I know bed bug bite hurts and they make your life a living hell if you have a severe infestation. On top of that, if you are trying to deal with these little pesky pests and the situation is getting worse every day. And you don’t know what to do.

Keep Reading to Learn what you are missing.

If your bed bug problem is worse than before treatment, I bet your exterminator wasn’t experienced to deal with these hard to deal pests.  If you did the treatment yourself, I am sure you messed something up.

The bed bug is a very strange pest to control. Their biology and makes it very difficult to control. Their only job on this planet is to suck human blood 247/365. This is their only diet!

Even some professional pest control companies often find it hard to control. Severe Bed bug infestation treatment needs sophisticated equipment. That is the reason why I received a lot of emails and comments from people who complain about exterminator even worsen their situation.

Case 1: I Did Bed Bug Treatment Myself

In the case of normal infestation, you can easily treat it with bed bug spray or traps. But if you are still seeing bed bugs and the situation is more severe than before, than you are doing something wrong.

You are not spraying where bed bugs are hiding:

Bed bug is a creepy little insect that is really really hard to treat. They start their operation in the night and hide in a crack/crevice under the bed and other strange places. In the case of a large infestation, you might some infested areas and they are growing again numbers and increasing their population. 

Bed bugs are at their peak reproductive rate in summer. A few bed bug can turn into thousands of bed bugs crawling under the mattresses, sofas, and chairs.

Using any other treatment?

If you are using any other method, it is obvious you aren’t getting control. In reality, these products only work in small infestation, for larger infestation, you have to hire someone who knows how to deal with bed bug.  Otherwise, you’d spend countless hours doing it yourself with little to no success.

I laid down important points you need to keep in mind before hiring an exterminator. Before going into that, first, let’s see how people feel about bed bugs? Lot of people I met feel shame when they talk about bed bug infestation in their home and they feel like this is their fault and there is kind of dirtiness attached to bed bugs which is a myth!

Bed bugs aren’t attracted to dirt, and cleaning your house won’t help in getting bed bugs away. I discussed a few things you might have missed when you treated your home for bed bugs. Now let’s see what could an exterminator do to worsen the situation. The points are the same but we are going to look at them from a different angle.

You can also read our guide to get rid of bed bugs permanently

Case 2: I Hired An Exterminator

It is strange, a newbie pest control operator would accept a job that they can’t do. They would just spray all over the place and hope for results, without knowing about which species of bed bug they are dealing with and what is the insect biology and behaviour.

I stress on this too much, and I repeatedly raised questions about how most companies treat bed bugs.

Note

Just low price is not the single indicator of low quality work. There is a multinational company doing poor work. You should do your due diligence before hiring a pest control company and this article is going to help you a low.

So here is the reality: treating bed bug is expensive because it takes a lot of time and equipment. And you might opt for a cheaper option, and it won’t make sense for these companies to do thorough inspection and treatment for such a low amount.

So keep reading….

Bed Bug Resistance

Bed bug develop resistance to the specific insecticide. Your exterminator might not figure it out. As I explained above, they only can spray and pray options if you sign up for their lower price service. 

A professional bed bug exterminator would take hours to study which species they are dealing with and to see if there is resistance issue. In case of resistance, they would rotate different insecticide and increase their chance of control.

Note

If they are using heat treatment, bed bug resistance won’t be an issue.

Diagnosing resistance issue is very hard and time tracking process. It would require periodic visits to see the impact of a specific type of treatment change the ingredient when and where required.

This is the reason why pest control companies like to use heat treatment in commercial accounts like hotel and hospitals because there is a limited time window for someone to treat the area.

Your Exterminator is not diagnosing the infestation

As I said above, a bed bug is not the type insect you’d spray and pray for results. It takes a lot of time and dedication to first figure out what bed bug species you are dealing with. And see document history of insecticide you used in the past and type of results you got.

And there are a lot of other things a professional exterminator would consider to do before mapping out a treatment strategy.

Hired a the cheap guy in Town? they might know what they are doing and they just sprayed your house or didn’t diagnose the issue before starting the treatment. Which isn’t going to work in any case.

Bed Bugs Are Still Biting You After Treatment?

I understand your situation, I got too many emails asking the same question. This seems to be a common issue. A lot of folks hire an exterminator and think that they would solve the problem. But they don’t.

You should look for the above point before you hire an exterminator and ask questions about their treatment strategy and previous experience in handling bed bugs.

Few minutes of research and due diligence with exterminator can help you a lot to weed out guys who don’t know what you are doing. As I said above, treating bed bug is very difficult and you only professional and experienced bed bug exterminator and it is going to be expensive. I am talking about $300-500 per treatment at the lowest.

It might get higher depending on the amount of infestation.

PRO TIP

Do not lie to your exterminator about what chemical and other methods you used in the past. This is going to help them understand if there is any resistance issue. If you do not provide accurate information they aren’t going to deal with it successfully.

Do you have any questions? Post a comment below and start a conversation. I’d love to talk to you guys and learn if you have something insightful. This is the only way we can increase your knowledge just by fruitful discussion.