First I needed to know what to look for. Do they live in nests? As some kind of colony or hive? I literally had no idea what I was looking for. Turns out it is called a "harborage". In a bed bug harborage, you will find adult bugs, larva and nymphs of the various stages, eggs, the exoskeletons of bugs that have fed and molted to the next life phase, and little black dots that are either your blood, their excrement, or both.
Kind of like this:
It's ok if you just threw up in your mouth a little bit. I almost did, too.
I prepped by pushing all of the other furniture out of the way, then started pulling my sofa apart. I didn't find anything with quite as many adults as that, but I did indeed find several harborages. One on each of the pillows that are cut to rest over the sofa arms and one on each side of the front of the sofa below where the arms meet the body of the couch. There were some discarded exoskeletons on the piping on the front of the sofa, as well. Each of the harborages in my sofa had 4 or 5 adults, a few early stage nymphs that hadn't yet fed (you can tell because they are white until they feed) and eggs.
Even knowing in advance what I would find wasn't enough to stop the shrieking and tossing the first pillow to the ground when I found the first harborage, nor the "ohmygodI'minfestedwithbedbugsandthisisthegrossestthingEVER" dance that subsequently took place in my living room.
I checked along the baseboards behind the sofa, the window sills, the seams of the curtains, the drop-leaf side table that belonged to my great-grandmother, my ikea Poang chair and its cushions, the stack of floor pillows used for sitting on the ground, and the coffee table including its storage area and found no further evidence of bugs.
Hurrah! My naivete allowed me to think this was the end of the infestation. I fall asleep on the sofa pretty much every night, waking up anywhere between 1:00 am and 4:00 am before crawling into my bed, so the bugs wouldn't have to go far to find themselves a nightly meal.
Now that I knew where they were, I had to figure out what to do.
As with any other internet search, I found many places with information about bed bugs. But like any other internet search, some were helpful and some were full of misinformation. It takes a while to wade through it all and initially I looked at so many different sources it would be difficult to say just which source was best in terms of the information I needed. Badbedbugs.com turned out to be a pretty good primer, both in terms of what to look for and the basic steps to take upon finding an infestation, like encase the mattress and box spring, seal other items in plastic, vacuum harborages, etc.
All of those are great for the harborages you can see. They don't do a lot for the ones you can't see, and don't really address how to kill them (other than leave the stuff encased and wrapped for 18 months to starve the bugs out).
For killing bed bugs en masse, I learned from various sources that there are different chemical treatments and bug bombs, most of them pretty toxic and requiring multiple treatments. Nothing, though, is effective as DDT, the pesticide that was though to have mostly eradicated the species which has subsequently been banned in the US. Chemicals that work on other insects don't work on bed bugs unless they specifically state they can be used for bed bugs (sometimes not even then). Exterminators have been using extreme heat and experimenting with extreme cold and these means have been effective, but I was looking for something a little less costly and more targeted - and something I could do that day.
I have 2 cats, so I didn't want to use a chemical pesticide and wanted something non-toxic but effective, if such a thing exists. My friend sent me to this stuff called Diatomaceous Earth (DE) . It comes in powder form and you spread it around and when the bugs walk through it, they dry out and die within 48 hours. Perfect! I did a Google shopping search and learned that Home Depot sells DE But I also wanted something that would kill them immediately. (For an update and warning on use of DE, see here).
One website suggested Isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol kills bed bugs on contact. I didn't have any, but I had a bottle of Bactine. I wondered "Hmmm ... can't hurt". Turns out, Bactine kills them, too. A couple of sprays onto the harborage took out all of the adults. They sort of melted and bled out. I have to say, it was mighty satisfying watching the pests bleed out the blood they'd taken from me. As a bonus, the Bactine seemed effective at pulling some of the fecal & blood stains out of the fabric of the sofa.
Other websites suggested steam worked well to clean them. It just so happens inherited a steam-machine from a roommate several years back.
So I developed a plan of action.
1) Locate any more harborages and spray with Bactine
2) Steam sofa
3) Procure DE, large thick sheet of plastic & duct tape
4) Powder sofa with DE
5) Wrap sofa in plastic sheet and seal with duct tape
** to be continued **
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