Meet the pet detectives on the frontline of Britain’s bedbug invasion… These dogs can inspect 100 rooms in an hour and locate the tiny pests within seconds

In a freshly cleaned room in a modern chain hotel at one of Britain’s largest airports, Fraggle the spaniel is going about her daily job.

As Helen Care, her handler, waits by the door, the two-year-old dog sniffs the air and then busily begins to work her way around the furniture.

Suddenly, without warning, Fraggle stops stock-still, her nose pointing directly towards one corner of the bed. The target located, she will not move again until her 46-year-old owner rewards her — throwing her a yellow tennis ball that she gleefully grasps in her mouth and starts playing with.

For Fraggle it’s all a game. But for Helen and her colleagues this is a deadly serious business — the frontline of the fight against a 21st century invasion of bloodsucking bedbugs.

And it’s being fought not just in hotels but in planes, trains, theatres, cinemas, pubs and restaurants.

Which is just as well because across the Channel in France, in recent days the scale of the looming problem has become impossible to ignore.

In Paris and other cities, residents say they feel like ‘plague victims’, with photos emerging of streets piled high with discarded mattresses and of packed commuter trains where passengers refuse to sit on the seats.

And, given Britain’s proximity to this outbreak of Gallic panic, it is hardly surprising that concern about the critters is growing here by the day — feared because of their itchy bites and the difficulty of eradicating the pests once they have, as you could say, bedded in.

There have been reported sightings on Manchester buses and the London Underground, with the capital’s mayor Sadiq Khan admitting the possibility of bedbugs moving around the Tube network was a ‘real source of concern’ and seats are now being cleaned ‘on a nightly basis’.

Luton is said to be a particular hotspot, with residents throwing away beds, ripping up carpets and even abandoning their infested homes.

Eurostar, meanwhile, said it had installed ‘preventative measures’ on its trains between London and Paris.

As for hotel chains, some have even started asking guests at check-in if they have recently been in France. There are particular concerns about rugby fans, who have been there for the World Cup.

Experts in Britain warn that it will be impossible to prevent a French exchange of bedbugs, something that will only make an already bad situation worse.

According to data from pest control firm Rentokil, while there have always been bedbugs in the UK, there has been a 65 per cent increase in infestations in the UK in the year to September. It blames the growth in travel and hotel bookings since the pandemic, plus warmer temperatures globally. The bugs are also believed to be becoming more resistant to pesticides.

But, thankfully, as I have discovered, all is not lost. And it is all down to a band of pet detectives who are already working to take the sting out of this insect invasion.

With noses that are up to 100,000 times more powerful than ours, these highly trained canines are using their incredible sense of smell to sniff out — and then snuff out — infestations.

Indeed, such are their olfactory superpowers, they are able to pinpoint a single living bedbug in a matter of seconds.

Manually conducting a similar search of a room would take a human two to three hours — and most likely fail to spot insects that are no larger than an apple pip.

First used in the U.S., now a handful of pest control companies have started to deploy bedbug dogs here. Among them is Merlin Environmental, who have 18 dogs on their books.

Like other UK pest control firms, it has seen a ‘significant increase’ in bedbug call-outs in recent years.

‘We already deal with the largest hotel chains in the country, also a lot of standalone, boutique and five-star hotels including one of the most recognisable hotels in London,’ says Tim West, the company’s commercial director, when we meet at the firm’s headquarters in Crawley, West Sussex.

‘But at the moment, because of the panic in Paris we are getting calls from clients we have not worked with for three or four years.

‘They are asking if they can start up again. We normally would conduct screening in hotels quarterly or monthly. One hotel rang up and asked if we could do it weekly. It is the fear factor — they feel they need to be doing something.

‘Paris has always had bedbugs, as have we. But the videos and pictures that we are seeing from there are making everyone nervous.’

Interestingly, it’s not just hotels that his dogs have been keeping an eye — and nose — on.

‘We also do trains — including sleeper trains — and a number of airlines,’ says Tim. ‘We were doing a plane yesterday and we had a ‘find’. Basically, wherever anyone sits for a period of time, they are all susceptible to bedbugs.’

That includes cinemas, theatres, care homes — they once even screened a convent. Pubs and restaurants can also be affected.

‘Pubs have comfy bench seats and chairs with cushions,’ says Tim. ‘But if someone has got bedbugs at home and walks in with them, they are going to drop off and then there’s trouble.

‘One pregnant female can lay three to five eggs a day. They will start feeding from day one and somewhere between three to six weeks they will reach maturity, so if you think of one pregnant female under a bench in a pub, in six months it can multiply in to hundreds.’

Which is why the best way to prevent outbreaks occurring and then spreading is to carry out regular monitoring.

With that in mind, I joined Tim, Helen and two other handlers as they carried out a quarterly check on an airport hotel. With more than 500 rooms, it has a constant turnover of international visitors.

‘I have always believed that airport hotels are high risk,’ says Tim. ‘As are seaside hotels in the summer. It is all about footfall. The higher the footfall, the higher risk you have of bringing them in.

‘Airport hotels are consistently busy all year round, especially the big ones by the major airports.’

Given the nature of their work, the team keeps a low profile as they start their search of the building.

While understandable, Tim says it is a shame that hotels that go to the expense of carrying out these checks don’t feel they can advertise it to their guests.

‘There was one hotel in London who were very proactive with this. Whenever we went in they would put signs up on the lifts and the lobby to let people know that bedbug dogs were in and explained to guests that they were there to make sure their stay was the best it could be,’ says Tim. ‘I thought that was great but most are nervous about sending out the wrong message.’

Our visit takes place in the middle of the day, making use of the hours between check-out and check-in when most of the rooms are empty or being cleaned.

Knocking on the doors, the handlers announce that they are ‘hotel maintenance’ before going inside. Even if guests see the dogs working, few ask why they are there.

Given the airport location, most people assume they are being trained to search for drugs or explosives, says Tim.

One inside the room, the dog’s training takes over.

‘They are trained like any other search dogs,’ says Helen, whose previous jobs include being a drugs dog handler in a prison and, more recently, training dogs to sniff out Covid.

‘We get them used to doing a search pattern in a room, searching for a tennis ball,’ she says.

‘We hide it in hotel rooms so they start getting comfortable using their nose to find the ball — it has to be their nose, not visual.

‘And then they go off finding the ball and when they find it they get to play with it.

‘So for these dogs the whole screening process in hotels, planes or anywhere is all a big game about finding their ball.’

The ball is then cut in half and then into ever smaller fragments, honing the dogs’ scent-sniffing abilities even more.

At this point, the ball is replaced with a test tube full of live bedbugs. The top of the phial has pinprick holes in it to allow the ‘musty’ smell of the creatures to seep out.

‘If the dog is motivated and enjoying the search, the transfer over from tennis ball to bedbugs can happen really quickly,’ says Helen.

‘When they locate the bedbugs, we reward them with a ball and a play.’

Training a dog from scratch can take between six and ten weeks. While all gun-dog breeds are well-equipped for such work, spaniels are preferred because of their smaller size.

‘It’s easier for a spaniel than a labrador to get under beds or navigate their way through a plane,’ says Helen.

The dogs work at incredible speed, sniffing their way around the furniture in a room in just 30 seconds. They can screen 100 rooms in an hour.

‘A good handler can read their dog,’ says Helen. ‘As soon as they go into a room with bedbugs, there will be a distinct difference already in the way the dog is behaving before it even gets to indicating. They get really busy trying to find the source of the odour.’

While the hotel we visit is clear of bugs, Helen demonstrates Fraggle’s skills with the use of a test tube containing three tiny bedbugs. The company claims its dogs are able to find a single bedbug in such a situation on 98 per cent of occasions.

This is good because bugs can live for several months without feeding, and even up to a year in colder climates.

Hidden in advance in a random room, I watch as the dog’s normal circuit suddenly comes to a halt at the end of the newly made double bed.

Fraggle completely freezes, her nose a fraction of a centimetre away from the bed frame.

Sure enough, the container of bugs is hidden between the mattress and the base.

Out comes the tennis ball, and Fraggle is rewarded for her good work.

If this were a real ‘find’, the dog would then be returned to the van while Helen or a colleague treated the infestation. This would be done with cold or heat — either with a jet of steam or freezing spray.

Really bad infestations are dealt with by heat-treating the whole room, raising the temperature to 60c (140f) and holding it there for four hours.

Chemicals are not used because they are less effective and also because they can damage the dog’s sense of smell on future visits, says Tim.

Once the room has been treated, most hotels will deep-clean the room before using it again.

In hotels that are regularly checked, when the dogs do find bedbugs it will usually be in a single room.

This reflects the fact that the bugs will have been brought in by a guest and then transferred to that room.

Wider infestations can be spread over time from room to room by cleaners.

‘They might vacuum one room and then wheel it into the next room and the bugs will crawl out before they have even turned it on,’ says Tim.

‘Linen trolleys can also be a problem — if you have bugs on bedsheets and put the dirty linen in a trolley you can then transport them around the hotel.

‘All the proactive hotels are hot on training their housekeeping staff.’

While the dogs would be just as effective in a house or flat, they are rarely used outside of commercial settings, purely because of the expense to an individual homeowner.

Other companies also offer a similar dog-based service, including Rentokil. Earlier this month it launched its Bed Bug Dog Detect service.

But instead of taking the dogs to a hotel, for example, trained technicians are sent in to collect an air sample from a room using a vacuum device.

This sample is then sent to the dogs who are able to detect any bedbug activity from the scent of the live bedbugs in the air.

In the meantime, thanks to the French outbreak, British bedbug eradicators are expecting the coming winter to be busier than ever.

While bad news for hotels and homeowners, well-paid work for dogs like Fraggle is certainly not to be sniffed at.