How to Spot Bed Bugs in a Windsor Bedroom

Why You Never See Them

A bed bug feeds for a few minutes every few days and spends the rest of its life pressed into a gap. Add that up and an individual insect is out in the open for a handful of minutes a week, in the dark, under a duvet.

So the odds of catching one by glancing at a bed are very poor until the population is large. By the time people are routinely seeing live insects, an infestation has usually been running for months.

When They Are Actually Out

Feeding activity tends to peak in the hours before dawn, though the driver is a host being available and still rather than the clock — somebody who sleeps in the day gets fed on in the day.

So if you are going to look for a live insect, the useful window is the early hours, and the useful method is a torch turned on without turning the room light on.

The Night Check

1. Set an alarm for somewhere between three and five in the morning
2. Have a torch to hand, and do not turn the room light on
3. Turn the duvet back quickly and look at the sheet around where you have been lying
4. Then the mattress piping at the head end, then the headboard gap
5. Look at the wall behind the bed, which is where they are visible crossing
6. If you see one, do not squash it — catch it in a clear sealed bag

This is worth doing once, when you have a reason to suspect and the daytime checks have found nothing. It is not worth doing repeatedly, and it is a poor substitute for looking at the seams in daylight.

What You Are Looking At

• Unfed adult: four to five millimetres, oval, very flat, reddish-brown, wingless. Moves at about the pace of an ant
• Fed adult: swollen, rounder, considerably darker — almost a different animal to look at
• Nymphs: the same shape, smaller, from around a millimetre. Newly hatched ones are pale and nearly translucent, and are very easy to miss
• No wings at any stage. A small flying insect in a bedroom is something else entirely

Where They Are Visible in Transit

They are hard to see at rest and easier to see crossing something flat and pale.

• The sheet, especially a light-coloured one
• A painted wall behind or above the bed
• The face of a white-painted skirting board
• The top face of a divan base, once the mattress is lifted

Windsor: If the Room Is a Guest Room or a Let

The night check is not available — nobody is in there at three in the morning, and that is precisely the problem. A room with no host produces no bites, no sightings and no complaints, while evidence quietly accumulates in the seams.

For those rooms the answer is the daytime evidence check at every changeover, while the bed is already stripped. It takes two minutes and it is the only reliable option there is.