How to Find Bed Bugs with Black Light
If you think that bed bugs only live in rundown places, you better think again. These tiny parasitic insects also live in fancy hotel rooms and luxurious homes. This is why it is imperative to know how you can detect bed bugs sooner than later.
Bed bugs have distinct brown or reddish flat bodies. They feed on their hosts’ blood and everyone is prone to a bed bug infestation whether you like it or not. These insects often enter homes through clothes, luggage, toys, furniture, and pretty much everything and anything under the sun.
Early detection is the very first step to prevent or contain an existing infestation. There are some claims that you can use a black light to find bed bugs. Is this true?
How to Find Bed Bugs with Black Light
Considered as parasites, bed bugs can become a health risk to many. Once you discover that your home is infested with bed bugs, the next crucial step is to identify their habitat to effectively eliminate them.
Since bed bugs hate the light, it makes it hard to find them during the daytime. Can you see bed bugs with UV light, then? Well, bed bugs black light will not let you spot a bed bug directly but a black light can be used to find their trail.
Try doing the following steps in using a black light to find bed bug trails:
- If you remove your bedding, you will see those trails bed bugs left behind.
- When finding bed bugs with a black light, turn it on first and check the corner seams of your mattress.
- Track the light across the seam until you spot the glowing trail.
- Bed bugs leave behind a debris trail of their blood and waste. Follow this trail until you find its end.
If the bugs are not in the bed’s corner seams, they might be in the nearby wall seam or electrical outlet. Suffocation and heat are the best ways to exterminate bed bugs once you find them.
Bed Bug UV Detection Light- How UV Light Detects Bed Bugs
UV light or black light is just like any regular light, with both being types of radiation. These two forms of lights are produced by different bodies such as the sun and they also act similarly. The difference, however, is their location on the light spectrum.
Visible light is the light you can see. Various light wavelengths appear in different colours to you such as red, blue, green, and yellow. The light has more energy if the wavelength is also higher.
UV light has more energy compared to visible light, which means that it has a higher wavelength. Your naked eye cannot see it.
When switched on, black light may appear as dark purple. This is because blue or purple is the highest visible light wavelength you can see. Other emitted lights are invisible to you.
Either way, UV light interacts with phosphors. These are luminescent substances. They absorb energy and release this as light. Teeth and nails, detergents, some types of ink are good examples of phosphors.
Phosphors absorb some of UV light’s energy. They release energy as visible light instead of heat, unlike other substances.
These are some of the things you should know on how to find bed bugs with UV light. Bringing a bed bug UV detection light when you travel or just having in your home will help you in early detection.
Simply add it to your current bed bug solutions and be able to prepare for a possible infestation before it happens. It can also be used for continuous monitoring right after an extermination treatment or in addition to your passive monitoring devices.
