BOSTON -- After a string of bedbug infestations that have affected everyone from customers at Niketown in Manhattan to a group of Duxbury middle school students who went camping in New Hampshire, many are wondering how they can avoid the little, blood-sucking bugs.

Mike Tache founded his own bedbug hunting company American K-9 Private Investigators several years ago after he brought home an uninvited guest, bedbugs, after a family vacation.

His tool of choice? Hounds. “He’s absolutely eager to get in there,” said Tache. We watched as a hound eagerly sniffed and scratched its way through an infested home.

Click on the creepy creatures and features in the room to learn more about bed bugs.

“So, right now, the dog is telling me there are bedbugs right there. Really, nobody’s immune,” said Tache.

Tache is booking several jobs a day now as bedbug fear drives a surge in business, up, he said, “300 percent over last year.”

He immediately spotted some telltale signs, pointing out a small blood stain on the pillow case.

And while his hounds can “smell odor as soon as he gets into the room,” Tache said they’re not always so obvious, especially to the untrained eye.

There are a few bedbug hotspots in the bedroom, the first of which is the headboard.

Secondly, check the mattress itself, paying close attention to the plastic tabs that cover the corner of the box spring, where the bugs especially like to burrow.

Another common spot is where the floors, especially carpeted floors, meet the molding at the bottom of the wall. Bedbugs will hide in that crevice.

When you’re traveling, Tache said the safest place to keep your luggage and purse is the bathtub. The idea is that because bedbugs can’t jump or fly, your bags should be safe.

Entomologist Rich Pollack, who runs Identify.us.com, comes at the bedbug issue from a different angle: he raises them for research and even lets the blood-thirsty insects guzzle their meals from his arm.

“I just felt the mouth parts go into my skin. It’s fairly flat and it's hungry. It wouldn’t have woken me up,” he said.

Pollack said studying the insects has given him surprising insight. “The vast majority of creatures on your bed are, in fact, not bedbugs.”

He gets many letters with the corpses of small dead insects taped to them, their authors curious enough to write to an expert to help identify what has been crawling through their home.

He said less than half of the submissions he receives from people who think they are the victims of a bedbug infestation, are wrong. Some are just beetles.

Misidentification, he said, can lead to months of misery and effort spent eradicating the wrong problem. “It's not unusual to spend thousands of dollars.”

Tache said bedbugs are “great hitchhikers,” but knowing as much about the enemy as possible is the only way to win the battle.