Basic Information On Bed Bugs

Perhaps when you were a little kid, your mom would say to you before you went to bed

, "Don't let the bed bugs bite". If so, you either became scared of these strange bed dwelling bugs or you thought she was making a joke. There were no bed bugs, right? Well, bed bugs are actually real. They had been pretty much eradicated as a household problem in the 1940s but around 1995, they made a comeback.

What are bed bugs? These bugs are tiny parasitic insects of the cimicidae family. They feed on the blood of humans and other warm blooded creatures like cats and dogs. The name bedbug was given to them because of their propensity to infest homes, especially beds or other areas where people sleep. Other names for them include wall louse, crimson rambler and redcoat. They tend to come out at night and generally go unnoticed since people are sleeping.

Their feeding routine is this: two tubes are pierced into the skin. One tube injects the victim with anesthetics and anticoagulants and the other tube withdraws the blood. They will feed for around 5 minutes and then slink back to their hiding place. People may not notice the bites for hours or possibly days. A skin reaction to the injections is how a person will eventually detect the bites.

Bedbugs like to feed every five to ten days. However, they can live a lot longer than that without feeding. In warm temperatures, the bugs can live up to 5 months; in colder environments, they may live up to a year.

Cockroaches, mites, ants and spiders are natural predators of the bed bug. Rodents will also feast on them, although bats are out off by the pheromone released by the bug when it is attacked. Thus, bats steer clear of them. Use of biological control to treat a bedbug infestation will typically result in failure.

Treating bedbugs will require more intense action. Bedbugs will die in temperatures over 115 degrees for at least 20 minutes. Pesticides are also recommended as an effective treatment. High concentrations or nitrogen or carbon dioxide will also kill the bugs. Once the infestation is dealt with, care should be taken to check for re-infestation, due to surviving bugs or eggs or due to animals or other carriers that brought the bugs inside in the first place.

As touched upon earlier, it is not easy to detect bed bugs because they come out at night while people are asleep. The bites are not always noticeable, and may not ever be noticed if there is no allergic reaction. A reaction will include red bumps or flat welts and intense itching. In severe but rare cases, nausea can be caused. Luckily, lab studies have shown that bedbugs are not likely to spread diseases from one person to another.

by: Aidyn Huffman

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