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Bedbugs aren’t just a made-up critter that parents warn their kids about before they head off to sleep.  These lentil-sized creatures are well adapted to living in company with human hosts, often making their homes in furniture, mattresses and pillows.  They are active during the night and feed off the blood of unsuspecting humans and animals while they sleep.  Their bites may show up as small, irritating welts hours after they occur.

Many pest control companies have a hard time addressing bed bugs because the chemicals used to kill them in the past have been banned due to their toxicity.  Additionally, the public has begun demanding greener, healthier ways to do everything—and that includes pest control.   One way to address infestations is to increase the temperature in a room with industrial strength heaters and then suck the dead bugs out with a powerful vacuum.

Recently, however, an amazing innovation in pest control has been developed:  the use of dogs to sniff out bedbug infestations.  An experiment done at the University of Florida found that dogs were able to locate live bedbugs in hotel rooms 98% of the time.  Dogs have been used for years to sniff out termites, but only recently since there has been a rash of bedbug infestations in the U.S. have they been used specifically for these pests.

The dogs used can be almost any breed, including mixed breeds.  They must go through a training process, working with a handler that uses a food reward system.  The effort pays off, literally.  There are currently only around 100 bed bug sniffing dogs at work in the U.S. today and a dog with trainer can cost between $200-400 an hour.  But for hotels and other businesses it is worth it because it means foregoing harsh chemicals, closing down for fumigation, and replacing furniture that doesn’t need to be replaced.

For a free inspection, give us a call at 888-675-0258 or go to http://www.accuracypluscalifornia.com/.

Tags: Bedbugs

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 9:14 am and is filed under Bedbugs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.