This food is enough for the bug for a week. But this does not mean that you will sleep peacefully, because there can be hundreds and even thousands of pests in the apartment.
How the bug bites - signs
Bedbug bite marks are very easy to distinguish:
How the bug bites - danger of bites
- allergic reactions. If a person is susceptible to the enzyme that the insect injects after the proboscis is punctured into the wound, an allergy may appear. The bite site turns red, itching and burning begin. Anaphylactic shock is possible, but this is very rare;
- the appearance of inflammatory processes. You can not comb the affected areas, otherwise the damaged skin will become an excellent "gateway" for infections. Through damaged skin, staphylococcus and other dangerous microorganisms can enter the body;
- development of anemia. In an apartment with a large number of bedbugs, small children suffer greatly. The bloodsucker sucks a lot of blood from the baby and he may develop anemia due to a lack of iron in the body.
How bedbugs bite - bite treatment
If bite marks don't bother you, don't treat yourself. But if you feel pain and unbearable itching, use the following treatment methods:
- treat skin rashes with any liquid containing alcohol. This is a tincture of celandine, propolis and the like;
- take antihistamines if you have an allergy. You will need to consult a doctor, he will advise a medicine such as Susprastin or Zodak;
- use oils to reduce inflammation. Apply tea tree, sea buckthorn or rosehip oil to the affected areas. Asterisk balm or Fenistil gel is well suited for this purpose.
If there are a lot of bedbugs in the apartment, disinfect the premises. Take care of the health of the household, because insects bite any person, regardless of gender and age.
In this article, we will try to understand in more detail the eating habits and preferences of bed bugs. Often, the very mention of bed bugs makes many automatically think of those itchy bites that bed bugs like to leave on us while we sleep.
Why do bedbugs bite?
Bed bugs bite us to survive - this is the simplest answer to this very painful question for people. Bed bugs feed exclusively on blood. and constantly need it to complete their life cycle from egg to adult.
When do bed bugs bite?
Bed bugs bite during the day
Despite the nocturnal lifestyle, there are times when hungry bugs crawl out to feast on blood and in the middle of the day. When the bedbug colony grows and there are many individuals, they have to expand their lunch schedule so that all individuals can get enough. There are also cases when after treatment, the bugs bite by day.
Do bed bugs eat anything other than blood?
Unlike many other insects that are found in the home, such as flies and cockroaches, bed bugs are not able to get their food from other sources, so bed bugs can only survive on blood received directly from the host. At the same time, insects will not be able to drink spilled blood, since they need the usual temperature and pressure that fills the bug's abdomen during a human bite.
How often do bed bugs bite? What kind of bugs bite?
Under normal conditions, an adult bed bug needs to be fed once a week. Female bed bugs need to be fed each time before breeding. But growing bugs need regular nutrition for growth and transition to the next stage of the life cycle, therefore bed bug nymphs bite every day.
Now we can imagine the following picture what kind of bugs bite: when bugs started up in the apartment and began to actively multiply, then the bites will be every day and every day there will be more and more of them to saturate each individual.
Why don't bed bugs bite everyone?
Very often, people are confused by the fact that in one apartment, itchy redness from bites in the morning does not appear in all family members, but, for example, only in the wife and children, while the head of the family remains untouched.
It is for this reason that many of our citizens miss the initial stage of infection of the apartment with bedbugs, the one at which get rid of bed bugs easier. Many at first take bedbug bites for allergies or some kind of rash - “maybe they ate something wrong,” but no one even thinks about bedbugs, because they don’t bite their husband. In fact, everything is very simply explained: bedbugs prefer to drink more delicious fresh blood, and it is much easier to bite through the more delicate children's or women's skin. But then, when there are a lot of bedbugs in the apartment, they already begin to bite all family members, because otherwise they will simply “eat” their owners, and this cannot be allowed.
How far do bed bugs crawl for food?
Bed bugs feed at a limited distance from their nest. So if a two-room or three-room apartment is infested with bedbugs, then in each of the rooms where people sleep there may be a colony of bedbugs. Therefore, the bedbugs that feed on you at night are not the same ones that bother your family members in other rooms.
That is why the destruction of bedbugs must be carried out in the entire apartment and in each room, otherwise the family of bedbugs remaining untouched in the untreated room can again capture the entire apartment.
Each piece of furniture and room can have its own colony of bed bugs living there and biting people sleeping nearby..
How long can bed bugs live without food?
Under favorable conditions adult bed bugs can go without food for up to five months. This applies only to mature individuals. But the growing nymphs of bed bugs are much more dependent on food and, as we wrote above, they need constant food for growth and transition to the next stage of the life cycle. However, even they are able to survive a hunger strike. few weeks. The older bed bugs get, the longer they can go without food. Bed bugs die the fastest from starvation in the first and second stages of maturation out of five.
Interesting fact: The California University of Agriculture and Natural Resources claims that there have been cases where adult bed bugs lasted 400 days without food at low temperatures.
Destruction of bedbugs in the apartment
Bedbug poisoning with fog is the most efficient way quickly and efficiently destroy bedbugs in the apartment. This is achieved with the use of modern preparations and equipment for their effective spraying. Disinfection from bedbugs in the apartment produced by specialists of the SES service Control in each room, thereby achieving the maximum result - 100% extermination of bedbugs!
Everyone knows for sure what a mosquito looks like. The photo is shown below.
You can notice the presence of mosquitoes in the apartment in the evening. Therefore, you can worry about the means of protection in advance. It's no secret that an ultrasonic repeller is the best way to get rid of blood-sucking mosquitoes. An effective remedy appeared on our territory about 15 years ago, and still occupies a leading position among all products against mosquitoes in the apartment. A small box is enough to connect to the outlet and you can sleep peacefully. The squeak of mosquitoes will be heard, they will fly around the body of a sleeping person, but they will not be able to bite. Ultrasound affects the nervous system of the insect, it loses its orientation in space, cannot find a source of nutrition. Forced to leave the apartment through an open window or crack, or simply dies without being satisfied.
The situation is much more complicated with other blood-sucking insects. It requires resourcefulness, endurance, patience, an effective remedy.
domestic fleas
Small dark-colored insects prefer the blood of pets - cats, dogs. They often bring fleas into the house. Photos and dogs are presented below.
However, there are situations when fleas settle in an apartment, drink human blood in the absence of pets. Then a person may not be aware of their existence for a long time, and wake up in the morning with bites on the body.
They are treated with alcohol tinctures, aloe juice, ice, soda solution, special medicines for the bites of blood-sucking insects.
The tracks are messy. They fight fleas with general cleaning with the addition of detergent, vinegar, ammonia, lavender oil to the water. As well as sprays, aerosols, concentrated solutions. In parallel with cleaning the apartment, pets and their bed.
linen lice
Louse in the house can appear absolutely unexpectedly. If earlier it was believed that they live in conditions of absolute unsanitary conditions, now the opinion has changed. For lice, the disorder in the room does not play a special role, the main thing is the presence of food. A photo of bed lice is presented below.
Insects bite in those places where blood vessels are located closer to the skin. Traces can be found on the arms, legs, back, neck, shoulders, occasionally on the stomach. Linen louse does not crawl on the head, it makes no sense to look for them there. In this it differs from the head louse. Although the rest of the behavior, lifestyle, reproduction is identical.
It is unreasonable to expect that the louse will disappear on its own. You can't starve her in your absence. Without blood, a louse can live for about a month. Then she goes into a new stage - suspended animation, waiting for favorable living conditions. Thus, the fight against linen lice should be carried out immediately after its detection. With a small stage of infection of the apartment, it can be dealt with quickly. Tidy up the bed. Remove bedding, wash at a temperature of over 65 degrees Celsius, and even better boil.
The most terrible blood-sucking insect of all listed. It is quite difficult to get rid of these insects, especially if time is lost, the bugs have managed to multiply. What a bed bug looks like can be seen in the photo. Interestingly, a hungry and well-fed bug differs in both body size and shape. The insect has an elastic translucent chitinous cover. When blood enters the stomach of the bug, it increases, the color changes. A well-fed bed bug has a round body shape, convex, scarlet color. A hungry insect is gray or brown in color, flat, several times smaller. A photo of a hungry and well-fed bug is presented below.
A photo of a child bitten by bedbugs is below.
Currently, there are a lot of means to combat bed bugs. The choice depends on the degree of infection of the apartment with insects, personal preferences, financial capabilities. You can buy an inexpensive chalk "Mashenka" from bedbugs, an expensive modern microencapsulated remedy used by professionals in the fight against insects. For example, Gett, Delta Zone. Destroy bedbugs with an aerosol, concentrated solution, general cleaning. It is very important to find a nest of bedbugs and find out the reason for their appearance.
Waking up in the morning, people bitten by insects usually attribute everything to. At the very least, on . But there are more and more tracks and they are located in groups. This is how a bed bug bites. It is difficult to believe in this, since a person does not see any insects in bed. It is more logical to write off everything on a flying mosquito. Before blaming a flying bloodsucker, you should carefully check the secluded places not only outside, but also inside the sofa, on the back of the bed and even under the wallpaper.
Bed bug lifestyle and hunting time
How often bedbugs bite depends on what you mean by that. One individual feeds every 7 to 10 days, but makes several punctures in a “session”. If there are a lot of bedbugs, then they will bite every day.
With allergies, bed bug bites can look like large areas of swollen, inflamed skin. With a strong allergic reaction, the victim may develop Quincke's edema.
Is it possible to mitigate the effects of bites
When scratching, a secondary infection gets into the scratches and things take a bad turn. When an infection enters the bloodstream, medications will be required, which the doctor should prescribe.
How to eliminate the effects of bites
Any allergic reaction is removed with antihistamines:
- Dimedrol;
- Suprastin;
- Loratadine;
- by other means.
As a first aid, any external remedy is suitable.
There are a lot of antihistamines of the first and second generations today. You need to choose the most suitable one. But this can be done only by trial and error, even with the help of a doctor who can only advise the most suitable remedy from his point of view.
Pharmacies sell creams for external use with the active ingredient - antihistamine:
- Elidel made in Switzerland;
- Psilo-balm produced by Nizhpharm and Germany;
- remedies for bee and wasp stings, the latter include Asterisk balm.
You can soothe irritation with ammonia. All poisons produced by insects cannot withstand the effects of ammonia.
Ethyl alcohol is useless.
Folk remedies to relieve irritation
In the absence of antihistamine drugs in the house, you can try to relieve itching with the help of improvised means:
- a hot bath will steam the skin, accelerate the movement of blood, due to which the poison will be distributed over a larger area, relieve itching;
- moistened plantain leaf - the moisture on the attached leaf will cool the irritated places, and the itching will subside slightly;
- a compress moistened with a concentrated soda solution soothes itching well;
- cooling with ice reduces the local temperature of the inflamed skin, itching subsides;
- lotions with decoctions of antiseptic herbs: chamomile, St. John's wort, plantain cool the bite site;
Of the dubious folk remedies, one can name a compress with urine and an onion cut in half. In the presence of scratching, pathogenic microorganisms can be brought into the wound with urine. Urine is not as sterile as "traditional healers" assure. Fresh onion juice burns tissue. If it does not damage healthy cells, then with inflammation and scratching it will only get worse.
How to protect yourself from bites
Bed bugs have an excellent sense of smell, and in search of food they are guided by the smell. The insect crawls into unwashed clothes and "moves" with it to another room or someone else's house.
When the first point irritation of the skin appears, you need to carefully examine the back walls of the furniture, look behind the baseboards and wallpaper. If the wallpaper has peeled off somewhere, a whole colony of bedbugs can settle under them. Adults can be seen upon close examination of the inside of the furniture; the larvae that have just emerged from the eggs are very small and almost transparent. This must be taken into account when trying.
On a note!
The bug larva in the first stage of development is easily mistaken for a louse.
With the instruction "spray places where insects accumulate" they are not suitable for bedbugs.
Here is no exception. There are quite a lot of specific details in how bedbugs bite and what consequences their bites cause, which not only earned these insects universal hatred, but also attracted the attention of scientists to them.
Bite Anatomy: Bedbug Feeding under the Microscope
The proboscis itself, outside the feeding process, is pressed by the insect to the lower part of the cephalothorax, making it invisible. Bed bugs and some of their relatives even have a special groove on the cephalothorax, which acts as a special sheath for an injection weapon.
There are two channels in the proboscis of the bug: one for blood absorption, and the second for introducing saliva into the wound, which acts as an anesthetic. As a result, adult bed bugs bite painlessly to their prey.
As a result, the bug feeds every 7-10 days. But how often bedbugs bite also depends on their number in the room - in a heavily infested apartment, a person can count more than 500 bites on the body in the morning.
Bed bug larvae feed more frequently and in smaller portions. The smallest of them need to be fed almost daily. Interestingly, when bitten, the larvae do not inject saliva into the wound, and the itching begins to be felt by a person even when the insect feeds.
Signs of a bite: how to distinguish a bed bug bite from other insect bites
Often confused with other insect bites. If there are few bites, then they can be mistaken for mosquitoes. Although the way bed bugs bite is quite easy to give them away, and their bites are easy to distinguish from the bites of other insects. The main distinguishing features of bed bug bites are:
- a series of bites. Due to the fact that the bug sucks blood from several wounds, it leaves a kind of "path" of bites;
- numerous bites. Bedbugs live in unorganized clusters, and in one night a person is bitten by several insects at once;
- confinement to night time. Bed bugs are inactive during the day.
Usually, after the bugs have taken advantage of the skin area, irritation and itching appear at the bite sites, which usually disappear within a few hours. And only in rare cases, bedbug bites can be really dangerous.
How dangerous is a bug bite?
The most serious consequences of bed bug bites are possible allergic reactions. In the case of high susceptibility to enzymes introduced by the bug when bitten, anaphylactic shock may even be observed, but only a few such cases are known to history. In general, in terms of danger, a bug bite does not exceed a mosquito bite.
Bed bugs are not carriers of human pathogens. Although some studies have confirmed the presence of various pathogenic bacteria on the body and in the body of domestic bugs, there are no cases of infection with any diseases when bitten by bugs in the history of medicine.
See also our bed bug experiments:
We catch bedbugs and test different means on them - see the results...
In some cases, after being bitten by bedbugs, the victim may develop a skin rash that does not go away for a long time. However, much more often, and especially in women, insects crawling on the bed themselves cause mental trauma and fear of sleep. In addition, due to the inability to sleep, when bedbugs are constantly pestering, the victims have reduced working capacity and worsened their general well-being.
Sometimes bites may not heal for a long time, and after a few days they begin to fester, hurt, ichor oozes out of them. This is already a clear sign that an infection has entered the wound when combing. In this case, you must consult a doctor.
When and who do bedbugs bite more often?
The light itself is, though not strong, but a repellent factor for bedbugs. In principle, they can also feed in the light, especially in the morning, but during this period the frequency and number of bites decreases, and the insects try to hide in their shelters.
When asked if bedbugs bite everyone, one can unequivocally say: yes, all people. And the conventional wisdom that men are less concerned about them, and even more so that they selectively bite carriers of a certain blood type, are erroneous. And that's why.
There is no connection between the frequency of bites and the blood group: there are simply more carriers of the first and second groups in general, and therefore the wrong impression may be created that they are more likely to suffer from bedbugs.
The areas of skin where bed bugs bite are most often found on the back, legs, and arms. It is they who usually remain open in a dream. It is easy for insects to get under clothes, but they prefer exactly bare areas of the body. And if bedbug bites have already appeared on the body, it makes sense to treat them for speedy healing and easing itching.
Treatment of bedbug bites
It should only be in cases where the rashes and local inflammations that have appeared in their place do not disappear within two to three days, or cause too pronounced pain. Then they should be processed:
- any alcohol-containing drug or tincture to relieve pain;
- take a choice of Suprastin, Diazolin, Diphenhydramine or any other antihistamine drug. This will help relieve inflammation;
- wash the bitten parts of the body with warm water and soap;
- treat bites with any soothing ointment or natural oils: fir, tea tree oil, sea buckthorn.
In no case should you comb the bites. The wounds themselves will open at the same time, and there will be a risk of infection inside. With the development of a generalized allergic reaction, you should use anti-allergens that have already been taken and familiar to each person and consult a doctor.
How to protect yourself from bed bug bites?
The most reliable way to protect yourself from bedbugs is to completely disinfest your home. Today, the industry produces a large number of chemicals for such a procedure, but disinfestation by special professional teams will be even more reliable and effective.
It is important to understand that bedbugs are mobile creatures. Expelling them from your apartment will not give a full guarantee that they will never appear in it again: from neighbors through ventilation, and in the summer, along the outer walls of the house, they can easily move into the apartment again. Therefore, it is better to start pest control in an organized manner for several apartments.
Separately, it should be said about travelers. About what to do if bedbugs bite in cheap hotels, almost every guidebook says. Nevertheless, it is these insects that continue to confidently spoil the most romantic evenings on independent trips.
