If you start looking online, you can find a lot of information and tips on what you can do to try to find or catch bedbugs yourself. It is a jungle of both good and less good tips. The purpose of this post is to simply try to guide you right about what information and tips are useful and which ones you can skip completely.

Ironing the bed to attract bed bugs?
A movie that has gone viral is one that you could take an iron and iron over the mattress in a hotel to see if there are bedbugs or not. This does not work. What you see in the video is not bedbugs, it’s just ordinary garbage. Bedbugs will absolutely not run towards a heat source like that. So skip this altogether!

Traps?
There are a number of different types of bedbug traps on the market, ranging from sticky traps to pheromone traps.
The purpose of pheromone traps is to attract any bedbugs that then get stuck in the trap. The scent emitted by these traps is supposed to be the scent of the bed bugs’ nest, i.e. a place the bed bugs naturally want to go to. This pheromone scent is extremely complex and has been studied for many, many years. Far from all pheromone traps on the market deliver what they promise, i.e. that it smells like a nest scent should smell. Nattaro Labs is a Swedish research and development company that specializes in bed bugs and has developed a pheromone trap that we believe is the most worth spending money on if you want to test traps first. However, there are no guarantees that the traps will work in all cases. Bed bugs are a complicated subject.
Sticky traps are the traps that usually work the absolute worst and, in our opinion, are not worth spending any money on at all. With sticky traps you simply need a lot of luck to catch anything in them.
Climb up traps are traps placed under the legs of a bed or sofa to catch bed bugs crawling on the floor and trying to get onto the bed or sofa. These traps are mainly used as a monitoring and control method in places where bed bugs are known to be present, it is not a trap you should spend money on if you want to check whether you have bed bugs or not. The reason for this is the same as why double-sided tape around bed legs is not a monitoring method for suspected bed bugs.

Double-sided tape around bed legs?
A very common tip you can get both through information online but also if you talk directly to a pest control company is that you should put double-sided tape around the bed legs to be able to monitor whether there are bed bugs in the bed or not. This does not work! The answer to why it doesn’t work lies in the knowledge of the bedbugs’ life patterns combined with the fact that you have probably been looking for this kind of information in the first place, i.e. you have been bitten by something. If you are going to use double-sided tape, the absolute best place to put it is around the bed frame itself. However, there are a number of different factors that affect the effectiveness of this method, ranging from the type of bed you have and whether or not you have a headboard…etc.

Cedar oil?
Bed bugs are classified as one of the most difficult pests to eradicate. If cedar oil had any effect at all on bed bugs, both we and the pest control companies would have very little to do about bed bugs. No, it does not work.

What to do then?
Bringing in a pest technician to do an initial visual inspection is always free and included in the home insurance or in the insurance your landlord or cooperative has. However, it is far from always possible to get this kind of free help as it is completely impossible for the pest control companies to send out a pest control technician to every person who suspects they have bedbugs. It is simply not possible, and we understand that. You can certainly try a good pheromone trap or double-sided tape around the bed frame and monitor this for a week or two. However, the results of these two methods should not be taken at face value. If you haven’t caught anything in the traps but are still getting bites, it’s important to get expert help. We carry out the same types of visual inspections as a pest control technician does, but we have an additional tool at our disposal, the dog’s keen sense of smell.

Your time is too valuable to go around worrying about bed bugs, get help right away to get answers right away. That’s the absolute best advice we can give.

However, if you want to use a dog, it is very important to choose the provider carefully. If the dog is marking for bedbugs, it is very important to ask the dog handler to visually confirm this and photo document. Failure to do so may result in the pest control company choosing not to do the cleanup if they cannot see any signs of bed bugs themselves.

A bed bug dog looking for small infestations and single bed bugs must work calmly and methodically.