How Do You Know If You Have Bed Bugs in Greenwich?

Why Bites Prove Almost Nothing

This is the single most useful thing on this page, and it goes against every article that tells you to look for bites in a line of three.

Reactions to bed bug bites vary enormously between people. Two adults can sleep in the same bed with the same infestation and one wakes up covered while the other has nothing at all - and the one with nothing is not being spared, they simply are not reacting. Some people take days or weeks to develop a reaction. Some never do.

That cuts both ways, which is why bites are such poor evidence:

• No bites does not mean no bed bugs. A non-reacting sleeper can share a bed with an established infestation for months.
• Bites do not mean bed bugs. Fleas, mosquitoes, an allergic reaction to a new washing powder, a skin condition, and simple heat rash all produce marks people reasonably read as bites.
• The pattern is not diagnostic either. A line or a cluster is consistent with bed bugs and it is not proof of them.

What Actually Counts as Evidence

1. Live insects in the seams. Conclusive. Adults are flat, reddish-brown and about the size of an apple pip. Younger ones are smaller and much paler.
2. Small dark spots on the mattress, base or bedding. Digested blood. It marks the fabric and does not brush off, which is what separates it from dirt.
3. Pale shed skins. Empty casings in the seams, the frame joints or behind the headboard. Very good evidence, and often easier to find than the insects.
4. Eggs. Tiny, pale and glued into a crevice rather than loose. Hard to spot without good light.
5. Blood spotting on the sheet. Suggestive rather than conclusive - it happens for other reasons - but worth noting alongside anything else.

How to Inspect a Bed Properly

Ten minutes, a torch and good light. Do it in the morning if you can, because you are looking for what was left overnight.

1. Strip the bed completely and look at the sheet as you take it off, particularly around where you sleep.
2. Go along every mattress seam with the torch, opening the fold as you go. Then the labels, which are a classic harbourage nobody thinks to lift.
3. Turn the mattress and do the same on the other side, then check the base underneath it - the divan base is more often the problem than the mattress.
4. Look into the frame joints and screw holes. A wooden frame with bolt holes is close to ideal harbourage.
5. Take the headboard off the wall if it lifts off, and look at the back of it and the wall behind.
6. Pull out the bedside table and look at the back, the underside and the drawer runners.

If that produces nothing at all and the bites continue, the honest next step is to consider fleas - which produce bites around the ankles and lower legs rather than on skin that was uncovered in bed.

Where They Came From, and Why It Matters

Not because it is anybody's fault - it is not - but because the answer predicts how far the problem has spread.

Bed bugs travel with people. Luggage, bags put down in the wrong place, second-hand furniture, and between flats in a converted building. A recent hotel stay or a trip usually means one bedroom is the extent of it. A neighbouring flat in a block is a different conversation and a different plan.

Nothing to Do With Cleanliness

Worth saying plainly, because embarrassment is the single most common reason people wait months before calling - and waiting is exactly what turns a one-room job into a three-room one.

Bed bugs are found in spotless homes and in good hotels routinely. What they need is transport, not mess. Nobody who arrives to treat them is judging the property, and nobody in this trade is surprised by them.

What to Send With Your Enquiry

• A photograph of anything you found in the seams, with something beside it for scale.
• How long the bites have been appearing, and whether more than one person is affected.
• How many rooms are involved, and whether anyone has moved to another room to sleep.
• Whether any retail insecticide has already been used.

Those last two matter more than they sound. Moving rooms and spraying are the two things that turn a contained problem into a spread one, and knowing whether either has happened changes where we look.

If You Have Just Come Back From a Trip

The commonest route in, and the point at which a problem is cheapest to catch.

If you have returned from a hotel, a hostel, a rented flat or a stay with family and something is biting within the following fortnight, treat that timing as significant rather than coincidental. Bed bugs travel in luggage and the delay between arrival and being noticed is usually a week or two.

1. Inspect the bed properly, as set out above, rather than waiting to see whether the bites continue.
2. Look at the suitcase itself - the seams, the lining, the wheels and the zip channels.
3. Wash and tumble dry everything that travelled, on the hottest setting the fabric allows.
4. Do not put the case back in the bedroom until you have looked at it.

Caught in the first fortnight this is very often a single room and a single treatment. Caught six months later, after somebody has moved to the spare room, it is a different job at a different price.