Pictures Of Bed Bugs

Bed bugs are tiny pesky insects which feed on human blood as well as animal blood. The insects are oval-shaped and do not fly, because their wings are vestigial. They belong to an insect family called Cimicidae and include 3 species which bite humans. Adult bed bugs measure about 5 to 7 millimeters long while baby bed bugs, that is, the nymphs or juveniles are so small-about 1.5 millimeters long.

Bed bugs can sometimes be mistaken for small cockroaches or ticks. Adult bed bugs appear reddish brown but the color reddens after they suck blood. On the hand, nymphs are clear-colored and get bright red after they feed.

Types of bed bugs

There are some  types of bed bugs that that pose a health risk to humans as well as to animals.  One of the most common bed bug found everywhere in the planet is called the household bed bug, also known scientifically as Cimex lectularius. These species of bed bugs usually live in temperate climates and comfortably in human environments. There are several other pests that look like bed bugs, both in appearance and habits.

The second type of bed bug is called the tropical bed bug, or in scientific terms Cimex hemipterus. This type of bed bug was only just discovered recently and it lives in tropical regions. It mainly infests bats and poultry.

Bed Bugs – US Statistics provided by The Pest Nest

Bed Bugs - US statistics

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Adolescent Bed Bug

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Adult Bed Bug

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Bed Bugs Nymphs

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Bed Bugs Feeding

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1st, 2nd and 3rd instar bed bugs nymphs

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Bed Bug Size compared to a coin

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Bed Bugs on mattress

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Bed Bugs colony

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Bed Bugs on wood

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Bat bugs, also called Leptocimex boueti, are also species of bed bugs found in tropical areas. They mainly infest bats, although at times they can attack humans. Bed bugs and bat bugs are very similar to each other such that it is impossible to differentiate them with the naked eye. Other species of bed bugs such as C pipistrella and Cimex pilosellus also attack bats.

There is another species of bed bug called Mexican chicken bug, or Haematosiphon inodora, which is also very similar to the common or household bed bug. However, this species mainly attacks poultry and some bird species.

Other species of bed bugs that look like common bed bugs are called barn swallow bed bugs. These bed bugs mainly infest cliff swallows and live in their nests, but they can also attack human dwellings particularly during bird migration.

With so many types of bed bugs attacking animals and humans, it is very important that they are correctly identified before any sort of treatment is done. Proper methods should be employed to control bed bugs; otherwise they can harm your children, pets or even furnishing.

Why bed bugs are a health hazard for human beings

Some researchers have found that bites from be bugs can pose health risks to human beings.

People react differently to bites from bed bugs depending on the various skin types as well as the environment. Normally, bed bug bites consist of welts or bumps which itch terribly. There are other severe but very rare cases of bed bug bites that lead to illness or nausea. Bed bug bites can also lead to anxiety, stress, or insomnia.

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Bed Bug Bites

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More Bed Bug bites

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Rash appeared in hours after bites

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Although bed bugs seem likely to transmit diseases from one person to the other; studies have extensively concluded that these pests do not transmit diseases from one person to another. Therefore, they are pesky insects rather than dangerous ones.

Feeding habits and reproduction of bed bugs

Bed bugs are most active about an hour before every sunrise because that is their best time to feed. However, they can also try feeding at any time, whether day or night, and they do feed when they get the chance and are hungry. They prefer to feed at night rather than at daytime.

Bed Bugs Life Cycles – provided by livescience.com

Bed Bugs Life Cycles

On reproduction, bed bugs do so by traumatic insemination, or hypodermic insemination. Males have genitalia which pierce females on any part of the abdomen and then the sperm gets into the body cavity and into ovaries for fertilization.
Female bed bugs lay about 5 eggs per day and up to 500 in her entire lifespan. The eggs hatch in about two weeks and baby bed bugs, or nymphs start to feed immediately after hatching. They pass through five stages before they mature into adults.

Bed Bugs – Feeding habits by NJ.com

Bed Bugs - Feeding habits

Getting rid of bed bugs

Infestations from bed bugs can cause havoc on your home. If you leave your home untreated, these tiny nastily pests can destroy your home up to the point where the damage is beyond repair. Luckily, there are various ways you can use to get rid bed bugs before they cause untold damage to both your house and belongings.

You can use heat treatment to get rid of bed bugs and first items to treat should be your bedding and clothing. Heat treatment is a very effective way of eliminating bed bugs. When you find these pets, you should wash your bedding and clothing using hot water.

You can also use steam treatments as well a vacuuming to eliminate bed bugs. Clean your house and get rid of the pests from your furniture and couches. Vacuuming or steam treatments are pretty effective but only when you put more effort to clean your house thoroughly.

You can also get rid of bed bugs using non-toxic treatments, sprays, insecticides and bombs. Non-toxic treatments can be in the form of powders. Insecticides and sprays can also be effective for getting rid of bed bugs but these can only be effective when combined with other effective methods. Alternatively, you can get a professional bed bug exterminator to do the job for you.

Prevention of bed bugs

o    Do not collect padded furniture or mattresses from the street
o    Check your sheets for any blood stains
o    Cover your suitcases in plastic and make sure they are above the floor when you go away
o    Look for bed bugs with a flashlight whenever you travel
o    Wash all your clothes in hot water after you come back from your trip to make sure that bed bugs you might have carried are eliminated
o    Though bed bugs are difficult to detect, when you suspect you have them, call a professional to get rid of the pests.

Bed bugs are tiny little pests which can cause damage to both your home and belongings if left unchecked. However, if you get bed bug infestation, you don’t have to get rid of your belongings. You should find a way to eliminate these pesky pests from your environment and restore your home before it is too late.

It seems that in addition the myriad of various social, political, professional and environmental problems we have to contend with every day, we also now have to deal with bed bugs. While they have been in existence for a very long time now, bed bugs have recently begun to infest inner city areas, especially various motels and apartment buildings. Fortunately though, you are not helpless to deal with them but you are going to need to familiarize yourself with them before going on the offensive.

Bed bugs are nocturnal, meaning you are only going to be able to catch them in action during the night. Unfortunately for us, they reproduce at an exponential rate and tiny colonies can very quickly turn into large-scale infestations if not dealt with appropriately. Just to give you an idea, some females have been observed to lay up to three hundred eggs over the course of a full year, with most of them achieving the 1000 egg mark at the end of their lifetime.

They are unbelievably resilient, can survive months on end without food, not to mention that they can live in practically any surface and usually choose to hide in anything with cracks and crevices, which brings the list to just about anything ranging from your floor to your clothes.

How do you get bed bugs?

Like for most insects, bed bugs thrive in warm, moist places with poor hygiene, which is the reason they are so common in many poor parts of the world. Generally though, an infestation is not localized to a single piece of furniture, clothing, or even a single apartment. Infestations usually happen on very large radiuses where bed bugs can find warm places to live and reproduce as well as humans for food.

Once again, this is the main reason bed bugs generally infest motels, hotels and apartment buildings.

If you believe to be the victim of a bed bug infestation, then it is necessary to identify them properly to make sure that you take the right measures in dealing with them. There are three basic pieces of information to use when identifying a bug: the shape, the color and the size.

Bed bugs are usually quite flat and thin, having an oval form. When it comes to colors, adult bed bugs are usually in the brown spectrum, with most of them being dark brown before feeding and dark red brown after feeding. The young ones are usually colored in white or gold, becoming bright red after eating. How big are bed bugs? As mentioned before, they are generally the size of a ladybug with nymphs being less than half of that size.

If you are the victim of a bed bug infestation then the smartest thing you can do is call some type of professional extermination service to deal with the issue as soon as humanly possible. Bed bugs are some of the most tenacious insects to get rid of, not to mention that they reproduce at an alarming rate; this is a challenge which only professionals are equipped to overcome.

Quite recently it seems that various inner cities and poorer urban areas around the world have suffered an increased report of bed bug incidents. This only makes sense though considering that bed bugs are mainly looking for humid and warm places which are lacking in hygiene to live, and they have found them as inner city motels, hotels and apartments provide just those conditions, with tasty humans on top of everything!
Otherwise said, bed bugs simply love to nest in our apartments as they have everything they need to live. Luckily, there is a way to fight back to first, you must make sure to identify the threat properly.

First off, you should keep in mind that bed bugs are nocturnal creatures which leads them to come out and feed at night; hunting for them during the day will prove pointless. One of the key elements to recognizing whether or not you have bed bugs living in your house would be the fact that you woke up one morning with small red marks all over parts of your body.
These red marks are actually bed bug bites and are quite unpleasant to say the least. However, those are only the signs that you have bed bugs in your house…

How exactly should you go about exactly recognizing them?Well, any insect can typically be recognized by its shape, its size and its color.

What shape do bed bugs generally have? Typically, they have thin, flat and somewhat oval bodies to them as it helps them fit into small cracks and crevices wherever they want.

What color are bed bugs? Before they feed, adult bed bugs tend to be of a darker shade of brown, and after they feed dark red is added to that mix. Nymphs (child bed bugs) are generally either white or gold, becoming extremely bright red upon feeding. How big are bed bugs? Well, they tend to be around the size of 1/4th of an inch, which is about as big as a ladybug.

So now that you have identified the bed bugs living in your apartment, how exactly should you go about getting rid of them? Well, to be fair, bed bugs are some of the most resilient insects out there; while you can wash everything thoroughly, from your furniture to your clothes as well as apply various insecticides, there will be no guarantee that you have gotten all of them.

Not only are bed bugs very hard to spot, they also reproduce at an extremely fast rate with each female laying about 300 eggs over a year. To make a long story short, you will probably need to hire the services of a professional exterminator who will use top-of-the-line tools and techniques to get rid of the infestation.

All in all, terminating a bed bug infestation is all about identifying it and calling for professional services as fast as possible. Every minute idly spent is going to allow them to make the colony bigger and become stronger, which at some point can become unbelievably problematic. Simply act fast and you should end up being just fine.

Bed bugs are some of the most annoying things to have on your bed. They are these pesky little bugs that grow and live inside of beds. Bed bugs usually come in large sets when they live inside of a home, and they’ll grow their entire family inside or outside of a bed to give them a clean place to stay. These bugs may seem harmless at first, but they are actually very dirty and they can bite you if they choose to. An infestation of bed bugs could take a long time to get rid of, and it can be annoying to still have them grow in your homes even if you’ve already called an exterminator.

What exactly are bed bugs?

Bed bugs actually look like cockroaches, but they’re usually extremely smaller. These bugs can come in only a few colors like yellow, black, and sometimes red, and they are usually only 1/4 inches long. Bed bugs cannot make you experience any bad health issues if ever you get bitten, and the bites are usually not felt the same way a bee bites a person. However, the main problem is that when a person gets bitten often, they could potentially be more irritable than normal and even ruin a person’s ordinary sleep patterns. Luckily, this problem does vary because not everybody has the same body or the same immune system. Bed bugs actually need lots of blood to survive, so they’ll take lots of blood out of your body whenever they can, leading some people to anemia or even making children become malnourished. If you’re wondering how bed bugs look like, view our Pictures Of Bed Bugs…

How do you get rid of bed bugs?

One of the best ways to get rid of bed bugs is by simply heating up your sheets as much as possible, as bed bugs can only stay in heated areas for a short period of time. However, this method can only do so much.

Sprays

Using sprays could be a nice way to help protect your bed from getting more of these bed bugs. There are some which can literally kill them the same way an exterminator’s products can. Try going for a spray that is oil based, as these can stay longer on where you leave the spray.

Steamers

Using a bed bug steamer is another great bed bug remedy. These can help steam the entire room, and you can spray the entire bed with a steamer. These will usually kill most of them, but don’t be afraid to place these directly where your bed bugs live.

Bed bug mattress covers

Bed bugs mattress covers can help prevent the old bed bugs from coming out, making them stay inside without giving them the chance to bite you. They can stay in there with nothing to eat for around 18 months or so, and they’ll soon die once they get no more blood in their bodies.

Bed bug infestations are quite hard to deal with if you have no experience. Many people are so used to just letting them stay in their homes, but the risks involved with having them could be extremely bad. If you’d like to keep your family healthy, try using the remedies above for getting rid of your bed bugs.

As a parasitic insect, bed bugs feed off human blood.  They have existed for thousands of years. For all intent and purposes they disappeared from developed societies in the nineteen forties. However, since around 1995 they have made a re-emergence, especially in the United States. New York City seems to have been particularly targeted. Many believe this is the result of the heavy influx of travelers to this area from all over the world. Bed bugs travel easily within a suitcase on clothing and the like. If you’re wondering what they look like, check out these Pictures Of Bed Bugs.

These creatures are normally reddish brown in color, round and flat.  They can grow to be three to five millimeters in length and one and a half to three millimeters in width. They can thrive in a variety of environments, but seem to do exceptionally well in mid range temperatures and humidity. They actually excrete an odor which is sweet in nature sometimes being compared to raspberries.

Bed bugs can cause a wide array of health issues. Most prominently among these are skin irritations. These skin conditions can cause extreme itching and sometimes result in blisters. Excessive scratching can lead to a bacterial infections within the broken skin. Bites normally occur to the legs, arms, shoulders and face since these are the parts of the body most exposed during sleep.

Believe it or not, bed bug bites can even contribute to insomnia, stress and anxiety. These conditions will normally occur when the infestations are very serious and chronic in nature.  Prevention of bed bugs starts with a very basic concept. Laundering your sheets, blankets and pillow cases on a regular basis with hot water and drying with high heat. Another very successful form of prevention is mattress and box spring encasement. These are normally zippered enclosures that surround your pillows , mattress and box spring with a specially membraned surface that is not conducive to bed bug nesting.

Here’s an interesting video on how to detect bed bugs on your own:

You may attempt to control these pests in a variety of fashions. Most often this will include a combination of procedures both with and without pesticides. Pesticide usage has diminished in recent years due to their obvious negative effect on humans and particularly children. Therefore, the non pesticide or mechanical elimination has become more popular. A simple vacuuming will literally suck these insects into oblivion. Heat treatments have also been found to be an effective source to kill them. The thermal point of their death is one hundred and fifteen degrees. Another interesting form of detection and capturing bed bugs is by the use of dog sniffing.

As mentioned earlier in this article, they actually emit an odor that a well trained canine can hone in on and expose their existence. As of 2009, approximately one hundred dogs in the United States had been trained specifically for this purpose.  If you have moved recently and used the services of a professional, you might have noticed all your mattresses were wrapped securely within heavy paper and / or cardboard before transporting them. The reason, you guessed it the control of bed bugs during shipment.  So I will leave you with this popular saying, many times told by a parent to their child, “ Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite “.