Bed Bugs 101: Rooms that are dirty with clothes on the floor or food left out are no more likely to contain bed bugs than a five-star hotel. Bed bugs can be found anywhere that people are sleeping. It's not very useful to argue over whose fault it is that bed bugs are introduced into a building. It's actually nearly impossible to prove, never intentional, and even for the most diligent people, never totally preventable. There are three ways that bed bugs can find their way to your home (although millions of places to find bed bugs) as follows: (1) Travel: Unknowingly bringing bed bugs home from hotel, hospital, college, friends house. (2) Furniture: Purchasing used (or sometime new) furniture that contains bed bugs, especially mattresses. (3) Multi-tenant buildings: Once bed bugs are introduced to one unit, they will eventually find their way to any and all adjacent units/bedrooms.

Since most bed bugs are large enough to see with the naked eye, you would think that people would notice them in an infested room right away. Unfortunately, most people do not know where to look and what to look for. Early infestations, when just a few bed bugs are present, are extremely difficult to find. While inspecting your hotel room (or anywhere you sleep outside the house) is essential to early detection, many people have reported bringing bed bugs home even after a thorough inspection. This is because bed bugs are very good at hiding in cracks and crevices. When just a few bed bugs are present, they typically will be well hidden behind the headboard or inside the box spring. Tell-tale signs, like cast skins and black fecal droppings, will only be noticeably present on a mattress or bed skirt after an infestation has grown in number over a period of weeks and months.

The reason that a bed bug infestation can go undetected for weeks is that many people do not react to bed bug bites initially. Everyone has different sensitivities to the bites. Some people will itch right away, some people will itch a few days later and some people will not itch at all until the bites become very frequent. When two people share a bed or bedroom that is infested, it is common that only one will notice itchy welts even though both people are getting bitten each night. For this reason, bed bugs frequently get misdiagnosed.