You might wonder how to find bed bugs during the day. These insects are nocturnal and typically come out at night to feed, so you’re not likely to see them scurrying around on your mattress by day. You can find them if you look in their hiding spots, though, and you can also find signs of them that they leave behind.
How can you find bed bugs during the day? This can be a challenge! Bed bugs generally come out at night and feast on humans who are sleeping or resting in the vicinity. During the day, they hide in tiny crevices where they can stay out of sight. We’ll go into all of the info you need on how to find bed bugs during the day, but here are a few facts to get you started:
Before you can look for bed bugs, you need to know what they look like. Bed bugs are small and brown. They’re oval-shaped and flattened, so they fit in super skinny cracks and crevices. Sometimes they’re fatter and redder after they’ve eaten. Since they eat at night, you’ll want to keep the time of day in mind when you’re looking; they’re likely to look plumper in the morning than in the afternoon.
They’re anywhere between 1/8” to about 3/8” long, depending on their age. While the smallest bed bugs can be difficult to see, they’re not too small to see with the naked eye.
Bed bugs have six legs and no wings, though you can see what looks like wing pads on the backs of adult bed bugs. They scurry, but they can’t jump or fly.
While it’s difficult to find bed bugs during the day, it’s not impossible. What you need to do is look where they’re hiding. For the most part, they won’t be hanging out on your sheets or your pillowcase; instead, they’ll find tight, often dark areas where they can hide undetected until after the sun goes down.
The edge of your mattress near the seams is a good place to start looking. Strip your bed and take a good look all along the edges. Remove the pillowcases and check the inner seams. You can also move the mattress and look at the edges of the bed frame that support the mattress. They might be hiding between the carpet and baseboard, or between the slats of wood if you have hardwood floors.
You might not find any bed bugs even if you have an infestation, but there are other signs you can look for that will tell you that you have unwanted guests.
When you’re looking during the day, you’re likely to find a few clues that you have bed bugs even if you don’t see any live bugs. Here are a few of them:
If you do find a bed bug during the day or otherwise (or if you simply find signs of bed bugs in your house), you’ll want to take quick action. Bed bugs can reproduce at an alarming rate. Female bugs can lay up to seven eggs per day, and they hatch after two weeks. Six weeks after hatching, the babies can begin reproducing. You don’t need to be a math whiz to recognize that you can have a very large infestation very quickly if you ignore the signs of having bed bugs in your house.
It’s also important to keep in mind that by the time you find bed bugs or detect the signs of an infestation, you don’t have one or two or a dozen bed bugs. You have a lot.
So, what should you do? Ideally, you will realize that you have this problem during the day and you will immediately call an exterminator, who will have the time that day to go to your house and begin an effective treatment.
Unfortunately, these things do not always happen in an ideal fashion, so you might realize the problem at midnight, on a holiday, or on a week when your local professional exterminator is overbooked and can’t make it for a few days.
In this case, you can try some DIY mitigation tips, but understand that it’s very unlikely that they’ll eliminate an infestation. You’re really going to need to get in touch with a pro ASAP. In the meantime, try these tips:
Knowing how to identify bed bugs and how to find them during the day will help you get on top of an infestation sooner rather than later, so if you think you might have these unwelcome critters in your home, be alert for the signs and call in a professional as soon as you have confirmation that you have them.
Featured image by Pexels / Pixabay
Article image by CDC/Harvard University / Wikimedia
Article image by Jeremiah Adams / Flickr
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