Bed bugs have been after the human race for as long as we've been around. If you know that people in homes around your neighborhood have been complaining about bedbug infestations, your first thought of course has to be about prevention. How do you get these pests to stay away from your home? When it comes to bed bugs, control isn't easy once they get into your house.
It's been known for a while now that bed bugs can easily make their way into a home when a person returns from travel to another city, having stayed at a hotel, taken a rental car or traveled on airplanes - all of which places can harbor bed bugs. The bugs just hitch a ride into your home traveling on clothing, shoes and luggage. You can also get bedbugs through buying used furniture.
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Now we can't live a life designed around bed bugs control. We do need to travel and do all the other things we usually do. Prevention, then, has to be designed around making your house inhospitable to bedbugs right away even before you have an attack.
Diatomaceous earth, a powdery, naturally-occurring substance that you can get at any Home Depot, happens to be an excellent preventive. It's not that diatomaceous earth happens to be poisonous. It is just that food grade diatomaceous earth happens to be a substance that readily absorbs moisture; and it's something that bedbugs find irresistible. Place quantities of this material strategically around your house, and not only will it keep the bedbugs from moving from room to room, it'll cause them to internally dry out.
The usual way you use this substance is, you get a professional to come in and spray the spaces in your walls with it. If it's food grade diatomaceous earth, bed bugs find it quite irresistible. Once they have their fill of it, the substance absorbs all of the moisture in their bodies and they die of dehydration. The great thing about using this substance is that it is non-toxic. Pets don't have a problem with it and neither do people who are allergic to strong chemicals. An application can be done on about 0.
If you would like to save a little money on the application process, you could do it yourself. All you need to do is to buy a pound of the stuff for a few dollars, place some of it in a squeezable bottle, and spray into the interiors of your walls. Once you remove outlet plates on your walls, you should be able to access the interiors. Since diatomaceous earth is such a fine, powdery substance, a good squeeze should send out a cloud of the stuff all over the interior spaces in your walls. You could wear a mask when you do it if you have a respiratory condition.