Bed Bug Parasites

Bed bugs are small, brown insects - about the size of an apple seed- that feed on human blood. After a feeding, they swell in size and can become bright or dark red in color. They are wingless and cannot fly or jump, but they are very good at latching onto clothing, hiding behind baseboards, burrowing into wooden furniture and mattresses, books, and any upholstery in your living space or workplace. These bugs are extremely small and very hard to see making them a challenge to detect with the human eye. Visual identification by a human only has a mere 35% success rate and requires furniture to be taken apart and moved around as well as the baseboards removed, making it a very time consuming and expensive problem if you hire the wrong people.

How Do They Get into Your Space?

Having bed bugs does not mean your living or work space isn't clean. They enter your environment by clinging to items you carry in from outside, including on the clothes you are wearing. The most common items are mattresses, box springs, upholstered furniture, luggage, electronics, books, pictures and household goods.

How can we help?

Exterminators use people to carry out their inspections and because humans don't have the ability to smell the scent of live bed bugs, they have to rely on visual identification. As these parasites are incredibly small and have the ability to burrow into mattresses and furniture, the accuracy of this is only 35% at best.

Dogs in the other hand, have a success rate of over 95% in correctly identifying the presence of live bed bugs. They rely on their nose to detect the scent of bed bugs- meaning no need to rip apart your living space to only hopefully catch a glimpse of these pesky parasites.

A canine’s olfactory acuity is far superior to humans. It is estimated that 1/8th of the dog’s brain is committed to sense of smell with over 220 million olfactory cells compared to only 5 million in humans.

Bed bugs produce two main pheromones known as (E)-2-hexenal and (E)-2-octenal which are what the dogs use to identify their presence.

At ProK9, we use our team members Sparta and Ryp, who have been expertly trained to identify the presence of bed bugs.