Can Bed Bugs Live in Bedside Furniture?

Why It Ranks So High

Proximity. A bed bug leaves a harbourage to feed and would rather travel a short distance, so the shortlist of good sites in a bedroom is really a shortlist of things within a couple of feet of a pillow. A bedside cabinet is the only piece of furniture other than the bed that qualifies.

It is also, in construction terms, a small chest of drawers — which means joints, runners, a back panel and enclosed recesses, all in a box the size of a suitcase.

Where On It

1. Take the drawer right out and turn it over. The underside of the drawer bottom and the back of the drawer box are the two most productive surfaces on the whole item, and neither is visible with the drawer in
2. The runners, on the drawer and in the carcass, including the screw heads
3. The empty recess the drawer slides into — enclosed on five sides, dark, and only reachable with the drawer out
4. The back panel, particularly where a thin ply back is pinned into a rebate
5. Corner joints inside the carcass
6. The underside of the whole cabinet, and any castor or foot recess

The Things That Sit On It

Less obvious and worth a look, because they are stationary objects in the right place.

• The base of a bedside lamp, especially a hollow or felted one
• A stack of books — the spines, and between the pages of one left open
• A phone charger or plug, and the gap behind it at the socket
• A clock or radio, and its battery compartment
• A picture frame standing on the top

None of those is a primary harbourage. All of them are places evidence turns up in a long-running case, and finding it there tells you the same thing perimeter activity does: this has been going on a while.

What Is In the Drawer Matters Too

Bedside drawers accumulate exactly the sort of thing that is difficult to treat: paperwork, tissues, medication packets, charging cables, spare glasses. It is worth emptying the drawer into a bag or box that stays in the room before any treatment, so the drawer and its recess can be dealt with.

The instinct is to carry that box out to sort through later, and that is precisely the movement that starts a second room.

Crowthorne: Matching Pairs

Bedside cabinets usually come in twos, one either side of the bed. Check both. It is common for one side of a bed to be considerably more active than the other — the side somebody actually sleeps on, or the side nearer the wall — and checking only the accessible one gives a misleading answer.

If the two are not matching, or one came from elsewhere, say so. A cabinet that arrived second-hand is a candidate for having brought the problem in rather than for having received it.