At Work With a Real Life Bed Bug Exterminator

I’m headed to meet bed bug specialist Hugh Barrie. The main thing I know about him, at this point, is he’s a Scot based in Bournemouth, professionally known as the Bed Bug Doctor. Oh, and he hates London – hence why he refuses to take jobs there, and why it took me a whopping two-and-a-bit hours to get to him.

My taxi drops me off at the end of a residential close. At the bottom of the property’s short driveway is the open backend of a white Ford Transit Custom van, inside of which is a heat generator connected to large grey pipes that snake into the property.

Barrie is stood by the van, smiling. The first thing he asks is if it was a mission to get here, to which I admit it was a bit. As I take in the scene, he tells me his van is unmarked, and that he doesn’t wear PPE, because neighbours – or “chimney pots” as he calls them – will get the hump.

“Everyone looks out the window and goes ‘What the hell is going on here?’” he says. “Imagine what the neighbours would be like if it said ‘bed bugs’. There’s a stigmatism with bed bugs.” But there shouldn’t be, he assures, as anyone can get them. If they ask, he tells neighbours it’s all for moths: “It’s the same treatment.”

Instead of any kind of hazmat suit, Barrie is wearing a pink Hugo Boss polo with faux handkerchief detailing in the breast pocket, navy trousers and Karimor navy-green gorp-core shoes. He is 59 years old with short white hair and a tan, with a friendly face and some purplish veins on his cheeks. Barrie, like his pest controller brother Richard – who I actually spoke to yesterday for a different bed bug story – is a lovely, avuncular Scottish bloke.

Barrie’s been up since 4.40AM, and he’s been here for over an hour. He tells me that the yellow-coloured heater “is just a great big burner” that goes through 16 litres of diesel an hour and generates 512,000 BTUs (British Thermal Units), which is a lot, apparently. Inside is a centrifugal fan, which is the reason it's able to blow hot air so quickly and at such a long distance. The air comes out of it at 75 degrees. He says some more things about the burner and then we talk bed bugs again.

Barrie gets a call and midway through he taps my arm to listen in. He asks the caller how they know they have bed bugs. Barrie says things like what the creature’s poo looks like (“little red wine stain mark”) and that they can walk 30 metres in one day. Barrie gets them to explain exactly why they think they have bed bugs, so he can be absolutely sure it’s a credible infestation. He says he can’t guarantee he’ll get every bed bug unless they heat the upstairs bedrooms to 56 degrees and above, and everywhere else gets sprayed. It’s another new customer locked in. 

Barrie will field a heavy number of calls during my four-and-a-half hours with him – many of them new bed bug jobs. His company covers the entirety of Britain, and Barrie works the jobs in the south of England. He says they’ve secured some massive contracts recently, including holiday parks.

We look again at the heater and the pipes, and then up at the upstairs windows. “You’d die up there”, Barrie says, if you were up there the whole treatment. I ask how hot a sauna is. “Forty-something,” he replies.

“So it’s hotter than a sauna up there?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

And is it dangerous?

“It doesn’t get to terminal velocity where you burst into immediate flames, no,” Barrie says. 

I tell Barrie about my clothes moths infestation, and how I’ve killed well over 100 in my flat over two years. His face immediately brightens and he becomes energised, saying – among other things – that I should look for damage around the carpet edge. I say that I’ve mellowed on the topic. “That’s life,” Barrie croons in a mock Scot Sinatra.

Barrie disappears to the front of his van and emerges with two Clearview Bed Bug Monitors, a maze-looking contraption his company invented to catch bed bugs. Bed bugs go in, leave their pheromones, and then cluster inside it. The plastic covering allows you to look at the little buggers, to see if you still have a problem, or even if it’s some other pest. They give them to the occupants after they’ve treated the house. He gives me two to take home.

Our day is littered with interesting bed bug information: Like, did you know that bed bugs, while nocturnal, can adjust if the human they feed on works nights? Bed bugs become attuned to their human’s CO2 and pheromone signature, so know precisely when to risk it all and come out of their hiding spot.

I tell Barrie that we have to record a TikTok at some point, and that I’m a bit apprehensive as I’ve never done anything like that before. I say I feel a bit old for TikTok. “Why not? Get your head round it,” Barrie encourages. His support is a theme throughout our day. In a sense, we’re both explaining to each other how it is we came to be roasting bed bugs in this nondescript post-war house.

While I found him accidentally, it turns out Barrie is actually courting media attention right now: He’s featured in The Telegraph twice, the Daily Star, BBC local radio and ITV local news. Bed bug specialists are in high demand – this is their moment, Barrie’s moment.

“So do you want to have a look in?” Barrie asks. We enter the house, hurdling the mass of inflatable pipes that resemble a somewhat disconcerting soft play area. It’s notably hotter in here – even with the front door open. I’m moving gingerly because I guess I don’t fully understand the danger the pipes pose or not, but Barrie just lifts one to the side like a collapsible slide and walks up the stairs. “Come on up.”

It is indeed scorchio upstairs, like a different climate altogether. “Oh wow,” I say, my breathing immediately heavy. “Ah, this ain’t hot yet,” Barrie says. The two bedrooms are getting pumped, and each room has an industrial fan inside it blowing the air around. He’ll keep moving the direction of the fan as the day progresses.

Most of the occupants’ possessions are still in the house, but he’s taken out anything that could melt from the bedrooms. (Bed bugs are almost certainly always based in the bedrooms as that’s where they, eugh, eat.) The heat is oppressive. “I mean, that’s coming out of there at 75 degrees,” he says, looking at the mouth of the pipe. “It’s only been on for half an hour,” he says. The bed bugs will have another three hours of this. 

Barrie rustles around in the sheet-less bed and finds me a dead bed bug. “They’re dropping off of here now,” he says. I tap the metal finishing on the bed frame and it’s like a near-simmering pot. “Imagine. Couldn’t live in that,” Barrie adds. Later, Barrie will put a blanket up over the doors to keep the heat in the bedrooms. The windows stay open because if it gets too hot, the wallpaper starts peeling off.

Heat treatment is a fairly new approach to killing bed bugs, invented in the last ten years as a fool-proof way of tackling infestations. Where insecticides (usually a spray) might miss hard-to-hit hideout spots, like under floorboards, hot air won’t. Bed bugs and their eggs die within a minute of exposure of 48 degrees. Barrie is heating upstairs to a temperature exceeding 56 degrees, just to be sure. The upstairs hallway and stairs also get heated as a happy by-product. 

In a few hours, when the heat treatment’s over, he will also spray the entirety of the house with Cimetrol Super – the only insecticide that works, he says – and then in two weeks, he’ll come back and spray the whole house again, even more thoroughly. The whole thing will cost £1,000 plus VAT.

Before that, though, Barrie makes us some tea and we chat in the kitchen. 

I ask him how is it that Barrie and his brother Richard came to be bed bug specialists at opposite ends of Britain. It turns out Richard was head of the Scottish division at Rentokill and took on large contracts all over Britain and abroad – Libya, Kuwait, all the places which have bad infestations. 

Barrie was a champion water skier. He came down to Bournemouth (pronounced Bourne-MOUTH with his Scottish accent) to teach water skiing 20-odd years ago, and he never left. 

He was a plumber, but also “a really bad motocrosser… hence the wrists” (slightly swollen). So while he struggled with plumbing physically, Richard suggested he get into the pest control business. Barrie sat the exams, and started his own company. He and Richard work together on contracts. Barrie’s been at it nine years now.

Barrie hints at a big contract down in Portsmouth, but he can’t tell me what the company is. We both laugh. His friend calls up looking for rat poison. “He’s got rats,” and we laugh some more. Barrie doesn’t do any other pest control now. “Too busy with bed bugs.”

As for the hysteria about infestations coming from France, Barrie says: “They’re already here. The horse has already bolted.” He was getting inundated with calls six months after the pandemic lifted, when everyone started travelling again. He says his “business has gone up 50 percent” since COVID.

The French thing is real to a degree, though. “Did you watch the rugby the other day?” says Barrie, referring to the England vs Samoa Rugby World Cup game. “50,000 people out there, all in hotels, all coming back here. I’m, like, rubbing my hands.” He rubs his hands with only partly performative anticipation. “I hope they all live in the Bournemouth area!” he jokes. “In fact, we’ve had calls already from people.” As soon as he’s finished saying this, his phone rings – it’s a World Cup attendee.

Barrie is telling me that I should visit the west coast of Scotland, “West coast is the best coast,” he says. “It’s like being in Barbados, the beaches.” He tells me the sea’s hotter there due to the Gulf Stream. I say I’ve never been. He takes another call, this time from a council about a care home job. Their guys use insecticide that doesn’t really work. The only insecticide that definitely works is Cimetrol Super, Barrie tells the lady down the phone.

Apparently, some councils and pest controllers use insecticides and equipment that patently don’t work. In fact, Barrie says spray treatments on their own never works, as it doesn’t kill all the eggs – even two rounds. “You always miss something. Always. Doesn’t matter how good you are,” he says.

He tells me about a lady in a care home he tried to help free of charge, after the council sprayed ineffective insecticide four times and tried to charge her £1,250 for it. The bed bugs remained.

Barrie heat-treated the flat, but after two months they returned. He realised the bed bugs were coming in from other flats inside the building, and that nothing could be done unless all the flats were treated, which the council wouldn’t pay for. It’s a reminder that those in Barrie’s line of work sometimes encounter vulnerable people in impossible living situations. And the responsibility of who actually pays – be it council, landlord or occupant – can often be a fraught one.

He tells me about some other cowboys who use outdated equipment that doesn’t work: “They leave and there’ll still be bed bugs crawling up the walls.” Then he takes another call – this time it’s just a coworker on another job.

When he’s done, I ask Barrie if there’s any trade language from his world that the uninitiated might not know. “Nah, we don’t have any slang,” he says. I ask what a heavily infected house might be called: “Minging,” he says.

It must be a great time to be in the bed bug business now, I say, and Barrie makes a noise of agreement. “It just means you gotta work hard,” he says. We talk about his early morning start, and then he suggests I move down to Bournemouth. “Fuck! Why you wanna be in London?” he says, adding he gets hives whenever he gets to the M25. 

Back to bugs, Barrie tells me about the electric static gun he’ll use to spray later. When he sprays using the gun, it will be charged with electricity, meaning he can spray one side of an object and the insecticide will wrap around it.

I go and stand with Barrie in the drive. He takes another call – this time from his lawyer. “He's got a bed bug,” Barrie says when he hangs up, and we laugh again. 

We mill around for a couple of hours. Barrie moves stuff upstairs and turns fans around periodically. He smokes a few cigarettes in the driveway, takes calls from potential customers and fires off emails. 

At around 1PM, he turns off the heat and pulls the pipes down the stairs. I go and stand in one of the oven-like bedrooms and hear the fan idling. I feel the capillaries in my head widening. I’m sweating immediately – it's proper heat, this. You don’t need to wear PPE for the heat treatment, but you do when spraying insecticide. I go back down to the cool of the kitchen.

Barrie carries the pipes out of the house along with the fire blankets and power cables. He carries the fans down, too. I watch from the kitchen, eating a grab bag of Mini Cheddars. The time for insecticide has arrived.

Barrie dons a protective breathing mask and goes room to room, spraying everything with the electric static gun. When he breathes it sounds like he’s a deep sea diver. Once the spraying’s over, it’s time to go.

Barrie tells me there were ten bed bugs in the master bedroom and about 20 to 30 in the other bedroom. 

As he loads up his van, he tells me that all the equipment in here comes to £40,000 – and that's just that one van. His company has multiple: "40,000 grand worth of stuff, just to kill bed bugs.”

He signs off the day’s job with a voice message to the homeowner's son saying not to enter the house for two hours, and we set off for the train station in his van. We talk again about his life story, and how he found himself waterskiing in Dorset. We talk, too, about his family – his three adult daughters, one in Australia, and two on the south coast of England.

“There you go buddy,” he says as we pull in at East Grinstead station. I ask what he’s got on tomorrow, thinking that might be a nice way to end the article. “The jobs never stop,” he says, studying his diary. “I’ve got jobs booked in ‘til November. Where am I tomorrow… Shrewton, which is Salisbury.”

We shake hands and with a wink, he's gone, his unmarked van disappearing behind a hedge. The jobs never stop, and I have a feeling Barrie won’t either.

@niche_t_