Signs of bed bugs in a Dubai home

Bed bugs are found late. They feed at night, they hide within a few metres of where someone sleeps, and they are small enough and flat enough to sit inside a seam without being visible. By the time anyone is certain, an infestation has usually been running for weeks.

The first thing worth saying, because it is the question everyone asks and nobody asks first: this is not about cleanliness. Bed bugs feed on people, not on crumbs. A spotless apartment is exactly as habitable to them as a messy one. What matters is whether something carried them in.

Why bites are the weakest evidence

Bed bug bites are commonly described as appearing in lines or small clusters, often on arms, shoulders, neck or legs — the skin exposed while sleeping. That description is broadly right and still not much use on its own, for three reasons.

• Reactions vary enormously between people. Two people in the same bed can be equally bitten and only one of them will show anything at all
• A reaction can take days to appear, so the location and timing tell you little
• Mosquito bites, flea bites, heat rash and a reaction to a new detergent all produce something similar enough to confuse

If bites are all you have, look for physical evidence before you do anything else. Do not start treating a bedroom on the strength of a rash.

What to actually look for

Dark spotting along seams

The most reliable sign in practice. Digested blood is excreted as small dark spots, roughly the size of a full stop, that soak slightly into fabric the way ink does into blotting paper rather than sitting on top of it. Look along the piped seam that runs round the edge of the mattress, and at the corners.

Shed skins

Bed bugs moult five times as they grow, leaving a pale translucent shell that keeps the shape of the insect. Finding these is confirmation, and finding several sizes means a population that has been breeding rather than a single introduction.

Live insects

Adults are about the size and colour of an apple pip, flat when unfed and rounder and darker after feeding. Nymphs are much smaller and nearly translucent before their first feed, which is why they get missed.

Eggs

About a millimetre, pearly white, glued in clusters into crevices. Hard to spot deliberately, but worth knowing about because they are central to how the treatment has to work.

How they get into a Dubai home

Bed bugs do not fly and they do not travel far under their own power. Effectively every infestation is carried in, and in Dubai a few routes account for most of it.

Travel is the main one. A city where a large part of the population flies regularly, and where hotel and serviced-apartment density is very high, gives bed bugs a lot of opportunities to move in luggage. They do not need to infest the suitcase — sitting in a seam for the length of a flight is enough.

Secondhand furniture is the second. Mattresses, divans, headboards and upholstered chairs bought used, or taken when someone leaves the country, are a well-established route, and Dubai's turnover of residents means a lot of furniture changes hands quickly.

The third is shared or high-turnover accommodation, where the interval between one occupant and the next is short and the bed is the one thing everybody uses.

• Do not put luggage on the bed in a hotel — use the rack, or the bathroom floor, which is the least likely place in the room to hold them
• Check the mattress seam at the head end when you arrive, before unpacking; it takes under a minute
• Inspect secondhand upholstered furniture in daylight before it comes into the flat, paying attention to seams, staples and screw holes
• In an apartment building they can also move between adjoining units along service voids, though this is far less common than it is with cockroaches

What not to do when you find them

The instinct is to move out of the bedroom and sleep on the sofa. That is the one thing that reliably makes the problem worse: bed bugs orient towards where a person is sleeping, and within a couple of weeks you have an infestation in the living room as well as the bedroom.

Two other things to avoid. Do not throw out the mattress before the treatment — it spreads the problem through the building on the way to the skip, and it is rarely necessary. And do not treat it yourself with a household spray: it kills what it touches, misses everything in the seams, and scatters the rest into skirting and furniture where the professional treatment then has to chase it.

Why the second visit is not optional

This is the part that matters most for what happens next. No product available reliably kills bed bug eggs. Whatever is used on the first visit, a cohort of eggs survives it and hatches over the following days and weeks.

That is why bed bug treatment is quoted as two visits from the start rather than one visit with an optional recheck sold afterwards. The second visit is timed to catch what emerges before any of it reaches breeding age. A single-visit quote for bed bugs is cheaper because it is incomplete, and that is worth knowing when comparing prices.

If there is a cat or a dog in the home and the bites are around the ankles, fleas are the more likely answer, and the treatment is different. Send us a photograph of the insect if you have one — identification before the visit means the technician arrives with the right method.