Bed Bugs: Unwelcome Bed Fellows

Bed bugs are a constant worry, if you suspect that they are in the bed with you. In fact, it is known that when people have been bitten often, they can become anxious, strained and obsessed. Insomnia soon follows. This predicament can quickly lead to irritability, domestic arguments and the loss of your job.

This obsession can obviously get out of hand unless you do something about it soon. If you are in a hotel, then you have to tell the manager immediately. If you are in rented accommodation, then your landlord has the responsibility to keep his property pest free, but if it is your own place, you have a problem. Or at least, you can get the issue sorted out, but it will cost you.

The Latin name for the species of bed bug that only drinks human blood is Cimex lectularius and they were first written about in Greece in about 400 BC. They did not arrive in Great Britain in large numbers until about 1670 and by 1726, they were in Jamaica and almost certainly the United States as well.

Bedbugs were exterminated from the developed world by and large by the late 1950′s due to the widespread use of pesticides such as DDT to constrain other household pests like ants and cockroaches.

Unfortunately|Regrettably, this has led to bedbugs being resistant to nearly all modern, domestic pesticides. The resurgence of bed bugs is blamed on increased foreign travel and higher levels of immigration from Asia and Africa.

It is generally believed that bedbugs only bite humans, but that is not right. Cimex lectularius only bites humans, but almost all warm-blooded animals have their own parasites, which could be called bedbugs.

Cats, dogs, deer, horses and birds (together with poultry) have their own bedbugs and these bed bugs will bite humans as well, if their preferred source of a blood meal is not around.

Bedbugs are quite small, being about a quarter of an inch long and a bit narrower. The are very flat and thin, so that they look as if they have been squashed. They are fairly agile when empty, but slow and cumbersome when swollen on blood.

They are most often brown in colour, bur they can be almost any shade, even white, until they have fed and then there is always at least a hint of red about them.

Bedbugs need to shed their skin six times before they become adult and can lay inactive for five months without food. They are aroused by body heat and CO2 and can signal their comrades that food is about by the discharge of pheromones.

Bedbugs prefer to live in narrow cracks and crevices. They like loose skirtings and architraves, damaged plaster and wall paper, ripped mattresses and loose joints in timber furniture. They will even hole up, quite literally, in a the sunken-screw hole – the countersink.

Bedbug bites often look like mosquito bites, but there is no red dot and they can take longer to come up and longer to go down and like flea bites, bedbug bites are often in a line of three.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many subjects, but is at present concerned with bed bugs extermination. If you are interested in this, please visit our website now at Picture Of Bed Bugs for more information.