Signs of Bed Bugs in Grand Rapids: Where to Look Before You Call

Why look before you call

MSU Extension’s first instruction to a homeowner is that “a pest management professional will want to inspect the home before beginning any treatment.” We do, every time, and you cannot shortcut it. But what you find first changes the call: a tenant who can say “live bugs in the box-spring corner and spotting on the headboard” gets a faster, better-priced inspection than one who can only say “I itch.” And the same MSU article lists, as the first reason treatments fail, that “all sources of the bed bugs were not identified during the inspection phase.” An inspection starts with where you already looked.

The order

1. Mattress seams, piping and the tag, at the head end first. Strip the bed and run a flashlight along the seam at a low angle.
2. Box spring: tip it up. The corners, the staples under the dust cover, the frame wood.
3. Headboard and frame: screw holes, joints, the gap where the headboard meets the wall. Slats and bolts.
4. Nightstand: pull the drawers and look at the joints and the underside.
5. The wall nearby: outlet covers, picture frames, the baseboard gap, curtain hems.
6. Anywhere else someone sleeps: the sofa and the recliner, same seams and frame joints.

Those are the locations the state manual means when it says a treatment must reach bed bugs “in all of their hiding places,” and they are where we put the temperature probes on a heat job. If the bed is clean in all six and the sofa is too, the problem is probably somewhere else or something else.

What you are looking for

• Live insects: flat, reddish-brown, slow in daylight; the young stages are smaller and paler and easy to miss against a light mattress.
• Dark spotting in clusters along a seam or a screw hole.
• Shed skins caught in the seams.
• Pale eggs glued into cracks and fabric folds.

Put anything you catch on clear tape stuck to an index card, or in a pill bottle, and keep it. Our inspection report records life stages present by room; a specimen from you goes in that report. Michigan’s dead 2019 bill named two ways to confirm an infestation, a “pest management professional or accredited canine team,” and either way the confirmation is evidence found, not bites felt.

Bites are not evidence

None of the Michigan sources we rely on, the state manual, MSU Extension or the health department fact sheet, describes a bite pattern that identifies bed bugs, so we do not either. Bites are the reason you started looking; they are not what you are looking for. Neighbors with an identical rash have been diagnosed with two different things.

If you are renting

The state health department’s fact sheet is blunt: “When you spot bed bugs, immediately call your landlord. If your landlord doesn’t take action, contact your local housing code authority.” Inside Grand Rapids that authority is City Code Compliance (616-456-3053); outside, the county health department (616-632-6900). Photograph what you found before you call anyone, and put the notice in writing. The letter →

What not to do

Do not spray. The manual: “Bug bombs ARE NOT effective against bed bugs and should not be used.” Do not drag the mattress to the curb; beds treat, and a mattress carried down a shared stairwell seeds the building. Do vacuum the seams you inspected, and follow MSU’s instruction to “dispose of the vacuum bag or the canister contents in a sealed plastic bag and place it outside the home.” Then call with what you found and where.