Bed Bugs Mattress Covers

While mattresses are not the only place that bed bugs will live and breed, there is every reason to stop them from breeding in your mattress. These small, wingless insects are known to emerge just before dawn to feed on human blood, and if they are harbored within your bed, you are going to be bitten.

Bed bugs and mattresses

Bed bugs live and breed in colonies that are warm and dry. They take four to five weeks to hatch from the egg and develop into an adult bug, and then live for as long as a year. Females will lay as many as 200 to 500 eggs during this time. While they can go long periods of time without sucking blood, they will travel from 1.5 m (5 feet) to more than 3 m (about 10 feet) to get to food. The closer they are to humans, the better (for them).

Although the common bed bug (Cimex lectularius) and its close relation, (Cimex hemipterus), certainly don't limit themselves to living in mattresses, there are thousands of photographs taken by both entomologists and pest control experts that show alarming quantities of bugs in beds of all sorts. They often burrow their way into box spring edges or through the seams of mattresses, lay their eggs (which become tightly stuck to the surface), and then either go back to an established harborage, or form a colony in the mattress where they are. Whether the adult bug that has laid the eggs sticks around or not, if the bed bug eggs are not spotted and manually removed, within a month her babies will be nearly ready to start sucking life-giving human blood.

How mattress covers work

Originally developed to protect allergic people from house dust mites that also infest mattresses, these specially designed mattress covers completely encase the mattress to prevent bed bugs from getting into the structure, irrespective of how it is made. Instead of seams, the covers have special zippers that will also stop any bed bugs that have already made the mattresses home from escaping. This might seem offensive, but the idea is to starve the bugs so that they die, without the use of harmful chemicals that you might otherwise breathe in. The alternative would be to discard and destroy the mattress, which is a wise choice if it is badly infested.

Of course some covers are better than others, and you should look at those:

• with patented zippers with small zipper teeth bugs cannot get through
• with few seams and joins that are tightly stitched
• with a built-in, bite-proof membrane that the bugs cannot burrow through
• made from material that can be successfully laundered to keep them clean and healthy

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) there are also mattress covers that incorporate an EPA-labeled pyrethroid insecticide. While this might seem like a good idea, bed bugs are known to be resistant to pyrethroid.

Some companies include pillow protectors with their mattress protection bed bug kits, although these are primarily to protect sleepers from allergens rather than bed bugs. Pillow covers, like bed bug-proof mattress covers are, however, useful for people who travel and aren't sure about the bedding they will be sleeping in.