Table of Contents
The short answer
Bed bugs are confirmed by evidence you can see, not by bites. If you find a flat, brown insect the size of an apple seed in the seams of the mattress or the joints of the bed, or small dark dots along the piping that smear when you wipe them with a damp cloth, you have them. Bites on their own prove nothing: mosquitoes, fleas, heat rash and allergies all leave marks that look the same.
Once they are confirmed, this is a job for a professional, and sooner is cheaper than later. The eggs are glued into cracks where household sprays and vacuuming do not reach, so treatment is done in two visits as a rule: one for the insects that are there, and a second 10 to 14 days later for those that have hatched since. Your part is the preparation, which decides how much of the room the treatment can reach.
IHR Dream Cleaning treats bed bugs as part of its pest control service. This guide covers how to check a bed, how the bites differ from mosquito bites, what to do after a hotel stay, what a treatment involves in general terms, and how to get the rooms ready.
What bed bugs look like at each stage
An adult bed bug is 5 to 7 mm long, about the size of an apple seed. Before feeding it is brown, oval and very flat, thin enough to slide into a gap the thickness of a credit card. After feeding it is swollen, longer and reddish brown. It has no wings. It cannot fly or jump; it crawls, and it is carried.
The young, called nymphs, pass through five stages, growing from about 1.5 mm to 4.5 mm. They are translucent or pale yellow, and one that has not fed recently is close to invisible on a white sheet. The eggs are about 1 mm long, pearl white, and stuck in small groups inside cracks and seams. These sizes are the ones given in the US Environmental Protection Agency's description of bed bugs, as published in October 2026.
| Stage | Size | What you see |
|---|---|---|
| Egg | About 1 mm | A pearl-white grain stuck in a seam or crack |
| Nymph | 1.5 to 4.5 mm | Pale and translucent; red after feeding |
| Adult, unfed | 5 to 7 mm | Brown, flat and oval |
| Adult, fed | A little longer | Swollen and reddish brown |
Are they dangerous, and do they mean a dirty home?
Bed bugs are not known to spread diseases to people, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (as published in October 2026). The harm they do is itching and lost sleep, and scratched bites can become infected. Some people react strongly to the bites and some do not react at all, which is why one person in a bed can be covered in marks while the other has none.
They are not a sign of a dirty home either. A bed bug feeds on blood and nothing else. It has no interest in crumbs or dust, and it turns up in spotless homes and good hotels as readily as anywhere else. Clutter matters only because it gives them more places to hide.
How to check a bed properly
There is no home test kit that beats a careful look. Set aside twenty minutes in daylight with a bright torch, a stiff card such as an old loyalty card, a roll of clear tape and a few sealable bags. Work slowly. A rushed inspection throws bedding around and spreads what it was meant to find.
- Before lifting anything, look over the sheets and pillowcases for small rust-coloured smears and for dark dots the size of a full stop.
- Fold the bedding inwards on itself, put it straight into a bag and seal it. Do not carry it loose through the home.
- Check the mattress: the piping around the top and bottom edges, every seam, the handles, the label and any button tufts. Run the edge of the card along the piping to open it up.
- Stand the mattress on its side and check the underside, then the base: the fabric stapled underneath a divan, the corners, the feet, the slats and the brackets they sit in.
- Check the headboard, front and back, and the wall behind it. This is the place most often missed. If it is fixed to the wall, look into the gap with the torch.
- Check the joints of the bed frame, the screw holes and any cracks in the wood.
- Move outwards: bedside table drawers and their undersides, the skirting board behind the bed, the folds of curtains that touch the bed, picture frames above it, and any chair or sofa where someone naps.
- If you find an insect, press tape over it or tip it into a bag. A specimen settles the question at once.
What counts as proof
You are looking for the insect or for what it leaves behind. Any one of the first four below is enough to call it confirmed.
- A live bed bug of any size.
- Dark dots along a seam that smear like ink when wetted. These are droppings. Dust and lint do not smear.
- Pale, papery shed skins in the shape of the insect.
- Pearl-white eggs or empty egg shells stuck in a crack.
- Rust-coloured smears on the sheet, together with any of the above.
If you find nothing but the bites continue
A light infestation can be missed, because a few insects have many places to hide. Put the bed on watch for two weeks. Pull it a hand's width from the wall, keep the bedding from touching the floor, fit pale sheets, and check the seams and the headboard every few days. Pitfall monitors that sit under each bed leg are sold for this purpose and catch insects on their way up or down.
If two weeks of watching turn up nothing, look at other causes: mosquitoes getting in through torn mesh, a pet with fleas, a new detergent, or dust mites, which do not bite but can irritate skin and airways. The guide to dust mites or bed bugs sets the two side by side. You can also ask for an inspection; an on-site inspection is free in every area we serve.
Bed bug bites or mosquito bites?
The two are easy to confuse, and nobody can say for certain which insect made a mark by looking at it. Pattern and timing give hints, no more.
| Compare | Bed bug | Mosquito |
|---|---|---|
| When you notice it | Often a day or more later, usually on waking | Within minutes of the bite |
| Pattern | Often several in a line or a close group | Scattered single bumps |
| Where on the body | Skin left uncovered in bed: arms, shoulders, neck, face | Any exposed skin, often ankles and feet |
| When it happens | During sleep, in any season | Mostly dusk and night, worse near standing water |
| Other evidence | Dots on the mattress seam, shed skins, the insect | A whine at night, mosquitoes resting on walls |
Why bites mislead, and how to look after them
Most people do not notice bed bug bites until one to several days afterwards, and in some people the marks take up to two weeks to show. The bites you see today may come from a hotel bed last week and not from your own. Some people never react at all. That is why the inspection in the previous section matters more than anything on your skin.
For the bites themselves: do not scratch, keep the skin clean, and ask a pharmacist about an antiseptic or anti-itch cream, or an antihistamine if the itching keeps you awake. See a doctor if a bite blisters, swells badly or looks infected, or if you think you are having an allergic reaction. No cream or tablet does anything about the insects.
How bed bugs reach an Abu Dhabi home
Bed bugs do not wander in from outdoors the way ants and cockroaches do. They are carried in, or they walk in from next door. In practice there are four routes.
- Travel. Luggage that sat on a hotel bed, a sleeper seat or the floor of a shared room. Summer travel and visits home make this the classic route here.
- Second-hand furniture. Beds, mattresses, sofas, wardrobes and bedside tables bought online or passed on by someone leaving the country. A used mattress is the highest risk of all.
- A furnished tenancy. A bed or sofa left by the previous occupant can carry them, which is why an inspection before moving in is a common request.
- The building. In an apartment block they can move between flats along shared walls, pipe runs and cable routes, particularly after a neighbour has sprayed or moved out.
What the route tells you
Knowing how they arrived tells you what else needs attention. If they came with a suitcase, the suitcase needs dealing with as well as the bed. If they came with a sofa, the sofa is part of the treatment. If you live in a tower and cannot think of any way they arrived, tell the building management. The flats beside, above and below may need checking, and a treatment that stops at your front door can be undone from the other side of the wall.
Hotels and travel: what to do on the trip and when you get home
In the hotel room
Two minutes on arrival, before anything is unpacked, is enough.
- Put the suitcase on the luggage rack or in the bath while you check the room, not on the bed or the carpet.
- Pull back the sheet at the head of the bed and look along the mattress piping and the top corners with your phone torch.
- Look behind the headboard if you can, and at the joints of the bedside tables.
- If you find live insects or fresh dark dots, photograph them, tell reception and ask for another room that is not next door to, directly above or directly below the first.
- During the stay, keep clothes in the case or on hangers, not in drawers or on a spare bed, and keep the case closed and off the floor.
When you get home
The aim is that nothing from the suitcase touches a bed or a sofa before it has been through heat. It takes ten minutes on the day you land and is far less work than a treatment. If you have come back to a home that was closed for weeks, there is more to do than unpack, and the guide to reopening a home after summer travel covers the rest.
- Unpack on a hard floor away from the bedrooms: the bathroom, the laundry area or a tiled hall.
- Put everything washable straight into the machine, worn or not, then tumble-dry it on a hot setting. It is the dryer's heat that does the work: the US Environmental Protection Agency lists a clothes dryer on high heat among the home methods that kill bed bugs (as published in October 2026).
- Bag anything that cannot be washed and inspect it under a light, seams and pockets especially.
- Vacuum the inside of the suitcase, its seams, pockets and wheel housings, and empty the vacuum into a bag that goes straight out to the bin.
- Store the case away from the bedrooms, not under the bed.
What to do on the day you confirm them, and what not to do
What you do in the first day or two makes the treatment easier or harder. The common mistakes all have the same effect: they move bed bugs into rooms that did not have them. Shop-bought sprays are the commonest first reaction and deserve a longer answer than a line in a list, so they have a guide of their own: do bed bug sprays work.
Do this
- Keep sleeping in the same bed. It is unwelcome advice, but bed bugs follow the person. If you move to the sofa or the spare room, they will be there within days.
- Bag the bedding and the clothes from that room, wash them, dry them on a hot setting, and keep the clean items sealed in fresh bags until the treatment is finished.
- Pull the bed slightly away from the wall and keep the bedding off the floor.
- Vacuum the mattress seams, the bed frame and the skirting, then empty the vacuum into a sealed bag and take it out. This lowers the numbers. It does not remove the eggs.
- Tell the building management or your landlord, and book an inspection.
- Note where you have found signs and when the bites started. The technician will ask.
Avoid this
- Do not move pillows, bedding, clothes or furniture to other rooms.
- Do not throw the mattress out. Dragging it through the home sheds insects on the way, the frame and headboard are usually infested too, and a new mattress put into an untreated room is soon infested itself. Most mattresses can be treated.
- Do not use a fogger or 'bomb'. The mist does not get into the cracks where bed bugs hide.
- Do not use rubbing alcohol, kerosene or petrol. They are a serious fire risk and kill only what they touch.
- Do not try to kill them by heating the room with space heaters. It does not work and it is dangerous.
- Do not buy unlabelled tablets, powders or liquids, and do not let an unlicensed person treat the home.
What a professional treatment involves
A bed bug treatment is slower and more detailed than other pest work. It is usually the most time-intensive treatment in our pest control service, because every mattress, bed frame and soft furnishing near the bed is inspected. The visit runs in this order.
- Inspection. The technician confirms that it is bed bugs and establishes where they are: which beds, which rooms, how far from the bed they have spread.
- Treatment of the bed and what surrounds it. The focus is the mattress, the bed frame, the skirting boards and the soft furnishings nearby.
- Guidance. You are told what was found, what was treated, when the room can be used again and what to do with the bedding and the bagged items.
- A second treatment 10 to 14 days later, to deal with the insects that have hatched since the first visit. When this applies it is explained before the work starts.
The methods, in general terms
Which method is used in your home is decided at the inspection, and you should ask. Across the trade there are four tools, normally used in combination, because none of them does the whole job alone.
| Method | What it does | Its limit |
|---|---|---|
| Residual insecticide | Applied into cracks, joints and along skirting; keeps working after it dries | Many products do not kill eggs, hence the second visit |
| Steam | Kills insects and eggs it touches in seams and upholstery | Slow, and reaches only where the steam goes |
| Whole-room heat | Raises the room and its contents above the temperature bed bugs survive | Specialist equipment; not every company offers it |
| Encasements and monitors | Seal the mattress in and show whether any insects remain | Support for a treatment, not a treatment |
How long you stay out of the room
You will usually be asked to keep out of the treated rooms during the work and for a period afterwards. The technician gives you the re-entry time for the product used. Follow it exactly, and ask for it in writing if rooms were treated differently. No general figure is worth quoting here, because it depends on the product, the surface and the ventilation.
If there is a baby, a pregnant woman, someone with asthma or a pet in the home, say so when you book so the plan allows for it. The guide to pest control with children and pets at home explains how to prepare for that.
How to prepare the rooms
Preparation is the part of the treatment you do, and it is the difference between a treatment that reaches every hiding place and one that does not. Follow the instructions you are given when the visit is confirmed. Where they differ from the list below, theirs take priority, because they match the method being used.
- Strip the beds. Put bedding, pillowcases and mattress protectors into bags in the bedroom and seal them before carrying them out.
- Wash and tumble-dry the bagged items on a hot setting, put the clean items into new bags and keep them sealed. Throw the used bags away outside the home.
- Do the same with clothes, soft toys and fabric items kept on the floor, under the bed or in the bedside tables.
- Empty the space under the bed completely. Whatever was stored there is bagged and inspected, not moved to another room.
- Clear access to the skirting boards and behind the furniture. Pull the bed and the bedside tables away from the wall.
- Vacuum the floor, the mattress seams and the bed frame, and take the vacuum's contents out in a sealed bag.
- Put away food, dishes, toothbrushes and anything a child might put in their mouth. Food goes into sealed containers or closed cupboards.
- Keep pets in a separate room during the treatment and for the period advised afterwards. Mention fish tanks and bird cages in advance.
- Write down where you have seen insects or signs, and when. Hand the note and any specimen to the technician.
Two things to leave alone
Do not spray anything in the days before the visit. It drives the insects deeper into the furniture and into neighbouring rooms, and the inspection then finds fewer of them than are there.
Do not take beds or wardrobes apart and carry the pieces around the home. If a bed frame has to be dismantled to be treated, that is better done on the day, in the room it stands in.
After the treatment: what is normal and what to do
Seeing a few bed bugs in the days after the first visit is normal. Insects are flushed out of hiding, and eggs laid before the visit go on hatching until the second treatment. A new bite in that period does not mean the treatment has failed.
Keep sleeping in the treated bed, keep it away from the wall, and leave the bagged clean items sealed until after the second visit. Do not mop or wipe the skirting boards and bed frame where the treatment was applied until the technician says so, because washing a treated edge removes what was put there. The guide to cleaning after pest control sets out what can be cleaned and when.
Tell us if activity has not clearly dropped within the time the technician discussed with you, so a follow-up can be arranged. After the second visit, the signs that need a call are live insects, fresh dark dots on new pale sheets, or new shed skins.
The mattress afterwards
Once the infestation is cleared, the mattress is usually left with dark spots. A professional mattress clean treats stains and takes out dust and allergens, and makes the bed pleasant to use again: AED 79 for a single, AED 99 for a double or queen and AED 119 for a king, with a minimum order of AED 100 per visit. It is not a bed bug treatment and does not replace one. Cleaning removes dust, not insects in the bed frame.
A zipped encasement made for bed bugs, fitted over the mattress and the base afterwards, takes away most of the seams they hide in and makes any return easy to spot against the plain fabric.
Common questions
Can I get rid of bed bugs myself?
A very small, very early problem, such as one or two insects found on a suitcase the day after a trip, can sometimes be stopped with heat, bagging and a great deal of care. An established one almost never is. The insects hide in gaps the width of a card, many insecticides do not kill the eggs, and some populations resist the commonest spray ingredients. The usual result of months of home treatment is a larger infestation in more rooms.
How long until they are gone?
Plan for two visits 10 to 14 days apart, then a few weeks of watching. Nobody can honestly promise a date, because it depends on how far they had spread, how well the rooms were prepared and whether a neighbouring flat is involved. A reasonable test is several weeks with no bites, no live insects and no new marks on pale sheets or in the monitors.
Will one visit be enough?
Often not. Bed bugs often need a follow-up treatment 10 to 14 days after the first to catch the newly hatched insects, and we say so before the work starts if it applies to you. Be cautious of any offer to clear an established infestation with a single spray.
Do bed bugs live on people or pets?
No. They feed for a few minutes and go back to their hiding place. They prefer people but will feed on other mammals and on birds, so a pet's bed that sits near yours should be washed and checked as well. They do not live in hair the way lice do.
Can I sleep in another room, or leave the flat empty for a while?
Sleeping elsewhere spreads them, because they go looking for you. Leaving the home empty does not starve them either. Adult bed bugs can survive for months without feeding, which is longer than most people can stay away.
Does washing clothes kill bed bugs?
The heat does. Use the hottest wash the fabric allows and then a hot tumble-dry. For things that cannot be washed, such as shoes, soft toys or a dry-clean-only jacket, the dryer on its own is the useful part, provided the item can take it. A cool wash followed by drying on a rack indoors cannot be relied on.
How much does bed bug treatment cost?
It is quoted once we know how many rooms and beds are involved. Pest control starts at AED 149 for a studio, AED 179 for one bedroom, AED 199 for two and AED 229 for three, with villas from AED 299. Those are for one treatment by one technician, and the price for a bed bug job is confirmed before the visit. What moves it is explained in pest control prices in Abu Dhabi.
How to book an inspection or a treatment
Book online on the website or in the IHR Dream app. Choose pest control, the size of your home and a time, and describe the problem: that it is bed bugs, which rooms, and what you found. Reply to the confirmation email with photos of the insect or the marks. We confirm the method and the price before the visit, and same-day visits are often available for an active infestation, depending on the schedule.
Payment is online by card, from My bookings on this website once the price is confirmed. You can cancel or move the appointment without charge up to 6 hours before it starts.
What the service includes is set out on the pest control service page. When you have confirmed the signs, book a visit.
