hi i'm jim dill from the university of maine cooperative extension and i want to talk to you a little bit today about traveling and tips on looking for bed bugs most people when they enter their hotel room the first thing they do is come to the bed throw their stuff on the bed or if not the bed probably the luggage rack or maybe even both and when you're traveling that's really probably in this day and age i don't know because bed bugs could be in either of those places the best thing to do is when you enter a room is to bring your equipment in what you're carrying bring it in you walk in after you've put your luggage in the bathtub then it's time to start checking your room the first place to check is walk up to the bed so what you want to do is you want to look in behind the bed backboard you look in the corners you look along the creases of it any place you can see on the bedboard backboard the next place you look is along the piping of the mattress you want to look all along here looking for either the adult bed bugs or any immatures or anything that looks suspicious to you and you want to do that all the way around the entire bed do it on the top part and you do it along the bottom part then the next place you look is kind of a little more disgusting and what you need to be looking either directly on the mattress or in most cases is a mattress pad you look take the sheet off and what you're looking here for is actually blood spots where the bed bugs have been feeding the next place that you should look is go ahead and open the bureau right side of you and you want to look all along the inside of the bureau you tip it over and again look along these corners bed bugs are very secretive usually in most cases they're within 20 feet of their host so in a hotel room like this you know there's not a lot of space farm to be so chances are they're going to be right on the bed on the night tables right side of the bed or the bureau's right side of it the other place that we talked about earlier too as i came into the room where not to put down luggage is the luggage rack luggage rack is a very good place for bed bugs to hide and they have a tendency because this webbing is so nice and snug the bed bugs really like to get in underneath here so when i'm in a room i fold it up and you look underneath there you look there and the other place is right around where it attaches and by folding it then you have plenty of give to the fabric so most people don't even bother to do that they don't move it they just leave it they put it down and as i say that's a prime place for bed bugs to hide and again in most places it's probably within five feet of the bed so if the bed bugs aren't actually on the bed zoom they can just zip across in the night and onto the bed they're easy to transport so that's why you start out putting everything where you shouldn't find bed bugs chances are there's not going to be bed bugs in the bathroom it could occur but once you put your stuff in the bathtub it's pretty safe all right so you've gone into your room you've checked your room and you're happy you haven't found any bed bugs so you can be content and hope you know of course there are no bed bugs but the question remains is what if you found a bed bug the first thing you can do is if you found a bed bug of course is pick up your luggage get out of the room go to the head of the hotel and just say please give me another room or of course you could always check out of that hotel if bed bugs are kind of strange in the standpoint of they could be in your room and that might be the only room in the hotel that they're in but normally if i found them i usually stay in that hotel but i move to another room and usually i try to get as far away as i can from that room but bed bugs are very spotty they can be in a five-star hotel or a dingy you know hostel that you may be staying in so and they're easily transported that's why the whole thing about the luggage bed bugs have a tendency to crawl into anything that's that's around to hide and that's why they're transported to your house to another hotel to movie theaters train stations you name it and that's where they are and they're a serious problem you