How cold does it need to be to kill bed bugs?

Brrrrr – it’s -10°C outside today and it is true that bed bugs will die in freezing temperatures, but how cold does it have to get and how long do bed bugs need to be in the cold?

In search of answers, I found that Joelle F. Olson of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and colleagues froze bed bugs at various stages of life, fed and unfed, for varying lengths of time. The good news is that the bed bugs can be killed with freezing cold temperatures. The bad news was that it takes in excess of 80 hours at -16°C to kill the adult bed bugs and the eggs. In this study, bed bugs survived temperatures as low as -25°C for short perio

ds of time.

This is good news is you live in the colder climes of Canada that you can put some of your possession outside in winter for four days. The problem becomes controlling mother nature to ensure that the temperature stays below -16°C for the entire time

to feel secure in the knowledge that the bed bugs will be dead bugs.

This past spring, a customer reported that a summer home they purchased in the fall still had bed bugs in the spring, even though it remain

ed unheated all

winter, and we had had a fairly cold winter. The very first weekend they went up, they were eaten alive not by black flies but bed bugs.

It seems that the only surefire way to kill bed bugs remains with heating your room and possessions to above 45°C. Renting a bed bug heater is your most affordable option to organically killing bed bugs in one treatment. Alternatively, you could move north of the Arctic Circle.