Bedbug is a common name for insects, numbering 40 thousand species. Most of them have nothing to do with a person. Some species harm crops, there are even useful ones: they eat caterpillars and aphids. From early spring to late autumn, representatives of this suborder of insects from the order of half-winged animals bask in the sun, pleasing our eyes with multi-colored “outfits”. Everyone knows, for example, what a bug soldier looks like. But there is one kind, the contact with which everyone recalls as a nightmare.
Acquaintance with a bug
In most cases, a person does not immediately realize that he has communicated with this insect. He does not know what a bug looks like, but feels traces of his presence “on his own skin”. If you wake up a few days in a row and find bite marks on your skin, it’s worth considering. It can be a bug.
He is very small. A bug is a blood-sucking insect (ecoparasite). It has a strongly developed sense of smell, which allows you to quickly and efficiently find a victim by smell (usually a person, but sometimes there may be an animal). Sucks blood once every seven days. But it multiplies exponentially. And now all his relatives together can poison the lives of not only a large family, but even the inhabitants of a multi-storey building.
At the beginning of the last century, bedbugs were not a wonder. After they began to poison with pesticides and other poisons, they almost disappeared. But not all. Probably the surviving representatives adapted to the first generation pesticides and no longer respond to them. Now the bugs again began to appear everywhere. And not only in poor areas, but also in modern new buildings.
Appearance
How do bed bugs (photos) look like home, or bed, or linen?
These are different names for the same insect. It has a body flattened above and below without wings. The body of the bug does not contain water. The length depends on the amount of blood drunk. This is said about him: "Fed up hungry is not a comrade." After eating, the bug increases not only in width, but also in length. Hungry reaches only 3 mm, full - 8 mm. By the way the bug looks, you can judge how long he ate. Its coloring depends on it. It varies from dirty yellow (hungry), scarlet (just ate too much) and to dark brown (quite a while ago). The contours of the body also depend on the amount eaten: hungry - oval, full - round.
Let's take a closer look at how bed bugs look (photo). Domestic vampires have a body covered with hairs that can only be viewed under a microscope. Females are larger than males. The bug has a proboscis, which pierces the skin. There are two channels in the small jaws. One is for injecting poisonous saliva with an analgesic, the other for sucking blood.
What does a bed bug look like? He is very different from hungry. Well-fed - slow, looking rounded. Hungry - flat and nimble: in search of food he can climb the ceiling and plan down on the victim, like an autumn leaf.
The body of the bug consists of segments, which helps it to stretch when eating and avoid mechanical damage. Crushing a hungry bug is almost impossible. A well-fed one is very easy, even with a slight pressure.
Developmental stages
A bug goes through several stages during its life:
The female lays 5-12 eggs daily (there can be up to 500 eggs in total for their life). Attaches with a special secret to the surface. The egg is milky white in shape, resembling a grain of rice, but much smaller - up to 1 mm. Not afraid of cold and poison. Therefore, when treating an apartment with a bug repellent, the eggs remain intact.
What do larval bugs look like ? They look like an adult bug, but smaller and significantly lighter. Therefore they are called nymphs.
A larva from the egg appears in a week. She immediately begins to move and is ready to drink blood. At first, the nymph is transparent, so through the skin you can see the blood she drinks. The larva sheds five times (discards the membrane), each time first drinking blood. After molting increases in size. After 6 weeks, the larva turns into an imago. If the development conditions are unfavorable, then the process is delayed up to 4 months.
The bug actively lives a year and a half. But if the room temperature drops below 18 ° C, it can hibernate (suspended animation) and starve for another year and a half. What does a bed bug look like in a state of suspended animation? It will become thin and transparent, almost dry, seemingly dead. But this impression is misleading. After the temperature rises, the bug comes to life, finds food and continues its life cycle. Do not tolerate frosts below -15 ⁰ and heat from 49 ⁰.
Where do the bugs live?
Where they are difficult to find and neutralize: inside furniture, under baseboards. Hence the answer to the question: "What does a furniture bug look like ?" This is another home name.
They also hide in books and electronics. In old things, crevices of walls and floors. In animal cells. They live in dirty and clean rooms.
In the habitats of ticks are adults, larvae, their skins, eggs and excrement.
Therefore, if you do not know how home bugs look, you need to carefully examine the secluded places in the bedroom and look for these clusters.
Ways to enter the house
- Through the cracks in the walls, ventilation hatches. An adult bug passes 1 m 25 cm per minute, the larva - up to 25 cm. It can overcome up to 30 m in search of food.
- With old furniture.
- With any interior items, if they were in a room infected with bugs.
- In the clothes of family members or guests.
- Clutching at the pet.
Often the landlord does not know what the bed bugs look like, does not notice their bites, and therefore does not fight with them. In this case, their number increases rapidly. Through the cracks, bedbugs penetrate into neighboring apartments. The hosts, upon discovering unexpected guests, try to destroy them. But they come again and again, and their flow does not dry out.
How and when to bite bugs
A channel in the jaw releases an anesthetic. A person does not feel a bite and does not react to it. The bug starts to suck blood. One nymph eating session lasts 3 minutes, an adult - 8-10 minutes. After eating, the bug creeps into the habitat and digests food. After 15 minutes, the bite site begins to itch. But there is no longer an insect nearby. You may not notice that there was a bed of linen. What does a bed look like in the morning? Drops of blood from crushed bugs that did not have time to escape remain on it. The spots darken by morning. Day "bloodsuckers" is not visible. At night (from 3 a.m.) the bugs go hunting. Proboscis pierce the skin and soft tissue until they find a capillary.
Nymphs do not know how to enter an analgesic, because the injection is heard immediately. But their proboscis is very thin, and the bite can be invisible.
If there are a lot of bugs, and they are hungry, they can attack in electric light and even in the afternoon. It is believed that they bite more people with delicate skin and do not like the smell of tobacco.
What do bedbug bites look like?
After the bite of one individual, a path of several punctures remains, located one from another at a distance of 4 cm. From each hole, the insect drinks a few drops of blood. If the bugs are only populated by you, there may be several bites, which will complicate the diagnosis. But usually a few dozen tracks.
Each bite looks like a mosquito, but with a clear restrictive feature. The area near the penetration site quickly swells and turns red, severe burning and itching begin.
The distance between bites can be a few millimeters. Then they merge into a continuous swollen and itchy spot. What does a bug bite look like? The photo below shows that red bumps with fluid form in its place.
Bedbugs bite patches of skin that are not covered with clothing: arms, legs, neck, bare back. They cannot bite through tissue like a mosquito. And there are always open areas. After all, the bug works silently. You won’t even hear a squeak from a mosquito.
After a few hours, the tumor disappears, the bites cease to itch. By evening, they usually remain barely noticeable points. But when combing, which is very likely, the blisters can remain for several weeks.
Bite damage
- Pain and itching do not let you sleep peacefully at night, and work during the day.
- Allergic reactions occur with increased sensitivity. Temperature may rise, Quincke's edema may occur, sometimes anaphylactic shock.
- If you get into the wounds of infection, there is a high probability of ulcers.
- If a small child is bitten by bugs, he may develop anemia.
- These insects carry the causative agents of typhoid, smallpox, tularemia, hepatitis, tuberculosis. Some scientists believe that bedbugs can infect humans. But this is not proved by science.
How to find out that bedbugs have appeared in the apartment
To understand who bites you, you need to find him. About 70% of people, mostly men, do not respond to bedbugs. They are not affected by the substance introduced by the insect. But the bugs bite everyone. If you find small dark spots of blood on your bed in the morning, you need to beware. It may well be bedbugs. To check, at night it is necessary to turn on the light sharply and carefully examine yourself, the sheet, the walls near the bed.
The sharp odor of almonds or raspberries that appeared from nowhere can also indicate the presence of bugs.
Differences from other insects
Often bugs are confused with cockroaches, lice, ants. Indeed, most of them, fortunately, are almost never found.
The main differences:
- bed bugs have no nests, ants have;
- cockroaches have wings, bugs do not (more precisely, have, but are underdeveloped);
- bedbugs bite the open part of the body, lice - closed;
- other insects are odorless.
How to distinguish bug bites
Even doctors can not always do this. But there are still a number of differences.
- Mosquito bites are not so painful. Traces of bugs are redder, placed by tracks and groups.
- The tick during the bite sits in the wound for a long time, burying itself in it with its head and pouring blood; the bug runs away.
- Bee and wasp stings are more painful.
- Bedbugs bite at night and indoors.
- With allergies, there is no trace of the proboscis on the red spot.
Bedbugs bite everyone and always. They can move from apartment to apartment, from old furniture to new. They are not easy to see, but even more difficult not to notice. As you can see, bugs are unpleasant insects. Their neighborhood brings not only pain from bites. The realization that these creatures crawl over you at night can cause depression or a nervous breakdown. Bedbugs themselves will not go away. Therefore, you need to try to get rid of them. Knowing what the bug looks like, it is easy to find the location of the parasite. Destroy better using special tools. Now there are effective drugs that do not have an unpleasant odor and are practically harmless to humans. The procedure can be done on your own or contact professionals who are engaged in pest control.