Are bedbugs afraid of hot steam?

Hot steam is even more harmful to bedbugs than just high air temperatures. Under a steam stream with a temperature of about 100 ° C, bugs die instantly, but under a steam with a temperature of about 40 ° C (more precisely, this is the so-called hot fog) they can be without damage for a long time.

Bedbug eggs are as vulnerable to hot steam as adult insects. That is why steam is more effective against eggs than many insecticides - most insect repellents have virtually no effect on eggs, while hot steam simply physically burns bed bug eggs, denaturing proteins, and developing embryos die.

On a note

Some steam cleaners work according to the vacuum principle - in them steam forms at reduced pressure and lower temperature. Accordingly, if the steam generator does not warm the steam above 50 ° C, it is pointless to use it from bedbugs - they simply will not die.

Do not use steam from a simple kettle against bedbugs. Not only is such a process extremely complicated, dangerous and inefficient, it can also lead to damage to furniture. Therefore, even if you start the fight against bed bugs, it is worth using steam cleaners or steam generators.

We destroy bugs with a steam generator

Generally speaking, a steam cleaner or steam generator is unlikely to completely destroy the bugs in the room. If only because even with a steam jet it is impossible to get into some places where - at the joints of the wooden parts of the bed frame, for the baseboard, for the wallpaper. Therefore, the destruction of bugs with a steam cleaner can be carried out only where they are on open surfaces: on mattresses and a bed, on the back of carpets hanging on the wall, under things.

You can freeze bugs in the room only where there is no water supply and heating system. For example, in garages, chicken coops, sheds, cottages, where temporary cooling will not damage the pipes.

Unfortunately, freezing of living quarters from bedbugs can be practically impossible in many cases. Even if you completely drain the water from all plumbing systems, temperatures of about minus 20 ° C can be detrimental to wallpaper and plaster, so freezing bugs in an apartment or private house can have more costly consequences than calling professional pest control.

In other rooms for freezing, it is enough to open the windows and doors on a frosty day and leave them that way for the longest possible time. In the cold of minus 20 ° C, most of the bugs will die on the same day.

In addition to this, if possible, sofas, armchairs, mattresses are carried out into the street, in the thickness of which the temperature can fall slowly, and therefore the bugs in them die for a longer time.

Safety rules for temperature removal of bugs

The main thing when combating bedbugs with the help of high and low temperatures is to comply with safety rules during operation:

Sometimes fan heaters (heat generators) are used against bedbugs - analogues of household dueks. They allow you to increase the temperature in the room for several hours to 60-65 ° C, and after this treatment all the bugs die out. However, such powerful devices are quite cumbersome, expensive and difficult to access, and therefore this method is used only by very large companies specializing in pest control. The main advantage of such systems is that bugs die during their operation even without directional processing of nests.

The most comfortable for bed bugs are temperatures within 20-30 degrees above zero, and this combines them with a person. At the same time, they are able to survive in the range from -30˚C to + 50˚C. Such a wide range is explained by the mechanisms of biological protection of insects from critical temperatures.

So, for example, when the temperature drops below + 10˚C, the bugs sharply reduce their vital activity, and they start the process of falling into a kind of suspended animation. In this state, bloodsuckers are able to withstand frosts and go without food for up to 12 months.

Another protective function is performed by the so-called heat shock proteins, which belong to the class of chaperones. They prevent and repair protein damage caused by extreme ambient temperatures, as well as other forms of stress. As their name implies, heat shock proteins were initially associated with the body's reaction to overheating, but later it turned out that bedbugs also use their protective properties at sub-zero temperatures and during dehydration.

But, of course, the resources of resistance to thermal stress in insects are not unlimited. It is interesting that bugs die at extreme temperatures, both high and low, for the same physiological reason - denaturation of body proteins. Their structure is destroyed, and proteins lose their properties necessary for the life of the insect.

Remember how the structure of egg white changes after heat treatment:

When bugs die at a deadly temperature, something similar happens in their body.

At what temperature does the larvae of bugs and adults die

This experience helps to determine at what temperature bedbugs die when washing clothes and bedding. In fact, 50 degrees is a critical temperature for both adults and larvae. In order not to leave any doubts, we recommend our readers to wash clothes in the + 60˚C mode.

In addition to washing, there are other ways to heat treat small personal items, any furniture, and even the room. For example, if the weather is hot outside, then the contents of bedside tables, shelves and cabinets can be folded into black plastic bags and taken out in the sun for the whole day.

For heat treatment of upholstered furniture, stimuli or steam generators are suitable. If there are no such devices, you can use a kettle with a narrow spout to pour seams and folds on the upholstery with boiling water. Slots in skirting boards, wallpaper, under window sills, as well as wall carpets and other potential shelters of bedbugs in a room can be carefully worked out with a hot hairdryer (hairdressing or construction).

When conducting such events, it is important to understand that bed bugs die only in direct contact with a deadly temperature. If they hide in deep places, inaccessible for sufficient heat, they will survive.

In the United States, special services provide the complete heat treatment of a living space with the help of bulky heating equipment that is brought in by truck. According to bedbugs.org, such a procedure costs the customer an average of $ 1,200.

How can bed bugs withstand low temperatures

How scientists react to cold and what extremely low temperature bugs can withstand, have been studied by various scientists. Although there is still a need for further study of this issue, some important data are already available to us.

It can be stated for sure that the effect of mild temperatures from -5 to +10 degrees is practically not dangerous for bedbugs. In one experiment, insect death at -5˚C occurred only after three weeks of constant exposure, and some of them survived. At 0˚C, the bugs did not die at all. A temperature of -10˚C killed bloodsuckers in two weeks.

Table "Deadly temperatures for bugs"

If you have a working carbon dioxide fire extinguisher in stock, you can also process furniture with it, the outlet gas temperature is below -70 degrees. With a direct hit, the bugs will die immediately. Some services use liquid nitrogen equipment that generates a temperature of -196˚C.

One of the oldest ways to deal with bed bugs is the so-called freezing. This method has been used in cities and villages from time immemorial and is extremely reliable. In this article we will tell you what advantages and disadvantages this method has.

Mechanism of action

As you know, all insects are cold-blooded creatures. The temperature of their bodies is unstable and depends on the environment. Cold-blooded insects provide a slow metabolism, so that they can do without food for a long time.

Freezing

If you decide to use freezing methods, then first of all you need to wait for suitable weather. As soon as the thermometer shows below -15, you can proceed with disinfestation.

First of all, you need to take out all the furniture from the house, especially the one on which you and your household sleep. In the house itself, you need to open all the windows, and if possible, the doors, so that the room is properly frozen. 2-3 days after the beginning of disinfestation, you can shake dead insects from the furniture and bring it back. At the right temperature, the method of freezing bugs kills 100% of insects and their offspring.

Benefits

In severe frost, bed bugs die with a guaranteed result, which even the most effective and expensive insecticide will not give. In addition, freezing does not require cash costs - for three months a year you are provided with absolutely free frost. On this, the advantages of the method end and the disadvantages begin.

disadvantages

The first and main disadvantage of freezing is the weather. Old grandfathers and grandmothers often complain that winters are not the same as before - temperatures below -20 are quite rare and often occur only two to three days a year. In central Russia, the average winter temperature is -8-12 degrees. Of course, you can freeze bugs even at this temperature, but few can leave the house for several weeks.

However, not everyone can live outside the house for two or three days. During freezing, you will have to beg to visit relatives or friends, move to the country, live in a hotel or a rented apartment. Since not everyone has such opportunities, this greatly limits the application of this method.

Alas, at low temperatures, not only bugs freeze, but also water in household communications. Even in a private house, the use of freezing is associated with certain chores - you need to drain the water from all heating radiators and drain the sewer. In an apartment building this is far from always possible, especially in old houses. And if the heating in some cases can still be turned off, then this trick will not work with the sewer system - severe frost can cause a real accident in the water supply system of the entire house and huge losses. And this is not counting such trifles of life as the icy floors of neighbors from above. For this reason, freezing is rarely used to disinfect residential buildings. Most often it is used in garages, chicken coops and other industrial facilities.

Another minus is ... thieves. Taking the furniture outside and leaving the house for several days with the windows open wide open, you run the risk of trivial theft of your belongings.

Summary

The method of freezing is an effective tool that allows you to quickly and cheaply kill bugs. However, a number of restrictions make it available only for processing technical rooms, and even then not always - the weather imposes certain restrictions. However, this does not mean that this method cannot be applied at all.

When using chemical methods of pest control, many are faced with what is needed, clothes and mattresses. Nobody wants to do this, even when using odorless products - especially in the case of children's clothing and bedding. In this case, frost comes to the rescue - just take the mattress and contaminated items to the balcony for a few days. In the warmer months, things can be handled by infected items in the freezer. It will be especially convenient for owners of large freezers - they are spacious and able to create a very low temperature.

Thus, freezing in residential buildings can be used as an effective additional method of disinfestation. But as the main processing method, it is better to choose insecticides - they create a long protective effect and can be used almost anywhere. If you do not want to use insecticides, then you can resort to another thermal method of pest control. We are talking about the so-called burning out, which acts in exactly the opposite way than freezing. Special powerful heaters are brought into the room, which warm the air to a temperature of + 55-60 degrees. At such a high temperature, bugs die within a few hours - with all their heat lovingness, they withstand heat much worse than frost. The method of burning is also 100% effective, but this treatment is much more expensive than classical chemical pest control.

The practice of killing bugs has proven that these insects respond poorly to temperature changes. Therefore, the answer to the question of whether to be afraid of frost bugs is positive. Since ancient times, for the lack of powerful insecticides, bedbugs have been etched precisely by high and low temperatures. Even small deviations from average temperature levels (-10 and +20 ° С) bed bugs can withstand with difficulty. This weakness of pests is successfully used in the fight against them, especially if the use of poisons is unacceptable indoors (animals and children are there, expensive furniture is installed).

The question of whether bedbugs are afraid of the cold needs to be answered with the help of science and practice. Observations have shown that these insects are susceptible to low temperatures, but to a greater extent do not tolerate high. At temperatures below -10 ° C, bedbugs fall into suspended animation and safely survive adverse conditions. At a temperature of -15 -17 ° C bugs die on average in 3-4 days. The most disastrous for bugs is a temperature below -20 ° C. In such conditions, they die in a few hours. Bedbug eggs are much more durable, in order to destroy them, you need to keep the temperature below -20 ° C for more than a day.

At high temperatures, bedbug nests die out in a matter of minutes. Such success can be achieved with steam at +50 ° C. A little more time, namely half an hour, is needed to kill bugs with a temperature of +45 ° C. Oviposites of bugs are less susceptible to high marks of the thermometer, so it takes a day that they died at such temperature indicators. Adult bugs die almost instantly from exposure to hot steam.

Even promising results do not justify such measures. At what temperature insects die, regardless of whether it is high or low, at the same housing spoils. For a day under such conditions, furniture and appliances will seriously suffer if you don’t take everything out first (and where to take out all the furniture?), The wallpaper will peel off, and the floor covering will swell. Of course, no one wants to risk interior items, and less aggressive actions are unlikely to help. Even implementing such global measures is very difficult. But a furniture-safe steam generator against bugs does not give brilliant results.

At what temperature do bedbugs die during warming

You can warm the apartment to +50 ° C using industrial fan heaters. This method is preferred in that it eliminates the use of chemicals and aggressive poisons. Warming up can be applied at any stage of reproduction of bugs, because eggs and adult bugs die from exposure to high temperatures. Thus, two problems are eliminated at once. In addition, it will take only a day to solve the problem in this way.

Destruction of bedbugs by steam is best accompanied by chemical exposure. This will help avoid re-infection. However, it is very difficult to do the procedure yourself. You will need special and very powerful equipment, which hardly anyone is holding on the balcony. Have to order equipment, pay for transportation, install. In the process, you need to monitor many factors, and not just turn on and go. Only experienced SES specialists know the procedure thoroughly. They can correctly assess the thermal dynamics of housing, they know at what temperature bed bugs die. By inexperience, you can harm not only the apartment, but also yourself. Due to prolonged exposure to heat, fainting may occur or worse.

You need to start processing with foci of infection, but not everything can be found with an independent examination. A bedbug generator literally helps in ten seconds, but a too powerful jet will simply blow away insects and exacerbate the problem. It is difficult to get the "favorite" places of settling of pests with a steam generator. Bed steaming is not possible at the joints of furniture, in the crevices of the baseboard and wallpaper.

Is it possible to freeze bugs

The question of whether to be afraid of bugs of frost has already been clarified: low temperatures are better perceived by bugs, therefore, the lowest possible thermometer values \u200b\u200bare required. Bedbugs perish only from prolonged exposure, because even -30 ° C they will calmly survive if the cooling is short-lived. Not higher than -20 ° C for several days - this is what winter bugs are afraid of. Freezing of bugs is recommended to be carried out in non-residential premises or used locally, for small items or individual pieces of furniture. In winter, you can keep the windows open, and then the bug dies after a few days. You need to maintain the temperature for more than a day, because not all bedbugs die on the first day, and egg laying is even more so. In addition, freezing is recommended to be repeated several times. But such freezing can only be carried out in a house with individual heating, because freezing with central heating will damage the pipes. And even in the case of individual heating, the equipment under these conditions will fail.

If you can’t leave housing in any way, you can take out the most infected furniture to the street at low degrees. Bedbugs in the cold do not freeze immediately. The insect dies only with stable and strong cooling, and a temperature in the range of -5-7 ° C will only stop their reproduction. Small items can be kept in the freezer, but in this way bed bugs freeze for more than a week.

Bed bugs are incredibly tenacious insects. They can do without food for a long time, are resistant to mechanical stress and quickly develop resistance to insecticides. It is especially difficult to destroy bedbug eggs because of their dense protective shell.

Having adapted to life near a person, the bugs pampered and lost some kind of ability useful for survival. So, for example, their development takes place in a very narrow temperature range from +15 0 С to +40 0 С. A further decrease or increase in temperature leads to the cessation of reproduction and their death.

Optimum for life and prosperity of bugs are indicators from +20 0 С to +35 0 С. Under these conditions, they actively feed and multiply, and the higher the temperature, the faster the development. However, this precocity has the opposite side. With an increase in the thermometer column, their life expectancy is reduced, they often need to eat. A prolonged hunger strike in heat conditions is poorly tolerated by adult insects and can cause the colony to die out.

In the process of lengthy research, the following regularity of the life expectancy of bugs from the ambient temperature was revealed:

• at +20 0 C, life processes in the body of an insect slow down, it eats less, sleeps more and is able to live about 15 months;
• raising the temperature to 30 0 C causes accelerated ripening, intensive reproduction and short-term life, the total duration of which does not exceed 9-10 months;
• the most comfortable for the development of insects is the interval from +22 0 С to +25 0 С, that is, normal room temperature. Under these conditions, they live for about a year, of which 1.5 months. goes to the development of the larva, and the remaining 10-11 months. insects are exclusively engaged in reproduction.

Interesting fact! Bed bugs can survive a long hunger strike, sometimes exceeding 1.5 years! All this time they are in suspended animation, from which only the smell of food - warm, fresh blood, can bring them out.

Critical temperatures

The survival rate of bugs in extreme temperature conditions depends on the stage of their development. So, for example, larvae more easily tolerate cold and heat than adults. Eggs are even more resistant to temperature effects. They are able to maintain viability even with prolonged freezing for several days. So, at what temperature do bedbugs die at the stage of an egg, larva, adult insect - an adult? Let's find out.

At what temperature do eggs and larvae die?

Bedbug larvae have a rather flexible adaptation mechanism to critical temperatures. They are able to withstand short-term frosts at -22 0 С, as well as a short-term increase in temperature to +50 0 С. At -20 0 С they can survive for three days. They tolerate the heat worse and die within a few hours at a thermometer slightly above +50 0 C.

The eggs are surrounded by a rather dense protective shell, which protects the embryos from environmental influences. Thanks to it, they have a very high resistance to adverse factors, including boasting greater stamina than larvae to sharp temperature jumps. Embryo death occurs only at -30 0 С and heat at +55 0 С.

Critical temperatures for adult insects

We found out at what indicators of the thermometer the death of eggs and larvae occurs. And at what temperature do adult bedbugs die?

1. Freezing the premises in winter frosts for several days.
2. "Frying" things in the sun.
3. Washing clothes at temperatures above +50 0 С.
4. Processing rooms and furniture with hot steam.

You can also iron the folds of clothes, as well as covers for upholstered furniture, or put a bag of contaminated items in the freezer. It should not be forgotten that larvae and eggs are able to tolerate cold for a long time, and the average temperature in the freezer, as a rule, does not fall below -18 0 С.

How to get rid of bedbugs using heat treatment, see this video: