How to keep mice away from your bed
Rodents, especially mice, are the bane of civilization. These tiny mammals frighten many people but annoy many more with their incessant gnawing away at wiring, boxes of food, and even wallpaper. They can also spread disease and are a nuisance.
When it comes to sleeping, in severe infestations, you can feel them crawling over the covers on your bed or even brazenly walking across your face or on your exposed hands and feet. Just the thought of that is enough to drive some to the brink of madness.
There are only two methods of keeping mice away from your bed. The first is to eliminate the mice with traps, poison, or a good housecat. Some would say keeping a few snakes in the house will do the same thing, but that’s not a solution for most people.
The second method is prevention, keeping the pests away from your bed so you can sleep. Let’s take a look at these two methods.
As a teenager, I remodeled a chicken coup into a room away from our tiny farmhouse. I was tired of sharing a bedroom, so I moved out into the yard each night to sleep. The remodel went great. It was well insulated against the Wyoming winter, had electricity, a TV (with only one station), and a stereo. It also had mice, mice who had lived there for years before the remodel.
It was a nightly battle to keep these rodents at bay. I set traps, which went off in the night, waking me up. I kept one of our cats in the room, but she woke me up too when she’d proudly bring her catch up to my face to show me her success.
I even set peanuts out as bait and shot the mice with a BB-gun pistol in the glow of the moon, but none of it kept them off the bed.
The solution came with steel wool. I used steel wool to finish wood projects in our shop and stuffing it into every crack along the floor of the shed kept most of the mice away.
A mouse can flatten to less than a quarter inch and enter homes under doorways most often. Installing a seal at the base of the door that brushes the floor will prevent them from entering.
My experience in getting my room mouse free is an example of what you can do to keep mice off your bed.
There are a few more modern methods as well. Lavender and peppermint oil are natural rodent repellents. Mice avoid the smell of these two oils, and other oils such as citronella are effective too. Lavender and peppermint are appealing to human nostrils, so they’re a good choice.
The final methods of mice prevention are sound based. Mice have a hearing range much higher than humans. An ultrasonic device can emit loud, annoying sounds (to the mouse’s ear) that we can’t hear. The ultrasonic waves drive them away.
Sound-repellent devices need to be placed at intervals around the room, but the good news is that they are not expensive and work with any standard electrical receptacle.
Mice Elimination
- Traps
- Poison
- Cats
- Snakes (don’t be squeamish…)
Mice Prevention
- Steel wool
- Peppermint/lavender oil
- Ultrasonic device
Randy Tucker
