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Bed bugs in apartment complexes: bed bug “lotharios” and “Nintento Trojan horses”

nobugsonme — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 23:03:46 +0000

Mark Sheperdigian has an excellent new article in Pest Management Professional about what apartment building managers need to be aware of when dealing with a bed bug infestation — the often unconsidered aspects of multi-unit dwelling life which help bed bugs to spread from unit to unit.

We’re all familiar with the problem of a single household discarding its contents (often unnecessarily) which then spread bed bugs to everyone who collects something from the pile.

However, bed bugs may spread easily in ways which are less obvious.

For example, have you also considered the potential for bed bugs being spread around a complex by a gentleman caller with multiple lady friends in the building, or by the visiting meals on wheels volunteer?

Or the way bed bugs might move around with adolescents who troop from one kid’s bedroom to another with Nintendos, game chairs, and other gear in tow? (These are what Sheperdigian cleverly dubs “Nintendo Trojan horses”).

Sheperdigian suggests apartment managers need to try to develop

programs that work to find and encompass all the networks, families and friendships that facilitate the move of bed bugs across a community.

Although I am skeptical most apartment managers won’t bother doing this — let’s face it, we hear so many won’t choose a knowledgeable professional, have adjacent units inspected, or follow-up on treatments — Sheperdigian shows us how very important these networks can be, if we really want to get rid of bed bugs in the building.

Instead of only searching adjacent units in a clover-leaf pattern, apartment managers may want PCOs to also inspect units frequented by tenants of an infested unit, or whose inhabitants are frequent visitors of an infested unit, or whose owners have the same visitors as the infested unit.

Sounds confusing, right? All the more reason, frankly, to consider just doing a careful inspection of the entire building.

Other recommendations Shepherdgian outlines for apartment managers include

Telling tenants about the bed bug problem and educating them about bed bugs (rather than keeping mum about the problem);
Setting up assistance programs for those needing help (such as the elderly or infirm);
Implementing programs for discarding items which must be removed, so removals don’t spread bed bugs in the building; and
Reaching out to regular visitors (like that meals-on-wheels volunteer) to make sure they aren’t re-infesting units they visit.

More and more, apartment managers are talking about how to prevent and respond to bed bug outbreaks. Last week Renee brought to our attention a new draft training manual created by the Columbus Apartment Association (with the assistance of Dr. Susan Jones).

Bed bugs are difficult to treat, even for the most well-meaning and attentive building managers. I applaud Mark Sheperdigian for outlining some of the angles which are commonly missed, and I know you’ll want to read the rest of the article here: Bed Bugs in the Apartment Department at Pest Management Professional.Similar Posts:

Mark Sheperdigian on the limits of bed bug inspections

nobugsonme — Thu, 14 May 2009 06:04:15 +0000

Mark Sheperdigian has a new brief — but important — article in Pest Management Professional, about the limits of bed bug inspections.

The author is stating truisms known to those who know bed bugs — not radical new insights. And yet it is crucial for the pest management professional working on bed bug cases both to understand these facts — and to communicate them to their customers.

First, Sheperdigian comments on the difficulty of knowing whether a unit is infested:

We can discover with 100 percent certainty that an account is infested; we cannot discover with 100 percent certainty that it is not.

This is the most frustrating factor for people who think they have bed bugs. Many will spend hundreds of dollars in human and canine scent detection and still have no certainty whether they have bed bugs.

Sometimes people feel they have hired a lousy PCO or dog team; sometimes that is so, but the truth is: bed bugs are stealthy and hard to detect. That’s just how Sneaky Simes rolls. And so, Sheperdigian suggests, the key is for bed bug pros to communicate the difficulty of detection.

And Sheperdigian reminds us that “Most infestations are established before they are discovered,” and

This also means that in a multiple-unit dwelling situation such as apartments and senior housing, the units reporting bed bugs are only a portion of the problem. Therefore, a program that begins by treating only units that have reported bed bugs is treating only a portion of the problem. There are almost always units that have a light infestation unbeknownst to the tenants — and units that have heavier infestations unreported by the tenants.

Perhaps that is the one piece of information I wish all tenants and landlords knew. People tend to complain about bed bugs if they see them, or if they react to bed bug bites — and even then, they will often hesitate while they explore other possible causes (and in some cases, until they hear for the first time that bed bugs exist!)

When tenants or landlords assume that only those who have complained about bed bugs have bed bugs, we can forgive their ignorance of just how bed bugs work.

The problem is that pest management professionals who know bed bugs should know that there are almost always other infested units.

We hear some PCOs insist customers pay for inspection of adjacent units and/or all of a building’s units.

We hear others try to encourage this but are understandably ignored by customers who just don’t get it, or just can’t afford it. Many of the latter will treat the isolated unit anyway. Only later, it may become fully apparent to the homeowner, tenant, or landlord that this was not enough to get rid of bed bugs in the unit.

Frankly, I think Boston is on to the only possible solution for this problem; the Boston Inspectional Services Department requires landlords to treat all horizontally and vertically adjacent units and inspect the entire building.

Few landlords do this voluntarily. And many buildings end up with seriously chronic bed bug problems.

Here, as in his previous articles on bed bugs, I appreciate Mark Sheperdigian’s knowledge and wisdom. All in all, these are important issues that bed bug professionals and customers need to be aware of.

I know you will want to read the full article: “Know Your Limits in Bed Bug Inspection” at Pest Management Professional.

Thanks to Renee for the tip!Similar Posts:

Mark Sheperdigian on what consumers should know about bed bugs; also, neonicotinoids, and why bed bugs came back

nobugsonme — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:43:05 +0000

Pest Management Professional’s articles are often so good, but in the past, you had to know to look for them. (Thank goodness they added an RSS feed so we can subscribe.)

Mark Sheperdigian brings the bed bug information in three “new to us” articles: the first is on what consumers need to know about bed bugs.

In short:

They’re not microscopic. (Lou Sorkin always helpfully reminds us, and the authors of run-of-the-mill newspaper stories that bed bugs come in a range of sizes and colors depending on life stage and whether they’ve eaten or not (lovely, yes?)
You can’t get an infestation from a single egg (though you can get one from a single pregnant female).
You can’t clean them away.
And you can’t prevent them. (You can reduce the risk, but never 100%.)

You’ll want to read the rest of this article here.

The next article is about choosing pesticides, and is really for the bed bug pros among us, but is enlightening to us laypeople too. In particular, the beginners’ guide to pyrethroids. And neonicotinoids? New to me.

The choicest nugget here, though, was the suggestion that PCOs test a bed bug population as to its pyrethroid-resistance. Simple, not foolproof by any means, but really smart:

If the bed bugs are resistant to pyrethroids, you should either know this going in or ensure that pyrethroids are not your main line of defense. How can you know if your bed bug population is resistant without having to send them to a researcher somewhere? You could try this procedure, which has been suggested from a number of sources:

At least a day before the treatment, collect some bed bugs and hold them overnight in a jar on a cloth or paper towel that has been treated (and dried) with your pyrethroid of choice. If all of the bed bugs are dead in the morning, you may fire when ready. If half the bed bugs are dead, be sure to incorporate other non-pyrethroid materials into your program. If the bed bugs are all alive, you should rethink your strategy — leaving pyrethroids out of the mix altogether.

This is not real science and will not lead to dramatic headlines that rock the pest management world, but it may help you avoid a follow-up treatment or two…or three.

Up until now, this might have only worked in large infestations, where “collecting a sample of bed bugs” is simple. However, new bed bug monitors like the CDC 3000 will mean that even smaller infestations can be tested in this way.

Cool, huh?

(As always, I do not recommend you self-treat for bed bugs. I am not a PCO but I think a good one is going to get rid of your problem more quickly and more fully than you ever will. A good PCO will be able to do so safely and will know how to avoid making the problem worse.)

Finally, I found this PMP article enlightening. In it, Sheperdigian pokes some holes in common theories about bed bug resurgence.

His point appears to be not so much that an end to baseboard spraying or the survival of bed bugs in chicken houses (for example) did not contribute to the resurgence of bed bugs, but that no one theory alone fully accounts for bed bugs’ reappearance, in such numbers, at this time, and their degree of pyrethroid resistance.

Read this one for the sub-headings alone. (“Harlan hears a who?” Priceless.)

And know just how indebted we are to Dr. Harold Harlan, who kept his bed bug colony all those years before there seemed an obvious need for one. And boy, do we ever need them as research subjects now.

Thanks to Renee for article suggestions!Similar Posts:

Mark Sheperdigian on killing bed bugs in “deep harborage”

nobugsonme — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 03:55:25 +0000

Mark Sheperdigian writes, in a new article for Pest Management Professional, about the difficulties of — and possibilities for — eliminating bed bugs from deep crevices and wall voids.

Eliminating bed bugs holed up in the deep harborage of structural crevices, and voids is problematic, which is a fancy way of saying they are just plain hard to get. Even the most powerful vacuum cannot reliably rip them from their strongholds, and they are blissfully out of the line of fire for most sprayables.

But we have more tools in the shed. Steam has proven to be very effective, but only has an effective range of a centimeter or two and it does not seem to take too many layers of insulation to protect bed bugs from the lethal effects of the steam. The use of cold, as we discussed last issue, has even more challenges in its ability to eliminate bed bugs. In the absence of the perfect and universal solution, the pest management professional (PMP) is left to consider the possible methods available for use and choose the most appropriate for each situation.

The rest of the article does just that.

Bedbugger does not recommend self-treating for bed bugs, for a variety of reasons. However, it does help to know as much as you can about bed bugs as you undergo treatment with a professional.

Although PMP is a trade journal, I find Sheperdigian’s articles readable and enlightening, and I think you will too. You can read the full article here.Similar Posts:

Mark Sheperdigian: inspection is “single most crucial operation in bed bug treatments”

nobugsonme — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 16:18:06 +0000

Mark Sheperdigian has published a new article in Pest Management Professional. It begins,

It has been said that you cannot hit what you cannot see — and for bed bugs, that goes double. The single most crucial operation in bed bug treatments is the inspection.

Inspection is, unfortunately, also the part of the process that we hear many pest control professionals either skip or rush through. Some feel it is too time-consuming. One large and reputable New York PCO, readers tell us, never conducts inspections anymore, as a matter of policy.

But bed bugs are easier to treat if you know where they are. And of course, you need to verify the problem is bed bugs in the first place. Therefore, Sheperdigian is right to tell PCOs they need to “Expect to inspect for bed bugs.”

Sheperdigian gives tips for searching (including where to look for bed bug eggs), advice on choosing an LED lamp, and tips on how best to hold the light to see bed bug eggs and other evidence.

You can read the full article here.

And if you’re suitably impressed, or just spending a lot on vacuum cleaner bags, you should also see Sheperdigian’s earlier article on vacuuming here.

He includes the wonderful tip of using a nylon knee-high to catch bed bugs inside a vacuum crevice tool. (Most bed bugs survive vacuuming; here’s a way to catch samples and use your vacuum bags more than once.)

Thanks to hopelessnomo for the link.Similar Posts:

Bed bugs in Detroit and Troy, Michigan

nobugsonme — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 23:33:07 +0000

Neal Rubin writes in a Detroit News Op-Ed column today that

At Rose Pest Solutions in Troy [Michigan], where Sheperdigian reigns as vice president for technical services, the number of bedbug jobs has risen from one or two in 2001 to about 160 last year, with continued rapid growth expected in 2008.

The article goes beyond the standard “bed bugs are in our area now” articles which are popping up weekly, delving into the origins of the problem, as well as various ways to get rid of bed bugs.

Interestingly, Rubin cites Sheperdigian as challenging the theory that bed bugs came back due to increased travel:

One theory says that bedbugs have reemerged because Americans are traveling more to countries where they never quite went away. The problem is, Sheperdigian says, his research shows we were traveling more in the ’80s and ’90s.

“This isn’t a matter of reintroduction,” he says. “There’s something deeper happening that we don’t understand.”

Rubin also cites Sheperdigian’s opinion on Cryonite:

. . . Sheperdigian’s opinion of one of the trendy new methods of bedbug-whacking, an icy carbon dioxide spray that’s supposed to freeze them in their creepy little tracks. He says it mostly blows them around.

As far as I am concerned, the jury is still out on Cryonite, but I have not personally seen any effectiveness studies yet.

For good measure, the article also notes that, as far as treatment is concerned,

Rose Pest Solutions uses a combination of vacuums, steam and insecticides. Others favor bedbug-sniffing dogs or the equivalent of gigantic hair dryers.

None are foolproof.

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