Bed bug season is upon us
Posted June 5, 2013 9:30 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – They’re nasty, disgusting little critters and they love warm weather.
We’re heading into bed bug season.
Dr. Dini Miller, an entomologist with Virginia Tech, says they tend to reproduce more in the summer.
“Indoor pests in general seem to have these population booms in the summer months,” Miller tells News1130.
“One of the reasons is they tend to love each other even more during the summer, so we see kind of a spike in reproduction. Even in my lab, during the winter time I don’t have as many bed bugs and then for some reason as soon as the warmer weather hits, even though they’re indoors for their whole lives in environmental chambers, they seem to have a lot more bed bug sex during that time and we seem to get a population boom,” she describes.
Summer also means a lot of people will be heading out on vacation.
Miller says the horror stories you hear about bed bugs in hotel rooms are often blown out of proportion, but there are still a few steps you should take if you plan on traveling this summer.
“Your bag has many opportunities to pick up bed bugs in a lot of locations other than your hotel room, like taxi cab trunks and the belly of the plane,” she says. “But if I was inspecting my hotel room, I’d inspect the side of the bed that has the best view of the television. I’d pull back all the sheets and just have a look at it. If you don’t see any bed bugs, I don’t go any farther than that.”
She says she’s on the road constantly and she hasn’t spotted a bed bug in a hotel room in nearly a decade.
Miller says what’s more important is making sure that you don’t bring any bed bugs with you when you return home from your vacation.
