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Let’s kick around a little bit about bedbugs. You know I’ve been to a lot of training classes over the last year pretty consistently. And bedbugs come up all the time because let’s face the reality they’re gonna be with us for a long long long time. And we’re always looking for solutions we’re trying to find ways to deal with them. And what I want to talk about today is maybe a different perspective. On dealing with the situation. Because as I’ve said in many of my other sessions what we have to bring our clients if we’re going to hold on to them is peace of mind. And the reality with bedbugs is really something. And there were some discussions in one of the classes we had at Baltimore last week at the interstate conference and one of the individuals on stage that I actually shared the same stage with on altering classes was Dini Miller and Dini brought up something that I’ve heard many times before but I’m so glad she said it.
Because it’s the reality of what we’re dealing with and what she said was. Imagine you’re in a restaurant and a fly buzzes across a table maybe lands on the edge of your plate. You’re going to wave your hand and make it go away. Let’s say you’re sitting in that same restaurant and a cockroach is seen on the wall. Oh my goodness that’s gross and disgusting you’re gonna call the manager and fuss and maybe get a free meal out of it. However if there’s a bedbug that maybe crawls across the booth or seen on a person in the building. Oh my goodness. They’re gonna shut the restaurant down. It’s gonna be on the news at 6:00. It’s gonna be on the Internet. It’s gonna blow up like crazy and it’s gonna be nuts.
And the reality is which one of those insects is most likely to kill you. The fly.
Why The Pest Control Does Very Little To Prevent Pest Introduction?
So maybe what we need to do is educate people a little bit better on the realities of this creature. This is not the format for that. What I want to try and do here is just give you a different way to look at things that may help you. You have to understand you have to get this what our industry does is prevent infestation. This industry does very little to prevent introduction
And that’s just the reality because pest pressure is constant. Oh I know we can rodent proof a building or something like that. But the reality is we’re structural folks we deal with human habitat we deal with buildings we deal with transport devices we deal with things that people occupy. And so what we have to do is make sure pest populations can not infest those zones. Can we prevent introduction. Well especially with something like bedbugs how. The next person walking in with all good intention may have just come from a movie theater and they had their backpack with them and maybe they got bedbugs in the backpack at the movie theater or in the cube farm that they work in or at the kid’s daycare center or at the school or they were trying on clothes at the local department store. Heaven only knows we can’t prevent introduction. So what we have to do is prepare our clients so they will not get an infestation. And the way you do that is informing yourself about the way these insects work. Now let’s take a look at a treatment scenario.
Teaching Quick And Dirty Bedbug Inspection
Let’s look at a hotel room because I think most of us when we go to hotel rooms. We do the quick and dirty. Well we certainly train our clients to do that and we all know the drill. Yet grab a hold of the mattress yet jacket back on the box spring about a foot and a half you pull out the flashlight which you’re all supposed to have with you. And I tell everybody to carry a flashlight wherever they go because you never know when you might need it but you shine that flashlight in that space between the box spring and the mattress. The wall is exposed to look in those zones close to the food source which is us. And I tell people if you see something moving it looks yucky black specks whatever it might be you’ll want another room. Let let’s make this simple. And of course the entire time you’ve deposited your luggage in the bathtub that way nothing can move in there while you’re fiddling around the room. But it’s that quick and dirty type of thing that we have to teach people to at least take a look and protect themselves. Are they going to tear a hotel room apart. Probably not. We do. I’ve been with PMP’s that stripped the room completely. And they search and search and search and they don’t find anything but they feel better about it. Remember it’s all peace of mind. But let’s look at that hotel chain. What are they going to do. Well they need a proactive program which means as a PMP I hope to goodness you have talked to them about their p. m. programs their preventative maintenance processes because that’s where you can do the most good on a proactive basis for bedbugs. It’s that simple. This is when they’re going in
And palming those rooms bringing them back to absolutely sterling so that their next guest is going to be well satisfied with that stay. And those processes vary from hotel to hotel. You need to talk to your clients to find out when they do it. And once that’s done the proactive bedbug processes can be put in during the finishing of those palms. So if you’ve set yourself up properly with a hotel you might be doing PNM work every single month as they bring down sections of the hotel and they do the work or they may have a eight month period they do it a six month period whatever but you become part of that process because if you’re dealing with bedbugs they’re you’re not playing fire sale and panicking and taking rooms out of service for a long period of time. You’re doing a far more sensible process now as far as process materials. We have some very good materials now that are great in NPM programs.
Teaching Quick And Dirty Bedbug Inspection
One of them that’s dry is some Cimexa. You’ve all used it. You put that out with Technocide duster. You can get the voids and everything else and shut them down for long long periods of time because the Exacticide takes that some Max dust and distributes it properly into the voids very very lightly not heavily. In the case of exposed areas fabric
It will very very soon be available and a ready to use which is going to change the dynamics completely on how easy this material is to use. But Cimishield is a long term residual and it doesn’t kill quickly after it dries. It kills slowly
But what it’s designed to do is nail down that proactive process and prevent infestations. It is superb at that. It comes in two formulations one with access active that kills insects immediately but then it dries off then it becomes the second product which is protect and protect is your long term residual if you don’t need the heavy duty killing up front. Just use protect it’s a little cheaper but it’s a proactive material
That you can use on a preventative basis. And it certainly bears looking into. So you’ve got some Max off for the voids. You’ve got some shield for the more exposed areas. And in both cases you have extremely long term products that will hold up under the normal processes and cleanings and things like that that go on in a hotel room. It’s ideal for that. But during the same period when you’re all finished
Teaching Quick And Dirty Bedbug Inspection
A couple of ideas here. Number one you’re going to have a product coming out of Canada very soon from Beapco. It is a surge protector. They call a power strip that’s going to be UL approved for use in the United States. Its functions as a surge protector but inside of it when you pivot open the base there is a bedbug monitoring board with a tractor. If you need to you can add a CO2 cartridge to it in a room that you might be suspicious about.
But what this does it adds a 24 hour a day monitor to that space that functions as a surge protector which all hotels have. So people can plug in their stuff. You can mount them to the wall you can mount them to a cabinet whatever. But when it’s plugged in it functions normally but it just happens to contain that monitoring space for bedbugs. Very very effective piece of equipment. And as I said we’ll have UL approval on those in the United States probably by mid spring. We’ll have them. I’ve used them for some time and testing. I like these units. I like what they do the other monitoring device that’s well worth considering is a small hard plastic device from JF Oaks that simply meant to go between a mattress and a box spring. Now is this going to prevent a bedbug problem. No.
All it is a point in space. It is an access point for these insects to be found by us. The reason I like these is because they provide me with targets so as with the beep code detector. I’ve got a target I’ve placed in that room so I can then have somebody go back in and do an assessment on that space with targets placed in their it’s a very helpful way to guide our own people. But these are the type of things you have to bring your client so that they have peace of mind. So they’re bedbug program is proactive. They’re not going to prevent. An insect being brought in. That’s not possible. But what we can do is prevent the insect from coming in and causing an infestation which becomes a disaster. The other thing you can do is document the living daylights out of the entire proactive process so that when something does happen that hotel can say. We have a PMP. We have a proactive process. So these things never get out of hand we’re protecting our clients that’s as good as it’s gonna get. In today’s world there may be other ways to do this. There are certainly other products we can bring into the fold. I just wanted to give you a taste. And so with that.
