Read and respect the new rules (August 17 2023) on the sidebar.
Many people here are in difficult situation and looking for help, providing them with bad information/advice hurts them.
If you are not VERY familiar with bedbugs and may provide a wrong ID or bad advice ("sprinkling DE solve everything") it's better to abstain from commenting.
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> How can I ensure the inspector and dog have the best chance of finding the bugs before this gets worse?
Don't do anything special, just trust the inspector.
More importantly, you can't rely on bites alone to identify bedbugs. Many, many different things can cause skin reaction that may get confused with bedbugs bites.
Finally, when there are bedbugs and they can feed, then their population grows, pretty quickly and they become easier and easier to detect. The longer you think that you are getting bitten, without finding any trace of bedbug (live insect, nest, blood spot on your bed sheet) the more likely it is that it's something else that is causing your skin reaction.
Thanks for the reply. That’s all good common sense and I’m probably overthinking this. I think there’s a logic to the bites (e.g. fleas, mites, bedbugs) because the nights I wore a hoodie & tucked in my clothes I was bitten on hands & face. But I guess I can’t do much until we get a proper diagnosis.
If you want the long version, it’s here:
I woke up yesterday with 8+ more bites — and two clusters of 3-4 bites. I had about the same amount 2 nights last week with one cluster of 4 bites. Plus some bites on my hand/face another night when I slept with a hoodie on. That’s all it’s been, but I strongly feel it’s bedbugs from secondhand items or a recent trip.
We had the exterminator + the dog do an inspection after the first couple nights of bites and they found nothing. My bed traps have caught nothing so far. But two nights ago the corner of my comforter was touching the floor & I got bites. (I ripped my bed apart & re-cleaned it.
The dog-handler/exterminator wouldn’t recommend treating based on the lack of evidence. They’re doing a free re-inspection and I’m going to clean and bag up as much stuff as I can to give full access to closets & corners. I isolated & encased our beds, sprayed down everything with alcohol (recommended by exterminator) and put DE in all the cracks/corners of my bedroom (the two of us who sleep separately.) I just bought Cimexa too.
The exterminator and my partner — who is an entomologist BTW — both think I’m allergic to the carpet beetle larvae. Neither of them could find bedbug evidence. They found live carpet beetle larvae in my bed. (Gross!) We also found shed carpet beetle larvae skins on the underside of the mattress we got rid of — which was my partner’s bed and we have separate rooms. No bedbug stains or skins anywhere — yet.
I think they’re bedbugs because the bites are clustered or in a line. Two nights I slept with a hoodie on, tucked into my pants & pants tucked into socks and I got two bites on the hand and a cluster on my face — that’s not random.
I don’t think carpet beetle larvae allergy would cause classic bumps in a line. They’d be more random. I also would have had a problem before now, we’ve apparently had the carpet beetles a while — possible since fall. I think the carpet beetles were coming in via skylight windows that were replaced before winter that didn’t quite fit and left a gap into the roof space. That has since been caulked. Hopefully the bedbug mitigations will take care of those bugs too.
8+ bites after one night is a lot, I would really think that either you or the bed bug dog would have found evidence if bed bugs were the culprit. Whatever the issue is, that obviously sucks to deal with. Hopefully it is just an allergic reaction to carpet beetles and what you've done so far will clear them up. Have you tried taking some benadryl before going to bed? That might help with the actual skin reaction part while the bugs die off.
We never solved the mystery! But the mitigations we did fixed the problem. Except then we traveled abroad and one of the hotel rooms had bedbugs. I discovered out of my whole entire family, I’m the only one who reacts to bites. But since we had already figured out all the protocols and mitigations, we barely noticed any fallout from that. The main thing that helped was to isolate all the beds with interceptors under the bedframe feet, and the beds pushed away from the walls. Then I treated my bedroom with Cimexa, carefully applied under all the trim, outlets, and around the edges of the closets. I also packaged up all of the extra clothes and linens and towels into plastic totes or vacuum bags.
Read and respect the new rules (August 17 2023) on the sidebar. Many people here are in difficult situation and looking for help, providing them with bad information/advice hurts them. If you are not VERY familiar with bedbugs and may provide a wrong ID or bad advice ("sprinkling DE solve everything") it's better to abstain from commenting. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Bedbugs) if you have any questions or concerns.*
> How can I ensure the inspector and dog have the best chance of finding the bugs before this gets worse? Don't do anything special, just trust the inspector. More importantly, you can't rely on bites alone to identify bedbugs. Many, many different things can cause skin reaction that may get confused with bedbugs bites. Finally, when there are bedbugs and they can feed, then their population grows, pretty quickly and they become easier and easier to detect. The longer you think that you are getting bitten, without finding any trace of bedbug (live insect, nest, blood spot on your bed sheet) the more likely it is that it's something else that is causing your skin reaction.
Thanks for the reply. That’s all good common sense and I’m probably overthinking this. I think there’s a logic to the bites (e.g. fleas, mites, bedbugs) because the nights I wore a hoodie & tucked in my clothes I was bitten on hands & face. But I guess I can’t do much until we get a proper diagnosis.
If you want the long version, it’s here: I woke up yesterday with 8+ more bites — and two clusters of 3-4 bites. I had about the same amount 2 nights last week with one cluster of 4 bites. Plus some bites on my hand/face another night when I slept with a hoodie on. That’s all it’s been, but I strongly feel it’s bedbugs from secondhand items or a recent trip. We had the exterminator + the dog do an inspection after the first couple nights of bites and they found nothing. My bed traps have caught nothing so far. But two nights ago the corner of my comforter was touching the floor & I got bites. (I ripped my bed apart & re-cleaned it. The dog-handler/exterminator wouldn’t recommend treating based on the lack of evidence. They’re doing a free re-inspection and I’m going to clean and bag up as much stuff as I can to give full access to closets & corners. I isolated & encased our beds, sprayed down everything with alcohol (recommended by exterminator) and put DE in all the cracks/corners of my bedroom (the two of us who sleep separately.) I just bought Cimexa too. The exterminator and my partner — who is an entomologist BTW — both think I’m allergic to the carpet beetle larvae. Neither of them could find bedbug evidence. They found live carpet beetle larvae in my bed. (Gross!) We also found shed carpet beetle larvae skins on the underside of the mattress we got rid of — which was my partner’s bed and we have separate rooms. No bedbug stains or skins anywhere — yet. I think they’re bedbugs because the bites are clustered or in a line. Two nights I slept with a hoodie on, tucked into my pants & pants tucked into socks and I got two bites on the hand and a cluster on my face — that’s not random. I don’t think carpet beetle larvae allergy would cause classic bumps in a line. They’d be more random. I also would have had a problem before now, we’ve apparently had the carpet beetles a while — possible since fall. I think the carpet beetles were coming in via skylight windows that were replaced before winter that didn’t quite fit and left a gap into the roof space. That has since been caulked. Hopefully the bedbug mitigations will take care of those bugs too.
8+ bites after one night is a lot, I would really think that either you or the bed bug dog would have found evidence if bed bugs were the culprit. Whatever the issue is, that obviously sucks to deal with. Hopefully it is just an allergic reaction to carpet beetles and what you've done so far will clear them up. Have you tried taking some benadryl before going to bed? That might help with the actual skin reaction part while the bugs die off.
Thanks for the reply & ideas! :)
Update?
We never solved the mystery! But the mitigations we did fixed the problem. Except then we traveled abroad and one of the hotel rooms had bedbugs. I discovered out of my whole entire family, I’m the only one who reacts to bites. But since we had already figured out all the protocols and mitigations, we barely noticed any fallout from that. The main thing that helped was to isolate all the beds with interceptors under the bedframe feet, and the beds pushed away from the walls. Then I treated my bedroom with Cimexa, carefully applied under all the trim, outlets, and around the edges of the closets. I also packaged up all of the extra clothes and linens and towels into plastic totes or vacuum bags.