Cooking Bedbugs is the name of the game. We were treating a house a few weeks ago. Generally, we need to divide the house in half with a custom-designed plastic divider system. So that we don’t have to sit on any infested furniture, we bring our own folding metal chairs to sit in while things heat up. So that we don’t cook ourselves, we sit in the regular room-temperature area. I was sitting next to a brand new sofa chair and I looked down for a second and, yep, there they were.
New couch! Bedbugs! yuck!
As you can see they were just hanging out at the seam of the chair. My partner Bill and myself got up to inspect the chair and found quite a few more in all the folds and seams as well as under the frame. So we said, “Let’s see how long it takes to cook a bedbug.”
We stuck the live bedbug on some tape and placed it in the heated area on the wall. As I checked my watch, I expected it to be maybe 7 or 8 minutes. Ten minutes went by, I lost track of time, and when I remembered to check, the bedbug was dead. So we got another one and placed it in the same area. I checked it in 5 minutes and that one was dead.
Since we had a pretty good supply coming out of that chair, one more went into the heated area. In 3 minutes he was dead. Another one went into the heat, and after 2 minutes, same result. We killed the last bedbug at the 1 minute mark. Next, we’re going to go for a new record—we are going to try to cook ‘em in under a minute. Stay tuned.