Bed bugs can survive outside for several days in harsh weather and without a host.
Kill bed bugs with cold.
Top ten tips to prevent or control bed bugs.
You can compare your insect to the pictures on our identifying bed bugs.
Using freezing cold temperatures to kill bed bugs is one option.
In most cases the pest can die at temperatures that are lower than 3.
As for the low temperatures 13 f kills both adults and bed bug eggs in about several days.
However compared to other insects the bed bug is not good at supercooling to keep the chemical and physical tactics unfrozen.
What they have very little tolerance for however is intense heat.
The epa says that even at 0 f cold weather can take several days to kill bed bugs and almost a week when the temperature is 20 f.
Instead they are freeze avoiders and produce their own antifreeze.
Other experts suggest the required period is at least two weeks.
But they also found that bed bugs no matter in what life stages they are and their feeding status can be killed after being exposed in temperatures of 16 degrees cold for 80 hours.
Joelle found that bed bugs are tolerant to cold to an extent.
The study ultimately proved that the adult bedbugs could be killed by cold only through exposure to temperatures of 16 deg c or lower for a period of at least 80 hours.
Bed bugs don t go away for the winter they will stay close to their food source and try to keep warm.
Bed bugs resort to a process called supercooling to deal with temperature drops but are not not as freeze tolerant as some other bugs like cockroaches.
Put an infested object such as bedding or pillows in a sealed plastic bag then put it in a freezer at zero degrees fahrenheit for about four days.
They would need to be in 0 degree weather for several days in order for them to reach 100 mortality.
Temperature that kills bed bugs a similar process can be used with heat.
When it comes to high temperatures more than 100 degrees fahrenheit 37 778 c starts to damage bed bugs whereas 113 f 45 c can kill bed bugs in 90 minutes and 118 f 47 778 c can kill them in 20 minutes.
Cold weather will not necessarily kill bed bugs.
That leaves bed bugs an extended period in which they are free to mingle and perhaps even escape your sealed bag.
The eggs of the bugs survived in short term exposure to even lower temperatures of 25 degrees c.
Think through your treatment options don t immediately reach for the spray can.
The researchers said that bed bugs could survive cold temperatures as low as 25 degrees celcius.
Extreme cold doesn t work to kill bed bugs but extreme heat will so we have learned that bed bugs are very tolerant of cold weather much more so than other pests.
Therefore the insect is vulnerable to cold.