What do bed bugs look like?

Of all domestic pests or parasites, bugs are probably the least recognizable. At different stages of its development, a bed bug can be similar to a cockroach, a louse, and a tick. And for many residents of megacities who are not very well versed in entomology, this insect may even be an unrecognized guest in an apartment who will cause a lot of trouble in the future. Therefore, knowing what the bugs look like is worth it to everyone, so that after the first meeting they can quickly begin to take action to expel the parasites from their homes.

 

The appearance of the bed bug

With the look of bugs in general, everyone is familiar with the example of the soldier bugs infested with spring in each park. The appearance that is typical for them is common to all the bugs: an elongated body, dense wings with an intricate pattern, a head well-delimited from the body with a pointed "nose".Similar bugs have pests of agriculture, predatory tropical bugs, and even water-bugs that inhabit the ponds and streams.

Bed bugs in a large detachment of hemiptera, as the whole group of these insects in entomology is called, are some exceptions. The way home bugs look like makes them very different from their relatives, and the main distinguishing features of them are the following:

• Lack of wings. After the transition to a parasitic way of life, the wings ceased to be something necessary for bedbugs, and moreover, it was the wings that created for each individual a certain risk of being easily injured by the owner. Without wings, the bug is not only less visible, it is also almost invulnerable in a hungry state: it is very difficult to crush or grab with your fingers. As a result, over several million years of evolution, these parasitic insects have lost wings. By the way, precisely because of the lack of wings, the domestic bug does not have the angularity of the body inherent to its other relatives: the parasite bug has a rounded body.
• The absence of a pronounced pattern on the body. Coloring bug just brown.When saturated with blood, the insect becomes darker, even to an almost black color. Hungry small larvae are almost completely transparent and have a light yellow color. In general, when finding a place where the bugs accumulate, an inexperienced tenant of the premises may confuse them with cockroaches. However, bugs differ from cockroaches quite well.
• Clearly and noticeably segmented abdomen. In general, the rest of the bugs, it is also divided into several segments, but they are not noticeable because of the presence of wings. In bed bugs, especially - in adults - strips on the body are clearly seen in the eyes. As the insect becomes saturated with blood during feeding, each segment stretches in length, the body becomes longer and the segments become visible especially clearly.

In general, the appearance of a bed bug is quite specific. It is necessary once to see an adult insect and find out that it’s a bug, never to confuse it with anyone ever again. A hungry parasite has a flattened, almost flat, but wide in the sides of the body, like a brown coin. In a well-fed insect, the abdomen is pulled out in length, filled with blood, and becomes more convex.

By the way, well-fed bedbugs become more vulnerable and often die in bed, crushed by their own victims. A hungry, “flat” bug is hard not to take with your fingers, but even to crush - it can press so tightly against a flat surface. To destroy one insect, you need to use a solid object - a coin, a knife, a nail.

 

Each bug has a small elongated proboscis on its head - a food organ composed of the upper and lower jaws elongated in the process of evolution. There are two channels in this proboscis: one for the absorption of blood, the other for the introduction of saliva into the wound. This proboscis bug pierces the skin in the place closest to the capillary, and sucks blood for a minute or two. Then he moves a few centimeters and repeats this procedure. After 4-5 bites, the insect is saturated and crawls to the shelter to digest food.

The body size of the bed bug ranges from 0.5 to 8 mm. Adults usually have a body length of about 4 mm in a hungry state, after feeding, their body sometimes increases in size twice. The larvae of the youngest age may be invisible to the naked eye.And in general, young bugs are much easier not to notice or confuse with other insects.

On a note

The need for bed bugs to periodically move from their shelters in the apartment to the place of feeding (on a person’s bed) can be used to destroy these bloodsuckers. To do this, you only need to make a kind of insecticidal drug barriers around each leg of the bed. The photo below shows an example:

Especially good for these purposes is the preparation for bedbugs Hector, which is a fine powder, sticking to bugs crawling on it and leading to their dehydration. It is important that the tool effectively destroy parasites, even if they are resistant to standard "chemistry" (Karbofos, Dichlorvos, etc.). In this case, the powder of the drug Hector is safe for humans and animals.

When implementing this method of dealing with bedbugs, you must first destroy all the bugs in the bed itself.

 

What do the larvae and eggs of bed bugs look like?

Homebug Eggs transparent and have a length of about half a millimeter. Due to the fact that the female lays them in small portions of 3-4 pieces, they are usually clearly visible.In addition, eggs are almost always located in the same place where adult insects spend the day, and therefore they are easily struck against the background of adult individuals, remnants of skins after their molt and dark excrement.

 

Each egg is elongated and looks like an ant's egg.

The larvae of bedbugs immediately after leaving the eggs look like new-born cockroaches or lice. They are transparent and light, and only with time, after a few feedings and molts, they begin to darken and acquire the characteristic body color of adult insects. At this stage, they are already quite easily distinguished from other insects.

Their characteristic feature is the bright rim of the body and the black dot in the middle of the abdomen. This point is the stomach filled with blood and the digestive tract. In the larvae that did not feed for several days, the whole body was of approximately the same yellowish color.

 

Differences domestic bugs from other parasites

Knowing what bed bugs look like, you can easily distinguish them from most other parasites:

• Bugs differ from cockroaches in a wider and more round body and lower mobility. The bug does not run fast.In addition, adult cockroaches have wings, which creates an even greater impression of elongation of the body. Wingless larvae of red cockroaches are different from bedbugs by a clearly visible red spot in the upper body. And the larvae of black cockroaches are much darker than even adult blood bugs that get drunk.
• From lice, adult bed bugs differ in size and color. With lice you can confuse small larvae of bedbugs, but here you should remember about the lifestyle of those and other parasites. Lice are found only on the hair, and each insect holds on to the hair very tightly and is difficult to remove from the head. Bedbugs, on the contrary, cannot move normally along the hairy part of the body, and therefore are found only in open areas.
• It is quite difficult to confuse with domestic ants of bedbugs. Even just hatched larvae already have a wide body, and one close look at them is enough to accurately understand that it is not an ant.
• Domestic bugs differ from ticks in the number and size of legs: in ticks, as representatives of the arachnid class, legs 8, and in domestic bugs, like all insects, there are 6 of them.In addition, for bugs, legs are not as large in relation to body size as ticks.
• Bedbugs are distinguished from fleas by their lower mobility, larger size and inability to jump. Even just hatched from the larvae of eggs exceed the size of an adult flea.

By the very bedbug bites can also be distinguished from other parasites, as such bites look very peculiar. Each insect leaves a few bites on the skin in the form of a peculiar path - 3-4 red dots extended in a conspicuous line. Usually, several adults and larvae bite a person at night, and in the morning many traces of bites appear on the body at once.

However, to understand that in the house, in the country or in a hotel bugs live You can even before a sleepless agonizing night. Even before the settlement, you can quite easily detect them and take appropriate measures.

 

How to understand that bugs live in the house?

The first and most reliable way to detect presence bed bugs in the house - see them. It's not so difficult, especially knowing what the bug looks like. In most cases, insects hide during the daytime under the mattresses on the beds, in the folds of furniture and clothing, in the corners under the carpets and floor coverings.In a room infected with bedbugs, it is enough to examine only the most obvious places of their possible stay in order to find several individuals. This will be enough to make sure they are present.

It is not the bugs themselves that come across most easily and easily, but the chitin shells remaining after their molting. Under the day-places of insects whole deposits of them can accumulate, if the room has not been cleaned for a long time. These same dry skins often come across in the garbage and at the corners of the room.

The bugs themselves smell quite characteristic. In a heavily contaminated room, even a person can smell the slightly sweet smell of almonds or fermented raspberries. In the US, even dogs are trained to look for bedbugs in the sanitary services: it is much easier for them to find these insects than drugs at customs.

The presence of bedbugs can be indicated by small brown spots on the bed, which remain after a person, who is turning over from the bites, accidentally crushes an insect that has become drunk with blood. In addition, in the daytime, their excrement is much more visible than the parasites themselves - small black dots that look like poppy seeds.They can be found near the baseboards, under the beds, behind the cabinets.

It should not be assumed that bugs settle mainly in unsanitary conditions: these insects are well assimilated and take root in rural animal sheds, and in fashionable city apartments on any floors. It is very important that they migrate fairly easily between apartments in apartment buildings, and therefore if the neighbors have problems with bedbugs, then the residents of a particular apartment will probably not avoid these problems.

see also Overview of the most effective means of bedbugs

 

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