Can dinner guests who have bedbug bites from someone else's home infect the home that is having the dinner?

Answer 1

This is unlikely. Although it is conceivably possible that a live bedbug or bedbug eggs could be brought into your home if someone has them in their clothes or shoes when they come over for dinner and come out in your home, in practice this is extremely unlikely.

Because the way bedbugs first get into somebody's home is most usually a result of them bringing something inside that has bedbug eggs laid in it. Most often it happens when people come back from holiday and bedbug eggs have been laid in somebody's luggage while enjoying that holiday perhaps in the hotel. Or in some cases the eggs are laid when the luggage was in transit such as in the aircraft hold on the way home. Another way bedbugs very often first get into homes is when second hand furniture is brought into the home, particularly a second hand bed, mattress or something like a chest of drawers with crevices where the tiny unhatched eggs may not be perceptible.

Once the eggs hatch, anywhere in the home, the bedbugs are attracted by the CO2 people breathe out when they are asleep so the newly born nymph will instinctively make for the source of that breath, which will be one bor other of the beds somewhere in that home, and after its first meal that bed will become its home from then on as it gets bigger and then becomes an adult bedbug. The human sleeping in that bed will thereafter get bitten while he or she is asleep on subsequent nights and over time more and more new bedbugs will get born and so an infestation may occur.