How Do You Check a Mattress for Bed Bugs?

What You Need

• A torch — a phone torch is fine
• A bank card or an old loyalty card, for opening out a seam
• Ten minutes and a stripped bed

The torch matters more than anything else here, and how you hold it matters more than how bright it is. Held nearly flat against the surface it rakes across the fabric and picks out texture in a seam. Pointed straight at it, the same light flattens everything out and you see nothing.

The Order

1. The head end, top face

Start at the top edge of the mattress at the head end and work along the piping — the covered cord that runs round the edge. Open the seam either side of it out with the card as you go. This one strip of fabric produces more first evidence than everywhere else on a bed put together, which is why it is first and why it is worth doing slowly.

2. The head end, and then down both sides

Same again along the sides, working away from the head end. Activity thins out as you go — that gradient is itself information, because it points back to where the population sits.

3. Labels and handles

Labels are stitched along one edge only and lift. Look underneath every one. If the mattress has carry handles, look inside the recess where the webbing enters the fabric.

4. Turn it and repeat

The underside is checked far less often than the top and it has the same piping, the same seams and the same labels. On a mattress that is rarely turned it can hold more than the top face does.

5. Tufting and vents

On a traditional mattress, look into the dimples around the tufting buttons. If there are vent grommets in the sides, look into those too.

What You Might Find, and What It Means

• A few dark specks clustered on the piping. The commonest first finding. Wipe one with a damp white cloth — digested blood smears rust-brown, dry dirt brushes off
• A pale, empty, insect-shaped shell. A cast skin. This is the one that settles it, because it means something has been growing there rather than passing through
• Tiny white specks cemented into a seam. Eggs, about a millimetre. If they shake loose they are not eggs
• Rust-coloured smears on the fabric itself. Usually from a sleeper rolling on a fed insect
• A live insect. Flat, oval, reddish-brown, four to five millimetres. Round and dark if it has fed
• Nothing at all. Genuinely possible even with bed bugs in the room - the frame, the base and the headboard are all still open questions

Reading, and Why the Mattress Check Is Worth Repeating

A lot of Reading property is rented, shared or has people coming and going through it, and that means more chances for something to be carried in and less chance of anybody noticing the first time. A single negative check in March says nothing about June.

If bites continue and the first check found nothing, do it again in a fortnight. A genuinely new infestation can leave almost nothing to find, and what it will not do is stay that way.

What Not To Do When You Find Something

1. Do not spray it
2. Do not carry the mattress out of the room
3. Do not move to another bedroom to sleep
4. Do photograph what you found, in place
5. Do strip the bedding into a bag in the room and hot wash and hot tumble dry it
6. Do check the frame, the divan base and behind the headboard next