Nassau Point Woman Reinvents Herself in the Canine Bed Bug Detective Business

With an intense little rat terrier named Archie, Nassau Point resident Diane Arpaia has reinvented herself as the expert handler of a bed bug-sniffing dog in only a matter of months and two years after closing up the printing business she owned with her husband for 20 years.

And — with the warm season coming on, tourists coming through North Fork hotels and summer rentals and bed bug exterminator commercials flooding the airwaves — the timing couldn't be better.

“The bed bug dog is an important tool in the fight against bed bugs,” says Arpaia’s website, sleeptightbedbugdogs.com. “A dog can find the problem in its earliest stages, when the bugs tend to be directly around the host location and have not had the time to scatter, and multiply, throughout the property. The bed bug dog specializes in localizing hot spots, thus reducing the treatment area and exterminator fees.”

Arpaia, 52, is the owner and handler of Archie, an energetic 1-year-old rat terrier and a sleek bug-finding machine. She trains Archie every day for about two hours a day, splitting up bug-finding sessions up into frantic half-hour classes. She hides individual live beg bugs, which are sealed up in vials, under couch cushions, behind books on book shelves and in various corners and boxes where beg bugs in the real world can infest themselves and cause serious problems.

“He’ll find everything out in the field,” Arpaia said of her dog during a real-world bed bug-finding gig. “He’ll alert me to where the bug is, I’ll put a sticker on the area and he’ll turn to me for his food. That’s his motivation.”

Arpaia met, trained with and eventually purchased Archie from Iron Heart training center in Kansas City this past December. The center is owned by a police officer who specializes in dogs that are experts in sniffing out bombs, drugs — and bed bugs.

“He doesn’t have very many larger dogs available, “ Arpaia said. “The smaller dogs can maintain a high level of energy on the job while the larger dogs tend to tire quickly.”

Arpaia said she paid about $10,000 for Archie and the initial training service — a good investment for this lifelong dog lover, she said.

“I’ve always liked to work with dogs, and I learned that you have to invest in a business that people need, not something that is a luxury,” Arpaia said, referring to her previous effort of creative interior wall painting after she and her husband, Carmine, sold the printing business about two years ago. Carmine, she added, also works a job that is a labor of love for him — he is a personal fitness trainer to senior citizens at in Greenport.

Arpaia has lived in the same house in Nassau Point with husband and three sons, two of which are grown, since 1989. She owns another dog, Haley, a much larger mix of breeds. Though Haley and Archie get along, Archie has to be treated much differently, she said.

“Since he’s a worker dog, he can’t just lay around like a normal pet,” she said. “He’s more like an athlete — he gets the best food and just the right amount of rest and playtime.”

Archie knows exactly when it’s work time and when it’s playtime, and he’s quite the mellow guy after you’ve passed the watchdog growl and he sniffs you a few times. Arpaia said she really got the bug to get a bed bug dog after her son, Mark, acquired beg bugs a few years ago in his Manhattan apartment.

“It’s not my hope that people get bed bugs so I get work, but the prediction is that they are going to spread,” Arpaia said. “Not so much in private homes but in hotels and rentals where people are coming and going on a regular basis. I’d like to use Archie in more preventative work at commercial places like that.”

For more information on Diane Arpaia and Sleep Tight Bed Bug Dogs, visit sleeptightbedbugdogs.com.