Looking At Bedbugs
Posted by Owen Jones in Uncategorized, tags: bed bugs, bedroom, decorating, family, health, home repairs, house, insects, other, pests, travel, Uncategorized, vacationThere are in fact quite a few types of bed bug, but the one that most people mean by ‘bedbugs’ is Cimex lectularius. Other species of bedbugs will extract human blood, but normally only if their favoured host, like poultry, is not around.
Bedbugs are small, but not too small to see. Adults are about four or five millimetres long and one-and-a-half to three millimetres wide. They are brownish in colour, but may seem banded because they are covered in short hairs.
Having said that, they are still not easy to have a good look at, because they are very quick and only come out at night. In fact, their favourite dinner time is more of an early breakfast, because they normally dine on us an hour before dawn. If you want to see or catch some bedbugs, this is the best time too do it, because you may see them trying to get home with full stomachs to sleep it off for a couple of days before setting out again.
So, rather than waste your time, it is probably better to look at a number of pictures of bedbugs first so that you know what you are looking for.. Bedbugs are attracted by heat and CO2, so one way of trying to catch a few is putting a bar of soap in a centimetre of water and then lying on the bed. After half an hour, get the soap and whip the bed clothes back. You can dab up any slow coaches with the soap.
Then you will have plenty of time to study them under a magnifying lens. If they are not living in your mattress and you are sure that you have bed bugs, check behind any loose-fitting woodwork.
They love to get into dark cracks to sleep it off and skirting boards or architrave are ideal. So is damaged plaster, broken lino or ripped wall paper.
Hardly any crack is too narrow for them, because they are so flat themselves, as you can observe from photos. They look as if they have been crushed. However, the nymphs or babies are very tiny, a bit rounder and often whitish. It takes six moultings for a nymph to become an adult and the moulted skins look just like the insect that left it, but with nothing inside it - as if it had been kind of sucked out.
The bedbug’s skin is actually the key to killing it, as bedbugs have become tolerant to most everyday insecticides. Their skin, or exoskeleton, has a waxy layer on it to prevent dehydration. If you can scrape off that wax, the insect will dry out and die.
Some modern bedbug sprays include finely powdered glass or silicone which sticks to the insect and as it wriggles into crevices, the powder rubs the wax off. Diatomaceous earth was used for the same reason long ago and it is making a comeback in the fight to exterminate bed bugs. It is non-toxic and environmentally friendly, so safe to use in your home and around your pets.
Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on many topics, but is at present involved with bed bugs extermination. If you are interested in this, please visit our website now at Picture Of Bed Bugs for more information.
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