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Why it Is Difficult To Declare That A Bed Bug Infestation is Eliminated.

02/12/2013

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* There are no absolute reliable monitoring devices that exist today.
* Visual inspections can miss low-level bed bug populations as these can hide behind walls, outlets, baseboards, cracks in the walls, inside electronics etc.
* A treatment may miss eggs that were inaccessible and these may hatch later.
* Bed bugs can go into hiding for quite some time after a meal and thus are more likely to escape the effects of pesticide treatments.
* There are no standardized, cookie-cutter methods for treating bed bugs. 
* Partly because every situation is different and every treatment approach should be tailored to it.
* Bed bugs proliferate very rapidly and thus can build resistance relatively fast to pesticides.
* One bed bug population that originated from one source can develop an entirely different resistance level  to pesticides compared to another bed bug population from another source.
* Bed bugs often stop biting after an insecticide treatment.
* No one really understands how bed bugs behave in the absence of hosts.
* There is no way of telling whether bed bugs that suddenly reappear weeks later are newly introduced since the last treatment or are remnants of the last infestation.
I would therefore highly recommend to ask our K9s to conduct a bed bug inspection and detect those pesky elusive critters all the way down to 1 live bed bug of egg.  Call us at 508-713-8267 or contact us here.
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IPM and Bed Bug Dog Detection

02/22/2012

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Let me start by quoting one definition of IPM which BTW stands for Integreated Pest Management:
"IPM is a process consisting of the balanced use of cultural, biological, and chemical procedures at are environmentally  compatible and economically feasible to reduce pest populations to tolerable levels." 
The benefits are:
- it saves money - it has to do with the process
- it promotes a healthy environment because it reduces the use of chemical pesticides
- and for the entertainment and hospitality industry, it maintains a good image.  It shows that you are pro-active and that your primary concern is your customer and his/her health and piece of mind.
So, using a dog to detect bed bugs before it becomes a huge, costly and un-controllable problem fits well within the IPM approach.  Using a dog is cost-effective because a dog can scan a room  in 3 minutes on average (compared to a human visual inspection of 30 minutes), pinpoint the location of the infestation and thus prevent a broad-spectrum application of pesticide use to eradicate bed bugs. 
Same with heat treatment.  The dog can pinpoint infestation to a room and check adjacent rooms for infestation and thus minimize heat treatment to those rooms.  A bed bug detection dog like Nicki or Malamer is a no-brainer.  Plus they are sooooo cute!
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