What a Professional Bed Bug Inspection Checks, Room by Room

A bed bug inspection is an evidence search. Someone takes the bed and the upholstered furniture apart, works outward from where people sleep, and reads stains, shed skins and eggs rather than waiting to spot a live insect. Confirming the species matters as much as finding it, because several other pests get reported as bed bugs first.

Where The Inspection Starts

At the bed, and the order is not arbitrary. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's guidance on finding bed bugs sends you to the piping, seams and tags of the mattress and box spring first, then to the cracks in the bed frame and the headboard. Bed bugs feed on a sleeping person and hide within reach of one, so that is where the evidence concentrates.

The difference between an inspection and a look around is that the furniture comes apart. The box spring gets tipped so the dust cover underneath can be checked, the headboard comes off the wall, and frame joints get opened where they open. A mattress that looks clean from above often has rust colored spotting along a seam on the underside, and nobody finds that standing up.

What Counts As Evidence

Live insects are only one of the things an inspector is looking for, and in a light infestation they are the least likely to turn up. The EPA's list of what to look for runs like this:

The EPA is direct about why the timing matters: a minor infestation found early is easier to deal with than the same infestation once it has spread through a house or a building. That is the whole argument for having someone look at the first sign rather than the third. If you want to see what the staining and the shed skins look like before anyone comes out, our bed bug identification guide has the pictures.

How Far Past The Bedroom Does It Go?

As far as the evidence does. The EPA notes that in a heavily infested room bed bugs also turn up in the seams of chairs and couches, between cushions, in the folds of curtains, in drawer joints, in electrical receptacles and appliances, and under loose wallpaper and wall hangings. An inspection that stops at the bedroom door in a house like that will confirm the problem and still miss half of it.

So the search widens in a predictable order:

• The couch and the recliner: anywhere somebody regularly falls asleep is a second bed, and it gets treated as one.
• Drawers and their runners: nightstands and dressers, including the empty ones, and the joints at the back where the wood meets.
• Outlet and switch covers near the bed: the EPA specifically lists behind them as a place to inspect.
• Curtain folds and hems, plus the hardware and the wall above them.
• Loose wallpaper, wall hangings and picture frames, and the gap along the top of the baseboard.
• Luggage, backpacks and storage under the bed, which is usually how the insect arrived in the first place.
• Adjacent rooms and shared walls in a duplex, a converted single or an apartment.

Why Identification Is Half The Job

People rarely call about bed bugs first. The National Pest Management Association's industry survey found that 84 percent of pest professionals had been contacted about some other pest before bed bugs were identified, and 71 percent of those calls were about fleas. The same survey puts the three places professionals most often find them as single family homes at 91 percent, apartments and condominiums at 89 percent, and hotels and motels at 68 percent.

Getting the name right is not a formality, because it decides what happens next. Ohio State University Extension's bed bug look alikes fact sheet points out that bed bugs superficially resemble bat bugs, chimney swift bugs and swallow bugs, and that separating them takes a microscope and often the skills of an entomologist. Which one is in the room changes where the work starts, so it is worth settling before anyone treats anything.

The practical upshot for a homeowner is small and worth doing. If you catch one, keep it. Tape it to an index card or seal it in a bag and hand it over. A specimen or a sharp close up photograph tells an inspector more in ten seconds than a description of a bite will in ten minutes, since reactions vary enormously between people and bites do not identify the insect that made them.

Do Detection Dogs Find What People Miss?

Sometimes, and less reliably in a real apartment than in a training room. The research is worth knowing before anyone sells you on a dog.

A 2008 University of Florida study under controlled conditions reported trained dogs at a 97.5 percent success rate, with no alerts where nothing was planted, and about 95 percent success at telling live bed bugs and viable eggs from dead insects and cast skins. A later field evaluation published in the Journal of Economic Entomology took eleven canine teams into naturally infested apartments and got a mean detection rate of 44 percent with a mean false positive rate of 15 percent. The handlers themselves believed their dogs were detecting at around 95 percent. Teams tested across several days were inconsistent with themselves, and the researchers pointed at training gaps, heat in apartments without air conditioning, clutter and competing smells.

Treat an alert as a reason to look harder in that spot. Physical evidence is what confirms an infestation, and a treatment plan should be built on what was actually found.

What To Do Before The Inspector Arrives

Less than you would think, and some of the obvious moves actively work against you.

• Leave the bedding alone. Stripping and laundering everything the night before removes the staining and the shed skins that would have confirmed it.
• Do not throw furniture out. EPA guidance is to keep furniture if the bed bugs can be safely eliminated from it, and to seal anything that genuinely cannot be treated into a bag or container rather than putting it on the curb.
• Do not move to the couch or the spare room. Bed bugs follow where people sleep, and one bedroom quietly becomes three. The EPA asks that anything carried from one area to another travels in a sealed plastic bag for the same reason.
• Write down the timeline. When the marks started, any travel, any second hand furniture or mattress that came into the house, and which rooms people have slept in since.
• Renting? Report it in writing that day, even before anyone has confirmed anything. A dated text or email is enough, and it starts the clock on the property owner's side.

Booking An Inspection In Stark And Summit County

Ohio is not a quiet state for this. Ohio State University Extension's bed bug threat fact sheet describes Ohio as a hotspot for infestations, with Cincinnati, Cleveland and Columbus ranking among the most infested cities in the country. A statewide survey of licensed Ohio pest management companies, published in the journal Insects, tracked how fast that happened: counties recording at least 100 bed bug treatments went from 7 in 2005 to 45 in 2011 to nearly all 88 by 2016, and in 2016 the three combined northeast Ohio counties covering Cleveland, Akron and Canton reached close to 38,000 treatments.

State Termite has worked Northeast Ohio since 1933, and bed bug inspections are free. If the inspection finds something, ThermaLock heat treatment is our lead method, because it reaches every life stage including the eggs, usually inside a single day, and leaves no chemical residue in a room where somebody sleeps. A bio chemical treatment is the secondary option when heat is not the right fit for a particular unit, and we will say so rather than sell you the one we like. Bed bug jobs need preparation, so the office talks it through with you before anything gets scheduled.

Tell us what you are seeing and when it started: schedule a free inspection or call 330-494-6199. Our bed bug treatment page lays out the options once you know what you are dealing with.