How To Check a Mattress for Bed Bugs

Do it in daylight, with a torch anyway

Bed bugs mostly feed at night, so a daytime check is not about catching one in the open. It is about reading what they leave behind, and for that you want good light plus a torch to throw a shadow into a seam. The shadow is what makes spotting visible.

Strip the bed completely — sheets, protector, everything — and put the bedding straight into a bag rather than carrying it loose through the house. If the check finds nothing, it goes in the wash anyway and you have lost nothing.

Photographs on this page are for illustration purposes only.

Work outwards, in this order

The order matters, because it tells you how long the problem has been running as well as whether you have one.

• The mattress seams and piping. Run a torch along every seam, both sides, all four edges, and the label tag. Use the edge of an old bank card to open the piping slightly.
• The divan base. More productive than the mattress in most cases. The folded fabric edge, the underside, the corners, and the top surface under where the mattress sits.
• The frame and headboard. Joints, screw holes, the back of an upholstered headboard, and the gap between the headboard and the wall. Take it off the wall if you can.
• The bedside furniture. Drawer runners, the underside of drawers, the back panel, and behind it.
• The room. Carpet edge and gripper, skirting, curtain hems, the backs of pictures, and the socket and switch faces near the bed.

If you find evidence at stage one or two, it is likely early. If you find it at stage four or five, it has been running a while and the treatment will need to cover more of the room.

What you are actually looking for

Four things, in descending order of how much they prove.

Black spotting is the sign to trust. Dots the size of a full stop, often in short runs along a seam, sometimes bleeding slightly into the fabric like ink on blotting paper. It is digested blood: touch one with a damp white cloth and it smears rust-brown. Nothing else on a mattress seam does that.

Shed skins are translucent, straw-coloured and bug-shaped but empty. They moult five times before adulthood, so skins accumulate. Finding several sizes means breeding, not a single hitchhiker.

Eggs are pearly white, about a millimetre, and stuck down rather than loose. Hatched ones look like tiny open-topped barrels.

Live bugs are the least reliable thing to look for, because a daytime check will often miss them entirely. An adult is about 4 to 5mm, flat and oval, reddish-brown — an apple pip with legs.

Photograph anything you find, close up and in focus, and send it to us. A clear picture of a seam settles the question faster than a description ever does.

If you find something

Leave the room as it is. Do not move the mattress out, do not start sleeping elsewhere in the house, and do not spray anything at it. Each of those makes the eventual treatment larger.

Do bag the bedding and put it through a hot wash and a hot tumble dry, and do vacuum the bed area and empty the cylinder straight into an outside bin. Then ring us on 01908 465226.

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