.

• Recliner chairs — the mechanism housing underneath is dark, tight and almost never looked at. In a home where someone dozes in a chair, this is frequently the main population
• Sofas where somebody has been sleeping since the problem started
• Sofa beds, in the folded mechanism as well as the mattress
• Wheelchairs and mobility chairs — cushions, seams and the frame joints
• Car seats, for anyone who spends long periods in a vehicle. Uncommon, real, and never checked

High Up, Where Nobody Looks

Bedbugs are usually described as staying low. In an established infestation where the harbourages near the bed are crowded, they spread upward and outward, and a room that looks clear at knee height can be busy at picture height.

• Picture frames and the wall behind them
• Curtain hems, pelmets and the top of a curtain pole
• Coving, and any gap where it has come away from the wall
• Smoke alarms and light fittings — dark, warm and undisturbed
• The top edge of a wardrobe and the gap above it

Inside Things

• Alarm clocks and radios on a bedside table. A warm object within a metre of a head is close to ideal
• Books, in the spine and between pages, on a bedside shelf
• Plug sockets and light switches, behind the faceplate
• Telephone and cable entry points where they pass through a wall
• Anything screwed to the wall with a gap behind it — a headboard, a shelf bracket, a TV bracket

The Routes Between Rooms

In flats and terraces these matter as much as the harbourages, because they explain how a neighbour's problem becomes yours.

• Pipe runs where they pass through a wall or floor
• Cable and conduit entries
• The void under a floorboard at the skirting line
• Gaps around a service riser in a block
• Under a connecting door with no sweep on it

Why These Get Missed

Not usually laziness. Three structural reasons:

• The inspection was scoped to a room. The recliner is in the lounge, so nobody looked at it
• The obvious harbourage was found early. Once there are bedbugs in the divan, the temptation is to stop searching and start treating
• Nobody asked the right question. 'Has anyone been sleeping anywhere else?' finds more missed harbourages than any amount of torchwork

What This Means for a Failed Treatment

If a treatment did not hold and it was not a hatching issue, the probability is high that one of the above was never treated, because it was never found.

That is why a re-inspection after a failure is worth more than a repeat treatment. Applying the same product to the same places a second time addresses none of it.

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