Just a few facts on how to identify bed bugs and how they affect your body during an infestation. First off, you can learn about how to identify bed bugs themselves. The easiest way is through visible evidence. Examples are bites on the arms or face that result in rashes or inflammation around the area. These can also become signs of other types of insect bites.
What are Bed Bugs?
Bed bugs are blood-sucking parasites that feed on you. They are tiny and oval-shaped insects that appear brown, black, or copper. These pests measure 3/16 of an inch in length. You can find it difficult to see with the naked eye. They live in warm and dark places such as mattresses, bed frames, behind baseboards, furniture cracks and crevices, and fabric folds.
These bugs are small and reddish-brown parasitic insects that suck on the blood of sleeping humans and animals to survive. You do not know their bites as a vector for disease transmission. In most cases, they can cause economic issues such as lost time from work. This is due to medical treatment or care seeking behavior that you could avoid. That is when an individual had simply identified himself as having bites before it became too late.
How Do Bed Bugs Start in Your Home?
Bed bugs start to invade your home through contact with an infested item. Examples are luggage, furniture, bedding, or clothing. You bring them in unintentionally and can become difficult to spot. Once they are in your environment, they will lay eggs and start to multiply. Female bed bugs can lay up to five eggs per day and 500 during their lifetime.
You can identify an infestation by discovering blood spots on your sheets, mattress seams, and pillowcases. Bed bug excrement looks like dark spots of pepper on mattresses, sheets, walls, and other areas where the pests hide. An unpleasant sweetish odor may also occur when numerous bed bugs are present.
The bed bug has been well established in many areas of the world! You can find it anywhere there is warmth, shelter, food, and blood. These pests do not materialize out of thin air. Instead, they hitchhike on you without your knowledge until it is too late for them!
Can’t Find Bed Bugs But Have Bites?
What if you do not see any bed bugs but have bites? The most common way to get them is when they are feeding. This means that they are not currently visible to your eye or in your environment. Bed bugs typically feed at night. You may not see them before waking up during the feeding process.
The bites usually appear as red welts on the skin and are often in a linear pattern. You may also develop a rash due to an allergic reaction to their saliva. When bed bugs bite you, there is a good chance that you also have an infestation in your home.
Bed bug bites are not always from these pests. Other insects that look like them and live around your house may also become the culprit. For instance, German cockroach nymphs can also give you a painful bite. But they are not related at all to true bloodsuckers like bed bugs.
What Can be Mistaken for Bed Bug Bites?
Mosquitoes, spiders, fleas, chiggers, and other biting insects can cause red welts on the skin. It is important to correctly identify the insect that is biting you. This is how you will know how to treat it and how to prevent it from happening again. In some cases, an allergic reaction to a bite will also resemble bed bug bites.
When you are unsure of what is causing your bites, consult with a healthcare professional for help. They can give you an accurate diagnosis and help you get relief from the discomfort. There are several ways how to identify bed bugs, but visible evidence and bites are how people first realize they have a problem.
Despite the medical training they receive, some doctors still have difficulties when it comes to identifying bed bug bites. The reason for this is that reactions vary from person to person. Some may not show any signs of an allergic reaction at all.
Tips for Identifying Bed Bugs?
- Look for blood spots on sheets, mattresses, and pillowcases
- Check for bed bug excrement, which looks like dark spots of pepper
- An unpleasant sweetish odor may also occur with numerous bed bugs
Physical signs of an infestation can become difficult to spot. But there are a few telltale clues that could indicate bed bugs. Specifically, look for rusted or reddish stains on your sheets and mattress. These are due to the insects that their exoskeletons crush as they feed.
Tiny and circular dark spots may also leave behind tiny eggshells from newly hatched nymphs. These have not grown large enough yet to bite you. Adult females do so only once drawing blood to acquire what you call mechanical fluids. Live ones will scurry around like little brown spiders when you alarm them with loud noises!
Where Bed Bugs Hide?
Bed bugs can become active at any time of the day or night. To avoid detection, they tend to hide during the day and come out at night when you are sound asleep. They will crawl around after dark to find a new host from whence they draw blood for sustenance.
These bugs hide in your mattress, box spring, pillows, inside furniture cracks and crevices. They find their way into your beds, sofas, and other pieces of furniture that have hiding spaces. Bed bugs also invade stuffed animals.
These pests can also conceal themselves within electronics such as alarm clocks and radios. This is how they move around between rooms in multi-unit dwellings like apartment buildings. These creatures can also hide within furniture items like wooden bed frames and dressers.
As they do not fly or jump around like fleas, they do sneak into public transport vehicles by hiding in folds of fabric or upholstery materials. You will not notice how infestation spreads throughout your home without proper monitoring for signs of bed bugs.
When Bed Bugs Bite?
Recognizable signs of a bed bug infestation include the following:
- The bed bugs’ exoskeletons crushed on your sheets and mattress
- Red irritated skin
- Dark spots from their droppings or blood stains from feeding wounds
- Bed bugs near the seams of mattresses, sheets, and walls
Bite marks are how you will know how to identify bed bugs. These insects pierce your skin while feeding to acquire what they need from your body. When you have been seeing how these pests feed on others, you may not wake up as they take nourishment. This makes bites difficult to spot at first especially when everyone is asleep.
Bed bugs are tiny insects that feed on you. They typically bite at night when you sleep, around the face and neck area. This is due to its proximity with skin exposure for hours during slumber time.
Bed Bug Behavior and Habit
Enlighten yourself with three ways of how bed bugs behave. Here they are:
Mating
Adult males emit a sex pheromone that females can detect. After mating, the female will lay eggs and attach them near the feeding area. They are easy to find when they hatch.
Bed bugs are one of the very few species on earth to mate using Traumatic Insemination. You can consider this form of mating as the most painful and brutal amongst insects or animals. But it does happen in bed bugs!
The male goes through awesome lengths for his sexual release! He pierces her abdomen with his genitals. Injects semen into her bloodstream via wound-like openings near its mouthparts. You can call this traumatic ejaculation because she has been punctured so violently during penetration! It may seem impossible. Both genders could get pregnant from such attacks.
Life Stages and Mating
Bed bugs go through five physiological stages, namely egg, nymph, larva, pupa, and adult. A female can lay anywhere from 200 to 500 eggs during her lifetime as to how to identify bed bugs and infestation. The entire life cycle of these insects lasts between four and six weeks on average. It takes about ten weeks to create a new generation! This depends on how ideal the conditions are within your home.
An egg sac is how to identify bed bugs and infestation. It typically measures a quarter of an inch in length. These pests can go from laying more eggs to living for several months on average without fresh food supplies. Younger stages will need blood meals for growth before they progress towards adulthood.
Eggs hatch after seven days, first starting as white nymphs that turn more brownish as they mature over the next ten weeks. The life cycle continues until their population growth becomes unsustainable.
Living Conditions
Learn how to identify bed bugs and infestation as to how these pests rely on how to survive. They can lie dormant for months or weeks without feeding as this is how they get into a home. But their development speeds up when they regularly feed on you and your family members! This is how this type of insect flourishes and grows exponentially in population numbers!
Young bed bugs need food regularly growing up. But adults can survive a year without a meal because they harbor their reserve fat deposits. This is how they do it:
Adults go into hibernation when there are no blood meals available for consumption. Males survive longer than their female counterparts due to how they expend less energy during mating. They also find ways of how to secure themselves from the risk of starvation through this uninterrupted time frame.
What is The Main Cause of Bed Bugs?
Now that you know how to identify bed bugs and infestations, you can know how to get rid of them. The main cause of how these pests enter your home in the first place? It is people! You unknowingly bring these insects into your house by bringing in used furniture, mattresses, clothing, or any other belongings.
Prevention is key when it comes to how to discourage bed bugs from entering your home in the first place. Check furniture before bringing it inside. Look for any telltale signs of an infestation such as fecal matter and bloodstains. When you see anything suspicious, do not hesitate to call NY Bedbug Dogs!
When you find an infestation in your home, contact them as soon as possible. Call them for effective treatment methods that can help your family members escape this dreadful experience!
Signs of Infestation
Look for bed bugs themselves which are about the size of an apple seed. They are oval, flat, and brownish. They can also become reddish when feeding on blood recently. Adult bed bugs can live up to one year without a meal.
Bed bugs lay eggs in batches of two to fifty. The eggs are small, white, and pearly in appearance. They take about seven days to hatch.
Bed bug droppings are black and resemble ground coffee.
Bed bugs feed on blood and will leave behind evidence of their meals in the form of bloodstains on sheets and mattresses .
You may notice how to identify bed bugs and infestations in places where you rest or sleep. These pests can crawl into spaces that seem too small for them such as inside the seams of your mattress.
Bed bugs can also travel through ducts and wall sockets. Ensure that there is no physical barrier that stops their access.
How Long Does Bed Beg Infestation Take?
When you learn how to identify bed bugs and infestation, the next thing you need to deal with is how long it will take for these insects to breed. You can expect this type of pest to lay five eggs per day. These eggs can last without food supplies for up to three months.
Prolonged rest in one place allows these pests to lay eggs on that location. You are inviting an infestation when you let them have their way inside your bedroom.
Eating habits affect how quickly a bed bug infestation grows in numbers! This is how they multiply exponentially when there is plenty of food at hand!
The gestation period averages six weeks before new specimens emerge from nymphs. These nymphs molt and shed their skin five times before they become adults.
Do Bed Bugs Infest The Whole House?
The response to this inquiry are yes and no. Bed bugs reside in the cracks and crevices near where you sleep. You cannot find them in other areas of your house. It is possible for them to spread when there is an active infestation in one area of your home.
But when you take steps to prevent them from entering your home in the first place, it will become much harder for them to establish a colony and infest other parts of your house.
Bed bugs are opportunist pests that can infest any room in your house. They will take up residence anywhere with a person to feed on. Treating just one area is ineffective. You need an integrated pest management plan for total eradication!
How Do You Stop Bed Bugs From Spreading?
The number of bed bugs in your home infestation can rise exponentially when you neglect proper treatment. Bed bug infestations have the potential to become a public health crisis given how fast they reproduce!
Treat everyone with a bed bug problem in mind. This starts by making sure that all family members know how to prevent these insects from coming into contact with them in the first place. Place screens on wall sockets and ducts. Check for cracks and crevices when you move furniture indoors. When you need help, call NY Bedbug Dogs today!
When treating a bed bug infestation in your home, look at everything as an interconnected system where one part affects another.
Are Bed Bugs Hard to Get Rid of?
Enlighten yourself with two ways on how to prevent bed bugs in your home. Here they are:
Bed Bug Treatment
This is a systematic and holistic process that starts by treating everyone with how to identify bed bugs and infestation in mind. You need to make sure that you can keep these insects from penetrating your home’s defenses.
It is important to first treat your symptoms so you can get back on track. But when the infestation has been going for a while and is not just isolated in one location, then it may become time to tackle this pest directly with some more extreme measures such as vacuuming or freezing!
Bed Bug Extermination
You may not have the time to implement how to treat bed bugs for your home. In that case, you can always turn to NY BedBug Dogs to get rid of them. There is no easy way out with how to identify bed bugs and infestation. But there are ways on how a pest control company can solve this problem for you!
Armed with how to identify bed bugs and infestation information, you will become ready when it comes time to act against these pests!
Follow this guide on how you can identify bed bugs in your home and when an infestation occurs. Prevent these pests from taking action!