well a great way to look for them would be to set a pillow or some un wanted piece of material and see if it gets covored. then if you find any call an exterminator

Well, I answered a similar question here at Mahalo not too long ago (see first link in sources). My wife and I were bitten by bedbugs in a hotel in San Francisco. This was a nightmare not only because of the bites but because I worried that we had brought the bed bugs home. One of our friends had a very difficult time getting rid of them from her apartment, and it costed her a fortune. Bed bugs can live up to a year on one meal!

Our dermatologist prescribed topical permethrin cream 5% and recommended we spray the bedding with Permethrin insecticide. I still have two cans of bedding spray, and two tubes of the cream so let me know if you want me to send them to you. However, you may not want to because permethrin is a neurotoxin and possible carcinogen, and can remain in your bedding for a long time, even after repeated washings. Permethrin is especially toxic to cats.

If you do not want to use permethrin, there are other ways to kill them.....isopropyl alcohol, heat and steam. We washed all our bedding at high temperature. Our washer has a sterilize cycle, which heats the hot water from the mains to an even a higher temperature. Fortunately for us, a bed bug problem never developed.

If you have a home infestation, you will have to call in professional exterminators. They may use any of the following insecticides to get rid of bed bugs:

Allethrin
Delta Dust - 0.05% (deltamethrin)
Pyrethrins
Resmethrin - 0.3% spray
Suspend SC - 0.6% spray
Drione Dust
Flee/Dragnet FT - 0.5% spray
Malathion 57% EL - 4 table spoons per gal. of non-odor kerosene
Tempo 2 - 0.05 - 0.1% spray
Tempo 0.1% dust
Tempo 20 WP

duenhsiyen

To find:

Bedbugs are tiny, reddish brown in color, and oval in shape. They do not have wings. The first thing you should do is inspect your mattress. If you've got red or brown spots along the ticking of the mattress, that's a good indicator of the presence of bedbugs, he said.

The only way to know for sure that you do have bedbugs is to capture one of the bugs -- or get its shed skin -- and take it to an expert for verification. There are also specially trained dogs that can be use to sniff for the presence of bedbugs.

The EPA has advised that if traveling, one should inspect hotel rooms for possible pests and the dark dots that they leave behind. Travelers are advised to keep their luggage off the floor and to zip their belongings up.

Remove all sheets and the mattress pad from the bed in the hotel, and check the mattress for the telltale dark dots. Check behind the headboard and around the bedframe with a flashlight. Even if you don't see anything suspicious, don't keep any belongings on the floor. Keep clothes in asuitcase, and zip it up at night. Hard-sided luggage makes it harder for bedbugs to hop inside.

To get rid of:

Last week, the EPA warned consumers about using outdoor pesticides in homes to control the problem. Instead, residents can invest in protective covers to fully encase their mattresses to combat the pesky critters. These force bugs out of mattresses so they become more visible. There are also small bait devices that can be put onto the floor under the feet of the bed. They will lure bedbugs out.

The EPA has advised consumers to reduce clutter, vacuum often and dry infested clothes at high temperatures.

Homeowners also can choose extermination, but it's a process that easily could cost anywhere from $800 to $1,200.

I have had bedbugs and they SUCK!!! The way I knew I had them is because I was getting bites all over me and it was making me itchy after showers. The way I killed them is I took my mattress and box spring outside and spayed them with raid and also sprayed uderneath my bed and around with raid. I then left the mattress outside to air out and left the window open for my room to air out. Good luck! Get rid of those things ASAP!!!

They are attracted to a gas.

I had to do a bit of research on these tiny little blood suckers for an uncle of mine about 6 months or so ago. He works for a man who owns a bunch of apartment buildings in downtown detroit and needed some advice on cost-effective methods on getting rid of the pests. Obviously having an exterminator go through an apartment complex would be incredibly expensive. I"m not going to rip from the sites, I'll just write my general recollection, I hope you appriciate my honesty.

As far as checking for them, if you are finding reddish spots on your mattresses, sheets, carpets, dressers, or other cracks and crevasses that would be the shells of the bugs, a sure sign of their presence. Black spots are their feces, make sure to wash your hands after handling items with feces on it, conjuctivitis isn't pleasant. Bed bugs will only come out at night or in low-light situations, and that is where they are hiding right now, in cracks in between floorboards, inside dressers, under mattresses, corners of molding, every single dark spot of the room.

Extermination treatments may have worked for some people but aren't always a guarentee, it could take more than one treatment depending on the size of the infestation or how many eggs were left behind because the bed bug eggs are sometimes resistant to chemical treatments. This becomes very costly if more and more treatments are needed.

I couldn't see how UV light would ever kill a bed bug, it just doesn't seem biologically plausible, although they do dislike light, to include artificial light, there is one remedy you can try which is cheap and somewhat easy.

Bed bugs are absolutely sensitive to extremely hot temperatures, and a steam cleaner or some sort of steam gun, is a sure fire way to drive them out of their hiding places or, if the steam is hot enough, kill them on contact. Not only will it kill the bugs themselves but also their eggs, take all your sheets, clothes that were in the dressers where the bugs were and wash them in very hot temperatures. Run the steam cleaner over your mattresses, the bed fixture itself, the key here is to be thorough, go over the room with a fine tooth comb so to speak. Go over it twice, maybe three times just to be sure, if it saves money on an exterminator then it is certainly worth it. I would suggest even getting underneath the room where the infestation was and using the steam there as well, anywhere darkness lurks, so does the bed bug.

I've had them 2 years ago, I needed an exterminator. He told me to confirm by lifting up my matress and checking for dead bed bug carcasses, most bed bug infestations will have them. You would also find tiny black pellets of bed bug faeces. The exterminator took an hour and I haven't seen a bed bug since.