Can bed bugs enter a house from outside?

[martinjsxx]

Originally Posted by Kefir King

Better safe than VERY sorry.
(An infested mattress looks VERY disgusting with patches of feces and dried blood. Easy to spot.)


Did they pick it up and haul it away?

They never put the mattress and box spring out for collection, although they put them against their house instead of the fence between the houses. Actually they have about three weeks' worth of garbage and recycling there that they haven't put out for collection. It's a lovely view from my living room. These folks are renting the house and on welfare. This is an upper middle class neighborhood and maybe where they were living previously it was normal to keep a month's worth of garbage outside your home. I don't know, that's the only thing I can think of.

[martinjsxx]

Originally Posted by macnyc2003

A VERY infested mattress will look that way, but it takes time to get so gross. A mattress at the beginning of an infestation (just a few bugs) will look completely normal. But it will have the potential to spread bugs, of course.

This mattress looks like it's in great condition (at least it was before several rainstorms), which makes me wonder why they put it outside if it didn't have some issue.

[luv my dayton]

Call city inspectors. Called on my neighbors years ago and the city made them stack their fire wood upon treated skids.They had stacked it along their fence a stone's throw from our house directly on the ground.

[Inquring81]

Originally Posted by martinjsxx

They never put the mattress and box spring out for collection, although they put them against their house instead of the fence between the houses. Actually they have about three weeks' worth of garbage and recycling there that they haven't put out for collection. It's a lovely view from my living room. These folks are renting the house and on welfare. This is an upper middle class neighborhood and maybe where they were living previously it was normal to keep a month's worth of garbage outside your home. I don't know, that's the only thing I can think of.

I ditto what Luv My Dayton said -- call the city. Tell them you saw a rat in that mess. If no one else in the neighborhood has three weeks of garbage in their back yard, your view is the local rat buffet.

Wise to spray around your house and the mattress. Keep an eye on the neighborhood dogs who may go lift a leg on it (and pick up a hitch hiker).

To back up what Kefir King is saying, there was a conference of bed bug experts in New York a couple years ago, and one of the morning shows had three of them them on talking about how to look for bed bugs in a hotel. The headboard is one of the major places they hide, and they are VERY good at hiding. The one being interviewed said she takes the headboard off the bed with a screwdriver before she unpacks, and if she sees problems, moves rooms. The interviewer (who was treating this as a half-joke) turned to one of the other panel (not the one who had said that) and said, joking "So, do you have a screwdriver too?" Without a word, the other two pulled out their screwdrivers and laid them on the table. It reminded me of those scenes in Westerns where the wingmen silently all pull their six shooters and lay them on the card table.