Of all the household insect pests or parasites, bed bugs are perhaps the least recognizable. At different stages of its development, a bed bug can look like a cockroach, a louse, and a tick. And for many residents of megacities who are not too well versed in entomology, this insect may even turn out to be an unrecognized guest in the apartment, which will cause a lot of trouble in the future. Therefore, everyone should know what bedbugs look like in order to promptly take action to expel parasites from their homes after the first meeting.
Bed bug appearance
With how bedbugs look in general, everyone is familiar with the example of soldier bugs swarming in spring in every park. Their characteristic appearance as a whole is common to all bugs: an elongated body, dense wings with an intricate pattern, a head well delimited from the body with a pointed “nose”. Agricultural pest bugs, predatory tropical bugs, and even water strider bugs that live on ponds and rivers have a similar appearance.
Bed bugs in the large order of Hemiptera, as the whole group of these insects is called in entomology, are somewhat of an exception. The way home bugs look makes them very different from their relatives, and their main distinguishing features are the following:
- Lack of wings.After the transition to a parasitic way of life, the wings ceased to be something necessary for the bugs, and besides, it was the wings that created for each individual a certain risk of being easily injured by the owner himself. Without wings, the bug is not only less noticeable, but also practically invulnerable in a hungry state: it is very difficult to crush it or grab it with your fingers. As a result, over several million years of evolution, these parasitic insects have lost their wings. By the way, it is precisely because of the lack of wings that the domestic bug does not have the angular body inherent in its other relatives: the parasitic bug has a rounded body.
- The absence of a pronounced pattern on the body. The color of the bug is just brown. When saturated with blood, the insect becomes darker, up to almost black. Hungry small larvae are almost completely transparent and have a light yellow color. In general, when detecting a place of accumulation of bedbugs, an inexperienced tenant of the room may confuse them with cockroaches. However, bugs differ quite well from cockroaches.
- Clearly and conspicuously segmented abdomen. In general, in other bugs, it is also divided into several segments, but in them this is not noticeable due to the presence of wings. In bed bugs, especially in adults, stripes on the body are clearly striking. As the insect becomes saturated with blood during feeding, each segment is stretched in length, the body lengthens and the segments become more clearly visible.
In general, the appearance of a bed bug is quite specific. You need to see an adult insect once and find out that it is a bug, so that you never confuse it with anyone else. The hungry parasite has a flattened, almost flat body, but wide at the sides, similar to a brown coin.In a well-fed insect, the abdomen stretches in length, filling with blood, and becomes more convex.
By the way, well-fed bugs become more vulnerable and often die in bed, crushed by their own victims. A hungry, “flat” bug is difficult not only to take with your fingers, but even to crush - it can be pressed 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 made up 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 introducing saliva into the wound. With this proboscis, the 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 satiated and crawls into the shelter to digest food.
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The body size of a bed bug ranges from 0.5 to 8 mm. Adult individuals usually have a body length of about 4 mm in a hungry state, after feeding their body sometimes doubles in size. Larvae of the youngest age may not be visible to the naked eye. And in general, young bugs are much easier to miss or confuse with other insects.
On a note
The need for bedbugs to periodically move from their shelters in an apartment to a feeding place (on a person's bed) can be used to destroy these bloodsuckers.To do this, you only need to make some kind of barriers from an insecticidal preparation around each leg of the bed. The photo below shows an example:
Particularly well suited for these purposes is the preparation for bedbugs Hector, which is a fine powder that sticks to bedbugs crawling over it and leads to their dehydration. The important thing is that the product will effectively destroy parasites even if they are resistant to standard "chemistry" (Karbofos, Dichlorvos, etc.). At the same time, Hector powder is safe for humans and animals.
When implementing this method of dealing with bedbugs, you must first destroy all the bedbugs in the bed itself.
What do bed bug larvae and eggs look like?
Bed bug eggs are transparent and about half a millimeter long. 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 conspicuous against the background of adults, the remnants of skins after their molt and dark excrement.
Each egg is elongated and looks like an ant's egg.
Bedbug larvae immediately after emerging from eggs look like newborn cockroaches or lice. They are transparent and light, and only over time, after several feedings and molts, they begin to darken and acquire the body color characteristic of adult insects. At this stage, they are quite easily distinguished from other insects.
Their especially characteristic sign is a light rim of the body and a black dot in the middle of the abdomen. This point is the stomach, filled with blood, and the digestive tract. In larvae that have not fed for several days, the entire body is approximately the same yellowish color.
Differences between bed bugs and other parasites
Knowing what bed bugs look like, you can easily distinguish them from most other parasites:
- Bedbugs differ from cockroaches in a wider and rounder body and less mobility. The bug does not know how to run fast. In addition, adult cockroaches have wings, which creates an even greater impression of elongation of the body. Wingless larvae of red cockroaches differ from bedbugs in a well-marked red spot in the upper body. And the larvae of black cockroaches are much darker than even adult bugs that have drunk blood.
- Adult bed bugs differ from lice in size and color. You can confuse small larvae of bedbugs with lice, but here you should remember about the lifestyle of both 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 scalp, and therefore are found only in open areas.
- It is quite difficult to confuse bed bugs with domestic ants. Even just hatched larvae already have a wide body, and one close look at them is enough to understand for sure that this is not an ant.
- Home bugs differ from ticks in the number and size of legs: ticks, as representatives of the class of arachnids, have 8 legs, and domestic bugs, like all insects, have 6 of them. In addition, bed bugs have legs that are not so large in relation to body size, like ticks.
- Bed bugs differ from fleas in being less mobile, larger and unable to jump. Even the larvae that have just hatched from the eggs are larger than the adult flea.
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By the bites of bedbugs themselves, they can also be distinguished from other parasites, since such bites look very peculiar. Each insect leaves several bites on the skin in the form of a kind of path - 3-4 red dots, elongated into a noticeable line. Usually during the night a person is bitten by several adults and larvae, and in the morning many bite marks appear on the body at once.
However, it is possible to understand that bedbugs live in a house, in a country house or in a hotel even before a sleepless painful night. Even before the settlement, you can easily detect them and take appropriate measures.
How to understand that bed bugs live in the house?
The first and most reliable way to detect the presence of bed bugs in your home is to see them. It's not that difficult, especially knowing what a bed bug looks like.In most cases, insects hide during daylight hours under mattresses on beds, in the folds of furniture and clothes, in corners under carpets and floor coverings. In a room infested 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 verify their presence.
Most often and easily, it is not the bugs themselves that catch the eye, but the chitinous shells remaining after their molts. Under the places of daytime insects, whole deposits of them can accumulate if the room has not been cleaned for a long time. The same dry skins often come across in the trash and in the corners of the room.
The bugs themselves smell quite characteristically. In a heavily contaminated room, even a person can smell a slightly sweet smell of almonds or fermented raspberries. In the United States, dogs are even trained to search for bedbugs in the sanitary services: for them, finding these insects is much easier than finding drugs at customs.
The presence of bedbugs can be betrayed by small brown spots on the bed, which remain after a person tossing and turning from bites accidentally crushes an insect that has drunk blood. In addition, in the daytime, much more noticeable than the parasites themselves are their excrement - small black dots that look like poppy seeds. They can be found near baseboards, under beds, behind cabinets.
At the same time, it should not be assumed that bedbugs settle mainly in unsanitary conditions: these insects perfectly master and take root both in rural animal sheds and in fashionable city apartments on any floor.It is very important that they migrate quite easily between apartments in apartment buildings, and therefore if neighbors have problems with bedbugs, then the residents of a particular apartment will most likely not be able to avoid these problems.
see also An overview of the most effective remedies for bedbugs
What a civilized person needs to know about bed bugs
Bed bugs and their larvae: video
