How Bed Bugs Get Into a Home

Luggage, by a distance

The commonest route into a home is a bag. Bed bugs are flat, they climb fabric easily, and a suitcase left open on a hotel bed or a rack beside one is a straightforward thing for them to get into.

The tell is the timing. A case that begins three to six weeks after somebody stayed away, in the bedroom where the case was unpacked, and nowhere else, is almost always this. It takes that long because one or two bugs have to establish and breed before anybody notices anything.

The practical countermeasure is small and works: when you stay somewhere, put the case on a hard surface rather than on the bed or on upholstered furniture, and give the mattress seams and the headboard a thirty-second look with a phone torch when you arrive. On returning, take the case somewhere other than the bedroom to unpack, and put everything washable straight through a hot wash and a hot dry.

Photographs on this page are for illustration purposes only.

Second-hand furniture

The other common route, and the one people feel worst about afterwards. A second-hand bed, divan base, headboard, sofa or armchair can carry a population that is invisible until it is in your bedroom.

The answer is not to stop buying second-hand, it is to check before it comes through the door: seams and piping on anything upholstered, the underside, and the joints and screw holes of any frame. Five minutes with a torch, outside the house.

The same applies to anything picked up from the kerbside, which is worth saying because a discarded mattress or sofa on a pavement has a reasonable chance of being there for exactly this reason.

Through the wall

In flats, converted houses and terraces, bed bugs move between homes along the routes that pass through the structure: service risers, cable runs, pipe penetrations, and the boxes behind sockets and light switches on a party wall.

If you live in a block and the problem appeared with no travel and no new furniture, this is the likely explanation. It is also the reason a single-flat treatment sometimes has to be repeated, and why we inspect party-wall services and put what we find in writing.

Visitors, and the things that do not matter

A guest who has been somewhere with bed bugs can bring them in the same way luggage does, which is why guest rooms and sofa beds are part of an inspection even when nobody has slept in them for months.

What does not matter: how clean the house is, how often you vacuum, whether you have pets, or how old the property is. Bed bugs feed on blood. Crumbs, mess and dust are irrelevant to them. Clutter only matters once they are in, because it gives them more places to sit.

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Other Bed Bug Questions

The full service page is Bed Bug Control.