When bed bugs first come into your home, they arrive ready to breed. It doesn’t take long for bed bugs to start biting you in your bed once they have followed you home. Bed bugs are attracted to their food source – you –  by your carbon dioxide. Once they find you, they will stay within an eight foot or so radius keeping your close as their source of food.

If you have brought bed bugs home recently you may not even know that they are present for several months. In fact some people don’t even have a reaction to bites and so their first sign of a bed bug presence is small fecal spots or red spots on their sheets. If you can see the bed bugs on your bed, you are at an infestation level.

It is easier and less expensive to treat a bed bug problem that is in the early stages. However, detection at this early stage can be problematic. Sometimes a visual identification of these pests is not possible at such a low level. If you have bite marks, this may be proof enough, that you have bed bugs and prompt you to pay for a bed bug treatment right away. For others, a confirmation of the presence of bed bugs is warranted. This is where bed bug detection devices are practical to use.

There are many new inexpensive bed bug detectors on the market. The one’s we particularly like are glue dotted strips. Just stick them on your mattress and headboard and in one to two weeks pull the strips apart to see if you have trapped any bed bugs. For low levels of bed bugs or a situation where you are simply not sure if you have bed bugs or fleas from a pet, using a detector can be a time and money saver; helping you to treat only when you have real evidence of a bed bug problem.