Do bed bugs live in your clothes

Do bed bugs live in your clothes?

Bed bugs are excellent hitchhikers capable of cleaving to luggage, piece of clothing unnoticed. These pesky, blood sucking critters can live just about anywhere. Joints of furniture, crevices on the floor, minute cracks on wooden doors and, worse, clothing materials. So, they can live and thrive on your clothes.

Now, if you career is such that it requires you traveling frequently, you are at a high risk of bringing home bed bugs. Their sneaky disposition makes it extremely difficult to notice their presence. When they infest your cloth, burrowing into deep hidden places like pockets is the very first thing they will do. So picking them up won’t be that easy. But don’t lose hope yet – you can fight back. Here are some of the cost effective techniques for treating a bug infested clothing.

1. First, avoid the bugs

Prevention, they say, is better than cure. This also holds true for bed bug infestation management. Keeping bed bugs away from your clothe is easier and more cost effective than treating the infected cloth. Keeping your clothes safe from bed bug infestation involves:

• Minding places you visit and where you lodge. Not every hotel is worth lodging in. Some are just havens for bed bug. So, before lodging in a hotel, do a thorough research – browse customer reviews, ask questions.
• Avoid placing your luggage on top of the bed in hotel rooms. If that bed were to be infested with bugs, you would end up packing a colony of bed bug home. Instead, place the luggage on top table tops or wardrobe. Better still, place it right in the middle of the bathtub – bathtubs are too slippery for bugs to climb on.

2. Heat Treatment

There are a few things bugs can’t stand. One is extreme heat; another is extreme cold. But there is a catch – bugs can survive any harsh temperature, no matter how hot or cold. However, when temperatures are set to extremes and for a long period of time, their chances of surviving becomes almost zero. You don’t need specialized equipment or the help of a professional to heat treat an infected clothe. A dryer set to the highest temperature is enough to get the job done. Only ensure the clothes stay for at least 2 hours in the dryer. A rule of thumb: the longer the clothes stay in the dryer the better. You wouldn’t want to spare one single bug or bug’s egg.

3. Sun exposure

Certain clothing material can’t just be placed in a dryer. Lingerie is a typical example. For such materials, a subtle heat treatment will suffice. Have the lingerie – and any other tender clothing material – wrapped in a plastic bag and subject to the heat of the sun. Leave for several hours to raise temperatures in the plastic bag. For better results, let sun beat the clothes for several days. This will ensure every single bug is killed off.

4. Use of Spray

Nature Mace’s Bed Bug Killer, free of toxins and safe around kids, is your best bet.