What causes bed bugs in the house and what to do in such a situation

Many people seriously believe that bedbugs start up in the house due to the uncleanliness of the owners: due to the fact that the room is not cleaned, there is a lot of garbage, food waste, and unwashed clothes. If you also think so, then we hasten to disappoint you - all this has nothing (at least not directly) to do with the appearance of bed bugs in the apartment. These insects infest even in the most comfortable, respectable and clean apartments, and it does not matter to them whether alcoholics live in the house or a pious young couple.

Interestingly, even at the end of the past and the beginning of this century, at the annual entomological conferences devoted to harmful insects that annoy people in modern cities, there was not a single report on bedbugs. And already in 2008, 8 speakers from prosperous countries of the world spoke about this problem. Now it's 2015, and the problem is more relevant than ever.

So, for example, in London alone, about 80% of houses and apartments have ever suffered from infestation with bed bugs. In sunny Florida, more than half of the houses at least once treated for these insects.There is even an opinion that today humanity is facing a real threat of a pandemic of bedbug infection.

And one of the reasons why these parasites start up in our homes and spread so quickly everywhere is the active migration of people, including the fashion for traveling to exotic countries. In the latter case, insects are brought by tourists in personal belongings from hotels and hotels.

At the same time, bedbugs absolutely “do not care” about the sanitary condition of any premises. The only important thing for them is the presence in these premises of a source of fresh blood - a person ...

 

Where do bed bugs come from in the house?

So, for the appearance of bedbugs in the house, the transfer of biological material into the room must necessarily occur: these can be eggs, larvae or adults of parasites.

Most often, bedbugs start in an apartment, penetrating into a house with used furniture, bedding, clothes and household items when moving and moving things from a bedbug-infested room to a clean one.

On a note

Always carefully inspect the furniture and household appliances you buy for the presence of eggs and bedbug excrement. Especially if you buy used items.

It should be borne in mind that bedbugs are able to live without food for about six months. Therefore, they can migrate over long distances, populate even non-residential premises and wait in the wings.

According to numerous reviews of the victims, the bugs in their apartment wound up after baiting insects in neighboring apartments. This is a common phenomenon, which is difficult for an unprepared person to resist.

With a mass infection of the house, bedbugs can crawl along the outer walls of the housing and crawl into the room through the windows.

Advice:

Meet your neighbors and know who lives in frankly dysfunctional apartments.Use insecticidal pencils to treat the outer slopes of windows and the front door frame, folk remedies (wormwood, tansy) and repellent sections to protect ventilation ducts from home bugs.

During daylight hours, bedbugs hide in secluded and warm places. Such places can be, for example, a computer, TV, laptop or microwave.



Often, bed bugs start up after the arrival of guests living in an infected apartment: guests can bring parasites on their clothes and shoes. In addition, it is easy to bring insects into the house in their own pockets, returning from the same guests, if the owners live in the “buggy” and do not know or do not tell you about it.

Insects can be brought from tourist trips (from infected hotels), brought with any extraneous things.It is enough to bring in one adult female, and you can expect bed bugs to start up throughout the house.

Advice:

Don't stay in overpriced hotels and guesthouses while traveling. Wash all items immediately upon arrival.

Between neighboring apartments, parasites spread through ventilation ducts, cavities in the walls of the house, cracks in the ceilings. Possessing a flat body, which, thanks to chitinous rings, can be compressed and stretched, the bugs are able to squeeze into the narrowest cracks and holes.

Bed bugs often start running from neighbors whose apartments were disinfested the day before, especially if it was not effective enough.

Only in extremely rare cases, bedbugs start up in an apartment, penetrating into it on animals. Parasites attack cats and dogs only when they cannot reach a person for too long.

There are known curious cases of the importation of bedbugs from elite stores with unworn clothes and new furniture from the warehouse. Insects can enter a store or warehouse from a visitor or worker living in a "bughouse", as well as from nearby living quarters.

 

Habitat and lifestyle of bedbugs in the house

Most often, bedbugs start up first of all near the place where a person sleeps. This is a bed, a sofa, the seams and folds of the mattress, the gaps behind the baseboards and wallpaper.

Sometimes bloodsuckers settle in other places:

• behind the paintings and carpets on the walls;
• in the folds of tapestries;
• in sockets;
• in system blocks of computers, in housings of household appliances;
• in unused clothes and shoes.

Bed bugs are predominantly active at night, but they can also attack in the early morning, and their vital activity largely depends on the presence of a person in bed.Insects are attracted to body odor and heat, as well as carbon dioxide in exhaled air (by the way, some bedbug traps are based on this principle).

The sucking apparatus of an insect consists of two tubes. With one of them, he pierces the skin and injects special substances that prevent blood from clotting and anesthetize the bite site. With another tube, the parasite sucks blood.

A meal usually takes 3 to 10 minutes. After a while, the action of the anesthetic stops, and the person begins to itch, the skin turns red, blisters appear.

Waking up and discovering chains of bites on themselves, people in most cases do not immediately realize that bedbugs have started in their apartment and something needs to be done about it urgently. As a rule, everyone tries to attribute it to allergies or mosquitoes. But bed bugs... How is this possible, because it's the 21st century... They live like that until one day they find a nest of parasites or see an adult insect on a white sheet.

It is worth one bug to appear in the house, and we can expect that very soon the number of parasites will reach unthinkable proportions. It also happens that a person moves into a long-term empty housing in the fall and does not notice the little bloodsuckers in the neighborhood, because they hibernate. Perhaps the entry of the new owners of the apartment was preceded by sanitization of the premises, as a result of which all insects were not destroyed (eggs, larvae or single individuals remained in the most secluded corners).



After some time, the insects wake up, begin to feed and multiply very quickly.

 

Checking the room for parasites

There are three main signs that you can suspect that bedbugs have appeared in your home:

• bites on the skin after sleep;
• the presence of insects and their larvae in the room;
• characteristic smell of sour berries or cognac;
• the appearance of excrement or remnants of the chitinous cover of insects under the beds and near the baseboards.

The first signs that bed bugs have started at home are bites that itch in the morning and look like small red dots lining up in chains of 4-5 pieces. The arms, neck, shoulders, and lower parts of the body are most commonly affected.

After carefully examining the bed and the whole room, especially next to the bed, you can usually already find insects, their larvae and eggs, as well as chitinous shells in crevices, folds of the mattress and linen, behind baseboards, carpets and paintings, near sockets. Small red spots may appear on the sheets in those places where a person tossing and turning at night accidentally pressed a bedbug that had drunk blood.

An unpleasant smell of almonds or cognac in the room can also indicate that bedbugs have started up at home. Some people of the old Soviet school know this especially well.

If you're still unsure, you can also try trapping parasites by making duct tape traps. The tape is glued along the edges of the mattress, on the backs of the bed, and in the morning they are examined for the presence of adhering insects.

If bugs are supposedly bred in the sofa, then you can start an alarm clock and turn on the light at about 3 a.m., and then inspect the bed linen (necessarily white). Surely bloodsuckers will be found on the sheets and blanket.

 

Methods and means of removing bedbugs

As a rule, the following methods of dealing with bedbugs are used:

• chemical - with the help of powerful insecticides;
• thermal - the use of hot steam, increasing the temperature in the room, pouring boiling water over the nests;
• with the help of traps;
• folk ways to deal with bedbugs;
• as well as calling the pest control service.

You can destroy parasites on your own with the help of special insecticidal agents. Very effective, for example, such drugs as Get, Delta Zone, Xulat micro, Executioner and others.

You can also fight with high temperatures, but usually warming up the entire room to a high temperature can be very problematic, as well as freezing it out (don't forget about the radiators, which can burst). The use of hot steam from bed bugs is effective only when all furniture is very carefully treated, and even in this case it is better to combine this method with the simultaneous use of insecticides.

Folk methods of dealing with bedbugs in the house today can be considered hopelessly outdated. It is hard to imagine that a modern person will spray turpentine or kerosene in his apartment, risking damage to furniture, plastic surfaces, carpets. And just breathing all this at the risk of starting a fire or an explosion is a very dubious pleasure.

Perhaps the most optimal solution in the event that bedbugs are wound up at home is to call a team of specialists who use just the same chemical method of persecution. At first glance, this may seem more expensive than self-processing, but this way you will save your time and health. In addition, there is a high probability that the bugs will start up again - in this case, under the guarantee, you can get a re-treatment of the premises for free.

It is useful to keep in mind that bedbugs often start up in an apartment, penetrating into it from neighbors. Therefore, before calling exterminators, it is worth finding out who else in the house suffers from parasites and carry out collective processing.

 

Where do bed bugs appear in the apartment and how to deal with them

 

Interesting video: an example of how bedbugs got into a house with a new mattress