QUESTION:

People are talking about fogging for Bed Bugs and applying a residual application to exterior surfaces around baseboards and wood work. My opinion is that there is no substitute for thoroughness and that fogging would probably not reach harboring bed bugs hidden deep inside voids, and that the majority of chemical treatment needs to be applied in areas that the bugs harbor, providing longer exposure time to the products. What is your recommended treatment for bed bug infestation?

ANSWER:

I agree with you completely Stephen, and suspect that a lot of technicians are going to shake their heads and say that I am out of my mind. But, given what we currently know about bed bugs and their susceptibility to our current insecticides we recognize the need to ensure the longest possible exposure to the active ingredients. Applying the products to open, exposed surfaces either by fogging or by "baseboard" spraying and expecting the bed bugs to linger on those exposed surfaces long enough to absorb a lethal dose of the active ingredient is, in my opinion, danged optimistic. We learned this a LONG time ago with German cockroach control, that these fast moving insects just ran over the narrow swath of active ingredient sprayed along baseboards and had no chance of picking up enough a.i. to kill them. Applying the insecticide directly into their harborage points was the best method of control. Ironically, this also placed that active ingredient out of reach of humans and pets that might live or work in that area, and this still needs to be a consideration with bed bug control too.

The Common Bed Bug is primarily a nocturnal creature, and therefore spends all of those daylight (or artificial light) hours hidden in some crevice, hole, or void. It just makes good sense that this is where we should apply our poisons (yes, I know, I said that word) to have the best and longest contact with them. Some studies by one of our most respected bed bug researchers recently concluded that for many of our commonly used insecticides it took many hours of contact with the active ingredient to kill bed bugs, often not even killing 100% of them. You might enhance this with the use of dusts or microencapsulated formulations, where the particles containing the active ingredient are more likely to cling to the exoskeleton of the passing bug, but even with these the best application is to place the product directly into the harborage points where the bugs will spend perhaps 20+ hours of the day. Since a bed bug feeds for no more than 10 minutes it seems logical that it comes out of hiding, locates the blood source, feeds, and then goes back into hiding. These are fairly fast-moving insects, so they do not linger on exposed surfaces any longer than they have to.

Perhaps the fogging / surface spraying concept is related to a desire to keep the price down by doing the work as fast as possible. Perhaps there is a misunderstanding about the capability of a fog to penetrate into voids of any kind, which it will not. Perhaps there is still a belief out there that The Common Bed Bug can be attacked in the same manner you might treat for earwigs or crickets, which you cannot. As our experts have told us many times, the bed bug cannot be successfully treated in the same manner as ANY other structural pest, and to do so is to be doomed to failure. I personally think that fogging has no place in bed bug control (again, I recognize that there will be serious disagreement). The pyrethrum DOES seem to enhance the effectiveness of the insecticides used, but it should be mixed with the residual active ingredient and applied as the crack and crevice treatment. Granted, it takes longer to properly treat every crack, crevice, and void in an infested room, but this is going to be the best way of knowing that all the bed bugs are going to be exposed to the active ingredient for the longest period of time, which currently seems to be needed.

Further, if we listen to our industry's best experts in this area, total reliance on insecticides to eliminate bed bugs is also not the best policy. These are tenacious animals, and defeating them down to the very last nymph and egg is best done with many non-chemical tools and techniques as well. These include the installation of mattress / boxspring / pillow / sofa encasements, steam along mattress seams or carpet edges, heat with laundering, dryers, or heat chambers, monitors and traps to determine the succes of the program.

And, I really have to include the vital need for PROPER IDENTIFICATION. I have seen many other kinds of bugs identified improperly as The Common Bed Bug, including carpet beetles and crab lice. I also recently identified for a PMP some BAT bugs that were in a home, and these would be treated very differently from The Common Bed Bug. Without proper ID we are likely to go off on the wrong path, and this is not helping our customers or our reputations.

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