Best way to detect Bed Bugs in a Vacant Home Sensci Volcano Lures Phoenix Pest Control TN

11 months ago
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Best way to detect Bed Bugs in a Vacant Home Sensci Volcano Lures
Bed Bugs need humans to get excited about moving around their environment. When humans aren’t there and there is no food, they only have 2 options.
They can go looking for food, but there won’t be any and they aren’t travelling as far as the neighbor’s house.
The other option is to go dormant. We have all heard about them surviving up to a year without feeding but that is only in a lab setting where they didn’t have a choice. You can go 3 weeks without food but you aren’t going to are you? You are going to find a Burger King somewhere right? Well… so are they. So chances are they are going to move around a bit but if there is no food, they have no choice but to shelter in place. The good news is when this happens, they cannot mate, molt or lay eggs. They don’t grow, but they don’t shrink either.
When we treat a vacant location, we will need to get deeper than normal and try to draw them out. Bed Bugs are attracted to warmth, blood, and carbon dioxide, which is what we breathe out. So, unless you are willing to spend the night and be the sacrificial bed bug attractor, we need to simulate these attractants somehow.
Carbon dioxide is probably the easiest and cheapest thing to simulate. You can use dry ice, which is not water, it is frozen carbon dioxide. It doesn’t have a liquid state at normal atmospheric pressure so when it melts, it changes from a solid directly into a gas. You can also use CO2 canisters to release Carbon dioxide. However, in my testing this didn’t work all that well. I wonder if it is because of the little bit of oil that is inside them to lubricate the air guns they are used in. I don’t know. Both of these have 1 major flaw, they are cold and don’t exactly represent the hot co2 we breathe out. But it’s an option.
 
I would love to leave some mice in a cage to attract the bed bugs out but haven’t had the opportunity to try that yet. I’m sure the PETA hippies would get their panties in a bunch over that but I don’t care. I kill mice every day, at least here they can do some good for once.
 
The scensi lure, when used with the volcano pitfall trap in my experience works better because it mimics chemicals found on your skin. It also lasts way longer than any other method, up to 3 months. On top of that, since it is a trap, you can monitor the population going forward. Normal sticky traps and traps without a lure don’t do that well at catching and monitoring bed bugs, especially in a vacant home where you need to draw them out to force them into your treatment and to monitor activity. Some smarty pants scientist discovered that they prefer the color black. Hey! Me too. I like to think bed bugs are metal heads. What do you think? I can’t see them drinking your blood to some bubble gum pop. Anyway, bed bugs aren’t great at walking on smooth surfaces because of their feet. The best way to describe it is a hook. A textured soft wall or fabric are no match for Mr bed bug but smooth plastic or glass, not so much. So, the Volcano uses this to our advantage, we are the smarter species after all. The exterior of the Volcano is textured so they can grab on and angled up. The idea is that they may be used to climbing up bed legs and this attempts to simulate that. Also its black. (metal music short) But when they get to the top edge it is smooth and slippery, causing them to fall into the trap right on what lured them in. of course the insides are smooth and inverted so they aren’t getting out of there. The blackout trap is made to go under the legs of the bed and catch them coming and going. The blackout also uses these simple concepts. I love simple solutions to complex problems.
 
The other difficulty with a vacant unit even with all the tools and knowledge is determining when they are gone and when to bring the K9s in to verify since your feedback is very limited at best.  This can prolong elimination since our only feedback is the traps. The problem is if 5 bed bugs are in a trap when we come back, we have no way to know if they were caught on day 1 or day 30. If everything was caught on day 1, and then nothing, then you are probably good to go. If they were caught throughout the month or on day 30 then you will need another treatment. There is no way to know. So, we have to compare what we find today with what we found last time. We must follow a trend to decide what the next prudent step is.
 
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