How Do Bed Bugs Work?
Posted in Bed Bugs Info on 15. Mar, 2010
What do you think about sleeping in the middle of the night and having something steal your blood without you knowing? It sounds like fiction but it’s actually the activity of bed bugs.
They were largely exterminated from the US back in the 1950s. However, in recent years they have been spotted and are a growing annoyance in households. Their growth could be a result from the reduced use of DDT and an increase of international travel.
How does international travel affect the breeding of bed bugs? If a traveler stays in a place where there are bed bugs infestations, they could crawl and hide in his bags. So, when he reaches home, the bed bugs would crawl into his bed, infesting his house as well.
Bedbugs feed on humans and other animals like birds and bats too. They are given the name bed bugs because they feed on our blood when we are asleep. So, basically, the bed is their dinner table.
Their hiding area isn’t just limited to beds. Any area that can give them protection from sunlight and has cracks large enough for them to get in will be a nesting area for them. They can be anywhere from your couches, bed frames, wall cracks and ceiling cracks.
Adult bed bugs are only 0.5cm long and have a very flat body, so they can squeeze inside any crack easily. The younger bed bugs are harder to be seen by the naked eye though.
Bed bugs are oval in shaped and its outer shell is brown in color. But you will usually see a reddish color on their body because of the blood they have sucked. They work like a mosquito too, by inserting syringe-like tube extensions into human skin and sucking the blood. When it is sucking the blood, it will release its own saliva into the blood stream as well.
The bedbugs bites are rarely harmful except for the fact that you may scratch the itch till your skin gets ugly. It doesn’t transmit disease like some species of mosquitoes.
When an attack happens too many times to a person, he or she may have an allergy against the saliva of the bug. So, it may result in intense itchiness and swelling.
