The appearance of domestic bugs, their lifestyle and way of feeding well distinguishes them from all other domestic insects. It is quite difficult to confuse these parasites with ants, cockroaches or casual guests of the apartment, and just by a few signs, even a resident of a big city or a small village who is very far from entomology will be able to understand that he is facing the same annoying night vampire.
And once you see in the photo what home bugs look like, and even more so - having met them in bed, it will be almost impossible to confuse them with other insects.
By the way, it is the features of life and biology that the house bug boasts that not only make it easier to identify it, but also complicate the fight against it. It is the indifference of bedbugs to the quality of the room, their ability to settle in rather restless places (not a single cockroach can feel comfortable under the bed mattress), resistance to many insecticides and some other qualities dictate certain rules of the game, only by observing which bedbugs can be expelled from the room .
But first, you need to determine exactly what is in front of us is a bug, and detailed photographs will help us with this ...
What do bed bugs, their larvae and eggs look like?
Bed bugs (bed bugs, furniture bugs, sofa bugs - there are no common synonyms) - small insects of dark brown color in adulthood and lighter, almost yellow - in the larval stage (see photo):
A characteristic feature of them is a very wide in the sides, but at the same time a body flat from the back. Outwardly, domestic bugs look like flattened cockroaches, but only until they drink blood. The flat body of the insect is clearly visible in the picture:
An important feature of these insects is also the absence of wings. All types of domestic bugs are deprived of them, and in this they are well distinguished from most other representatives of the order of semi-coleoptera - enemies of agriculture, water striders, soldier bugs, in which wings form a special body shape with noticeable angles and patterns.
For example, compare in the photos below what a soldier bug looks like and an ordinary home bug:
It is interesting
The statements of many witnesses who claim that house bugs fly have been scientifically refuted. They are basically incapable of doing this. And the facts of the fall of these creatures on a bed or a standing person are explained by the fact that insects calmly climb onto the ceiling and, unable to resist, fall from there.
Such cases can happen with a very large number of parasites in the room, when they are hungry and try to get to the food source in any way.
Due to the lack of wings in domestic bugs, the abdomen is clearly visible, divided into segments by transverse stripes. In adult insects, this separation is especially noticeable after they feed - their body is elongated and thickened, and in general they become like black cockroach larvae.In the photo you can see the difference between a hungry and a full insect:
On a note
See also our bed bug experiments:We catch bedbugs and test different means on them - see the results...
Talking about varieties of bed bugs is not entirely incorrect from a scientific point of view. Around the world, there are about 30 types of bed bugs, very similar in appearance and differing in structural details that can only be distinguished under a microscope.
But representatives of most of these species do not interbreed with each other and do not produce fertile offspring. The photo shows adults of some species - it can be difficult for a non-specialist to distinguish them from each other.
The size of domestic bugs is small: adult insects have a body length of 4 to 8 mm, depending on the degree of saturation with blood, the size of the larvae ranges from 1 mm to 4 mm. The width of the body of an adult hungry bug is almost the same as the length. As you can see from the photo, the bug looks like a copper coin:
Bedbug larvae are also called nymphs because they differ from adults only in size and color details. The hungry larva of the first three instars has a light yellow color, its chitinous covers are transparent. Therefore, in the body of the nymph, a drop of blood in the stomach becomes clearly visible after a hearty meal (see photo):
Outwardly, bedbugs can only be confused with cockroaches. These parasites differ from both black cockroaches and Prusaks by the absence of two characteristic outgrowths at the end of the abdomen - cerci. Cockroaches and their larvae always have cerci and are clearly visible. These outgrowths are clearly visible in the photo below:
And further: We catch bedbugs and put deadly experiments on them - this is a must see!
In addition, adult cockroaches have wings, although they do not use them for their intended purpose.
Home bugs have their own specific smell. It is especially actively secreted by females with a secret with which they attach eggs to different surfaces. For a person, this aroma is somewhat reminiscent of the smell of fermented berries or cognac. The presence of this smell in the apartment is a clear sign of its strong infestation with parasites.
It is interesting
Compared to their relatives, bed bugs smell very weak. Some of the bed bugs found in nature are among the most smelly insects in the world. Everyone knows stink bugs, popularly called "stinkers", soldiers that birds do not eat, harmful turtles - they all have a very strong smell that helps individuals in communication and saves them from predators.
But about whether domestic bugs smell, one can only speak relatively: compared to ants or cockroaches, they smell strongly, but not very much compared to other semi-bugs.
Bedbug eggs are small, about a millimeter long, elongated and look like a grain of rice. They have a small cap on the end. In the photo, all the details of the egg are clearly visible:
Such an egg, found lying separately from the colony, can be overlooked and confused with anything.
But female bedbugs lay their eggs mainly in places of shelter, and therefore there are masonry along with insect droppings, chitinous skins of nymphs and an abundance of parasites themselves of different ages (see example in the photo):
And in general, the reproduction of these insects occurs precisely in secluded places in the room.
Reproduction of house bugs
Bed bugs reproduce at an amazing rate. Even the ubiquitous cockroaches are inferior to them in terms of the rate of increase in numbers.
Each bed bug becomes sexually mature a month after hatching from the egg. The temperature in the room can affect the rate of maturation of the insect - at temperatures below 20 ° C, the larva grows within two to three months. In general, these parasites are afraid of sudden changes in temperature, and rarely settle in unheated rooms in central Russia.
Bed bugs die at temperatures below minus 22°C and above +45°C. This is used by pest control services to deal with them, using industrial hair dryers to treat individual rooms.
Each female lays about 400 eggs in her entire life, approximately 3-4 eggs per day. The bugs do not show any concern for the offspring.
An important feature of the reproduction of bed bugs is the so-called traumatic insemination, in which the male pierces the integument of the female's body with his genitals and injects sperm into her abdomen. Agree, from our, human point of view, this act looks quite shocking.
Eggs develop in the body of the female for some time, and with a lack of nutrition, they can be absorbed and serve as food.
Purely theoretically, according to scientists, in six months the offspring of one female domestic bug can exceed 1 billion offspring. Of course, in a real apartment there are no such quantities of insects, but nevertheless, in a few months, bloodsuckers can multiply so much that they make the room unsuitable for life.
Both adult domestic bugs (scientifically - imago), and their larvae feed only on human blood. At the same time, an adult insect, when bitten, injects an anesthetic into the wound, and the person does not feel the bite itself.
The close-up photo shows how the bug bites:
But the nymph does not yet have the ability to inject an anesthetic with a bite, and it is the bites of young bugs that especially bother a person in a dream.
Bed bugs and other insects in the house: friends, enemies, or just neighbors
The relationship of domestic bugs with other inhabitants of human habitation is very difficult.
Start even with the owner himself - a person: due to the specifics of their diet, bedbugs are forced to impersonate bites, and therefore their presence in the apartment is much more undesirable than the presence of, for example, cockroaches. Therefore, a person destroys domestic bugs with particular persistence.
But other insects in one way or another interfere with bedbugs:
- cockroaches readily eat bedbug eggs. Even though the habitats of these species of insects in a residential area vary, cockroach nymphs often enter bedbug colonies and harm the eggs.
- The venom of house ants is deadly to bed bugs. In general, ants are peaceful, and they themselves do not attack bedbugs. But the bugs will not be able to settle next to the colony of ants. In addition, ants, like cockroaches, are not averse to profiting from a bedbug egg.
- Flycatchers, small centipedes of a very characteristic appearance, actively catch and eat bedbugs. They cannot completely destroy them in an apartment, but they are able to influence reproduction to a certain extent. However, due to the rarity of living in apartments, flycatchers cannot be used as a biological control tool for bedbugs.
And one more thing: the bugs hid in all the cracks, and you just can’t find their nest? And smoke bombs find bedbugs where even a needle cannot squeeze through ...
But the bugs do not harm any other insects. They are not able to feed on eggs or larvae, do not compete with their neighbors for food. Such all offended altruists.
Interestingly, cats that love to hunt cockroaches are absolutely indifferent to bedbugs. Perhaps they are deterred by the smell of blood-sucking parasites. Other insects - moths, fleas, flies - simply cohabit with bedbugs.
Life of bedbugs under the microscope
Home bugs settle indoors in a kind of spontaneous colonies-nests. There is no structure in such a settlement, but outwardly it looks exactly like a colony due to the dense placement of adults, nymphs, eggs and waste products of insects in it (see photo):
As a rule, these insects settle in any secluded places in the room, which are maintained at a stable moderate temperature and which are close to the person's resting place.
Each bug feeds at a certain frequency. It is enough for adults to feed once every five to seven days, the larvae suck blood almost daily. An adult female must eat at least once very densely to make one laying of eggs.
Each larva must shed five times before becoming an adult. It is the chitinous covers shed by the nymphs that form the garbage, creating a feeling of the slovenliness of the entire nest.
The photo shows the chitinous covers of domestic bugs, which they shed during molting:
For one molt, a nymph needs one full-fledged feeding, however, more abundant nutrition contributes to a better development of the insect.
If there is no source of food nearby, or the temperature in the room drops sharply, insects can fall into a stupor, similar to a state of suspended animation. They can stay in this state for up to a year and a half, and when a person appears next to them, they can get out of it and return to normal life.
Bed bugs are strictly nocturnal insects. They get out of their hiding places and go in search of food between 3 and 7 in the morning, when a person sleeps most soundly. The rest of the time they spend in nests, which are located:
- in beds and upholstered furniture, under mattresses
- under carpets and behind skirting boards
- behind the cabinets and inside them, behind the pictures on the walls
- in sockets
- inside system blocks and various household appliances.
The photo below shows where to look for bedbugs in the apartment first of all:
It is in such places that bedbugs should be looked for in order to destroy them.However, the destruction itself must be carried out taking into account the increased resistance of these insects to poisons.
Bedbug resistance to various insecticides
Long evolution and high fecundity are the reason that domestic bugs have an increased resistance to various poisons. Each individual insect dies from an insecticide as quickly as a cockroach or an ant, but among a large number of descendants of one female, there is a high probability of an individual with a mutation due to which the parasite will be able to produce an antidote - a protein that neutralizes the insecticide in the body even before it starts. actions.
Under natural conditions, such mutations are not fixed in the species, since different poisons rarely act on insects. But when persecuting bedbugs, the poison plays the role of a kind of natural selection factor that allows only mutants to survive.
Such resistant insects are found among the corpses of their brethren, give offspring that are also resistant to poison, and after a few months, experts state the ineffectiveness of one or another drug. It is important that the cause of the emergence of such resistant mutants is the person himself: the less parasites are poisoned, the less likely the appearance and fixation of the mutation.
On a note
There are so many drugs on the market today that bedbugs (and other insects) cannot develop resistance to at all. One example of such a drug is the "GEKTOR against bed bugs", which effectively destroys even those populations of parasites that are insensitive to the traditionally used "chemistry".
In this case, the key to the high efficiency of the product is a specific mechanism of action - the active substance of the Hector product is finely dispersed hydrophilic silicon dioxide, which can literally suck water out of the bugs. You can read more about this in a separate article: Insecticides Hector.
It is important to take into account that a one-time treatment of a room, even with an effective remedy, often does not guarantee complete disposal of bedbugs: during the persecution, the eggs remain viable, from which the larvae are gradually hatched.
Therefore, when using most insecticides, it is recommended to treat the room twice with a break of five to six days, so that when re-treatment, destroy all the larvae. To date, several very effective preparations have been developed that allow you to fight home bugs with your own hands. You can get acquainted with them in the relevant sections of this site.
What are home bugs and how to recognize their presence in the apartment
Unique Footage: Mating Bedbugs
Hello! I have three small children, I am very afraid for them, the bugs bite them and me so mercilessly. I'm tired of bedbugs. And there is no money to buy poison or something. What should I do, I'm very tired. I don't sleep at night.
There is one and only way to get rid of bedbugs - this is to buy poison in the sanitary and epidemiological station, and not somewhere in the store. With the help of a spray gun, process absolutely everything in the apartment, moving all the furniture that is in the apartment, especially carefully pour upholstered furniture, baseboards. Pour everything, walls, floor. If there are carpets, then it is better to throw them away altogether, since there is too much fuss with them to process them (you need to splash them with poison and tightly cover them with plastic wrap). After treatment in the apartment, close all windows and doors tightly and leave the house for a day. All clothes that are in the house should also be splashed with poison and, especially, bed linen.
Such an operation must be carried out 3 times with a frequency of half a month. At the same time, all bed linen should be washed in boiling water at 95 degrees and ironed. All neighbors should also process their apartments, preferably if at the same time. There is no other way to get rid of them. And most importantly - do not forget to carry out the processing at least three times, since the larvae hatch, and everything starts all over again. And if only you poison, and the neighbors ignore, then the bugs will first run away to the neighbors, and then return to you.
Here, they bought it according to the SES prescription, poisoned it 2 times - and nothing! This Tsifoks is from cockroaches, not from bedbugs.
Hello. Bought a garden, found dead bed bugs in the garden.Prior to that, two winters and one summer, no one was. Is it possible that they are still alive? Thanks in advance!
Perhaps the suspended animation period is 1.5 years without food.
Hello. Tell me, please, we have a small child recently born. After the hospital, when we arrived, bedbugs began to run. How can you get rid of them without calling special people?
Looks like nothing))
Please help me figure it out and get the bugs out. They are very small, very hard to see. Wound up on the windowsill, crawling on curtains and curtains, on the radiator. There is a pigeon kublo near the windowsill, could they crawl from there? There are a lot of them, they move fast. Photo will not work, very small. Any advice on how to get them out?
Hello. How to kill bedbugs? The mattresses have all been thrown away, but they are coming out from somewhere. We have not been sleeping for many nights, we are looking after the children so that they are not bitten ...