Do you know whether you have ever come across a bed bug? You probably have not. Not yet, but the chances that you will are growing every day. This is because bed bugs are undergoing an explosion in their numbers and mankind is quite powerless to stop them at the moment, although a number of people are working on it.
You see, the difficulty is that bed bugs are pretty much resistant to every pesticide that we have. They were almost wiped out in the West in the Forties and Fifties with the widespread use of DDT, but the ones that survived and the ones that have been carried into the country are tolerant to pesticides.
Scientists are working on pesticides that will be effective against bed bugs, but there is no light at the end of the tunnel so far.
So, we are stuck with a burgeoning population of bed bugs. How do you get bed bugs? Usually, you just pick them up and take them home or someone does it for you. It is thought that foreign travel and immigration are largely responsible for the first members of our new bed bug community.
Nowadays, you can pick them up anyplace where people go: taxis, cinemas, restaurants, hotels, motels, cars, buses and planes. Even in the doctor’s surgery.
It used to be believed that bed bugs only flourished in poor peoples’ houses, but this is incorrect. In fact, the rich are more likely to get them than the poor, because they travel more often. You can also be given bedbugs in secondhand furniture, clothing and suitcases.
Bedbugs like to hide in cracks, so you could be sitting on a bus and one will crawl up the back of your coat and nestle under your collar. There it might lay a few eggs and walk away or it might go to sleep. When you get home, you will put your coat in the wardrobe and a few days later you will have your very own colony of hungry little bedbugs. It is that easy.
Some bedbugs will also reside on birds and bats. These bedbugs prefer bird blood, but if there are not many around, you may find them dropping from the ceiling onto you, if you have birds or bats in your attic. Bats are protected now, so you will have to have them removed, but you ought to discourage birds from nesting above you.
The bedbugs will be attracted to the CO2 on your breath and your body heat and then they use pheromones to tell the others where you are. It usually only takes a bedbug five minutes to feed and then it goes back home to sleep it off for three to five days.
A mature bedbug has gone through six moultings and after a mature female has been inseminated, she can lay between 300 and 1,000 eggs in her lifetime of about six to twelve months. She will lay several eggs a day and they will hatch out in around ten days. So, you only need one pregnant female and you are in trouble very soon.
If you have a few dozen females laying eggs in your mattress, it will take less than a fortnight before dozens of newborn bedbugs (called nymphs) are hatching out every day and then one of their relatives will lead them straight to you.
Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on many subjects, but is currently concerned with how do you get bed bugs? If you are interested in this, please go over to our website now at Picture Of Bed Bugs for more details.
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