Don’t let the bed bugs bite? Easier said than done — even in swanky Vegas hotel suites.

In the last six months, as Sin City has hosted scores of large conventions and major international sporting events like the Super Bowl and a Formula One Grand Prix, the Southern Nevada Health District received over 60 reports of bed bugs at Strip hotels, including the Encore and Venetian. Perhaps encouragingly, only seven of those cases were verified and no properties were fined.

Gnarly as it can be to acknowledge the presence of flesh-eating pests at five-star properties, their presence is extremely hard to prevent in the face of the ongoing flood of global humanity that descends upon the Las Vegas Strip and its hotels on a daily basis.

“When you have a lot of people coming at the same time from all over the world, that’s always a risk,” Chow-Yang Lee, an entomology professor in California, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Canines are critical combatants

Considering that Wynn Resorts hosted 378,000 guests at its Vegas properties between November and early February, the fact that only one live bed bug was confirmed at the Encore is pretty impressive.

That insect was found by a bed bug detection dog and, in fact, a Wynn spokesperson told the Review-Journal that its “full-time K9 team is specifically trained and 100 percent dedicated to detection.”

Properly trained canines have become a central tool in the battle against bed bugs, but not every dog will do.

“You got to have happy dogs to do this,” Mike Smith, owner of Bed Bug Investigations in Michigan, told MLive in 2013. “It’s a lot of work. These dogs are working sometimes six days a week.”

“The dog needs to have the desire to work and hunt,” added Sarah Rodeheaver, who owns Dog Zone, a Michigan business that trains dogs for bed bug detection. “It’s hard to find the right dogs; only about one out of 100 are qualified. They need to be comfortable going into every environment and able to work.”

Dogs are far more effective than humans when it comes to locating bed bugs, and despite the sheer grossness of the task, playfulness is a virtue. One of Rodeheaver’s most successful detectors was a rescue dog named Pilot who could play all day. And when it was time to find the bugs, he got excited because, she said, “It’s nothing but a big game for him.”

Photo: Brian Kersey/Getty Images