Where Should You Check Around a Bed?

The Distance Rule

Bed bugs travel to feed and prefer not to travel far. In a new or moderate infestation, essentially everything is within arm's reach of a sleeping body. In an established one it extends to the walls of the room, but the concentration stays close in.

So the useful sweep is a metre out from the edges of the bed, plus the wall behind the head of it. Anything beyond that is worth checking second, not first.

The Circuit

1. The mattress, piping first, at the head end
2. The frame or divan, joints and drawers
3. Behind the headboard, and the wall it hangs on
4. Both bedside cabinets, drawers out
5. The floor beneath the bed, and anything stored there
6. The skirting on the head wall, out from directly behind the pillows
7. The carpet edge and gripper along that wall
8. Socket and switch faces on that wall
9. Anything hanging above the bed — a picture, a mirror, a wall light
10. A chair, if there is one within the metre
11. Curtains, if the bed is under a window

The Vertical Half Nobody Does

The circuit above is mostly horizontal, and there is a vertical half to it that is routinely skipped.

• Behind a picture or mirror over the bed. The gap between frame and wall is a perfectly good harbourage in an established case
• A wall light or reading light, and its rose or backplate
• The top edge of a skirting board where it meets a poorly filled plaster line
• A curtain hem, and the fixings of a wall-mounted blind
• Wallpaper lifting at a seam or an edge, in an older room

Nothing on that list is where a problem starts. All of it is where a problem that has been running for months ends up, which makes it worth checking specifically when the horizontal sweep has already found plenty.

What Is Under the Bed

Two separate questions. Is there activity on the floor and the frame underneath — and is there stored stuff, which is a different problem.

Stored boxes, cases and bags under a bed sit inside the harbourage zone. They are somewhere the treatment cannot reach, they are difficult to inspect, and they are the single most likely thing to be carried into a clean room during a clear-out. Emptying that space — keeping everything in the room — is the most useful preparation there is.

Crowthorne: When the Metre Comes Up Clean

It happens, and it means one of three things. The infestation is very new and there is genuinely almost nothing to find; you are looking at the wrong bed in the property; or what is biting is not bed bugs.

All three are worth taking seriously rather than looking harder at the same metre. Check the other beds in the house, including any nobody sleeps in, and if bites continue with nothing found anywhere, the identification is the thing to settle next.