What blood-sucking insects can be found in a bed or sofa

The regular presence of blood-sucking insects in bed is not only a sleep disorder, nightmares at night and itchy bites in the morning, but also a constant risk of contracting quite dangerous infections. Yes, such that tomorrow you can be busy all day just getting rid of such bites. For example, some human blood-sucking parasites are potentially capable of carrying plague, encephalitis (and not just ticks), anthrax, and typhoid. This alone is enough to ensure that at the first suspicion of the presence of "bed" insects in the house, immediately take measures to remove them.

You should not expect that life in a big city and a comfortable apartment is guaranteed to protect against insects in bed. A characteristic feature of such human parasites is their indifference to the cleanliness and sanitary condition of the premises, because they feed on blood, and not the remnants of our food.

On a note

Perhaps the most unpleasant blood-sucking insects that you can meet in your bed are bed bugs. It may seem strange, but they are the real scourge of Amsterdam, London and Stockholm.According to statistics, in most major European cities, the number of apartments and houses infested with bedbugs is constantly growing, and pest control services do not always cope with rapidly multiplying parasites that have time to develop resistance to the insecticides used. According to statistics, more than half of the homes in Florida, USA, have also been infested with bed bugs.

When figuring out which insects bite you in bed, it will be easiest to catch the parasite right at the crime scene, carefully examine it and compare it with the photographs below. The following are photos of the most common "bed" insects, where you can recognize your offenders.

Bed bugs - their length, depending on age and degree of saturation, usually varies from 2-3 to 8 mm. The photo below shows this using an example of an adult bug:

This is what a bed bug larva looks like:

Fleas - usually bite in the morning. They jump very well, and if you can’t catch an insect in the bed, perhaps it’s them.

The photo shows a flea on the human body at the time of the bite:

Linen lice are insects that are not even attached to the bed, but more to the human body. They bite around the clock, but at night their activity is especially noticeable.

Photo of an adult louse:

And this is what nits look like - lice eggs in a dense shell:

And, of course, mosquitoes - everyone knows them, so there will be no problems with their identification:

Some of these insects can be identified by the appearance of their bites, but the most reliable way is to see the parasite itself.

Generally speaking, household cockroaches are among the insects that can be found in the sofa or in bed, but such cases are quite rare.Meanwhile, even ordinary red cockroaches, with a lack of water, can eat the epithelium around the lips of sleeping people, especially children. This is just the case when you can say that even cockroaches bite.

So, if you have already managed to recognize which insects bite in bed, it's time to get to know these parasites in detail to find out how you can fight them ...

 

A little about bedbugs: photos, behaviors, lifestyle

Bed bugs are perhaps the largest blood-sucking human parasites, which are still quite common in apartments to this day. The photo below shows several of these insects on the bed (usually such a picture can be observed at night when the light is suddenly turned on):

And in the next photo - a nest of bedbugs in the sofa. These insects prefer to hide as close as possible to human resting places:

Review

“It's kind of a nightmare. We never had any insects in our apartment in our life, but then they began to discover that in the morning some kind of bites appeared on the body. They began to find out and once they caught a bug at night. Such a nasty creature, still fat, it is clear that he sucked blood. I was hysterical, I went to live with a friend, and my husband called some services so that they would poison everything. Now they don’t seem to be there, but I still check myself in the morning. ”

Svetlana, Moscow

Each bug must feed on blood every few days. Larvae need it for growth, and adult insects need it for reproduction. Their only food is human blood, which they suck, piercing the skin with a thin proboscis and reaching the blood vessel.

And further: Smoke bombs from insects - a quick-acting killer thing ... (the article has more than 10 comments)

The photo below shows bed bug marks. Red dots indicate places where bloodsucking insects were accidentally crushed by a tossing and turning person:

It is interesting

Initially, at the dawn of the development of man as a species, bugs parasitized bats in caves. And only when people began to actively populate the caves, they switched to a new victim. Today, in some caves of Central Asia, there are populations of bed bugs that continue to parasitize bats.

Bedbugs are nocturnal, and you can meet them in an apartment during the day only in exceptional cases. During daylight hours, they hide in sofas, under mattresses, in household appliances, behind baseboards and on bookshelves, and go hunting at about 2-3 in the morning. Bed bugs are the most common insect in furniture.

The photo below shows bed bugs in a disassembled bed. These insects settle in unorganized nests:

 

Bedbug bites and their consequences

Bedbug bites look like red spots on the skin with a characteristic dot at the place where the insect introduced the proboscis. Often the bug leaves a whole chain of 3-7 such bites, piercing the skin in several places. It is by such chains (paths) that these insects, which often live directly in beds, are easily recognized.

With a large number of bed bugs in the house and high sensitivity to their bites, a person in the attack field may develop an allergic reaction with profuse skin rashes and generalized symptoms. In children with abundant and regular bites of bedbugs, anemia may even develop.In addition, the constant itching from bites does not make the victim feel normal, and when combing the wounds, pustular inflammation can develop.

Bed bugs are potential carriers of many infections, but physicians have not recorded cases of their transmission of diseases such as HIV or hepatitis.

 

How to deal with bedbugs

There are two reliable ways to remove bedbugs:

1. Harassing them with special insecticidal sprays or aerosols. The former include, for example, concentrates for breeding Delta Zone, Lambda Zone, Get, Karbofos, Hangman, Sinuzan. To the second - ready-to-use products in aerosol cans Raptor, Dichlorvos, Kombat and their analogues. Sprays are more effective, especially with a large number of bloodsuckers in the house, but somewhat more difficult to use.
   
2. The second option is to call special pest control teams, which often poison bedbugs with the same insecticides, but relieve the resident of the apartment from the risk of poisoning himself.

Self-removal of bedbugs is cheaper, but requires a serious investment of time and effort. When contacting pest control services, you need to be careful not to run into scammers or those who, in fact, do not perform the work.

In the photo - a nest of bedbugs in furniture:

If these insects are wound up in a sofa or other furniture, they can be frozen outside in winter at temperatures below minus 20 ° C. However, this method is rarely effective, since bed bugs often hide not only in the sofa, but also in other places in the apartment.

You can also destroy bedbugs in the apartment with heat by raising the temperature in the room to + 50 ° C, which is usually achieved with the help of industrial fan heaters.Of course, such a procedure must be carried out very carefully and with all precautions.

And further: We catch bedbugs and put deadly experiments on them - this is a must see!

 

Fleas: when they bite and how to deal with them

A flea is a small jumping blood-sucking insect that attacks mainly during daylight hours. Not everyone thinks about it, but potentially fleas are able to carry plague, anthrax, typhus, encephalitis, brucellosis and many other serious diseases, so these parasites should be guarded especially carefully.

On a note

It was fleas and their hosts - rats - that in the Middle Ages became the cause of an extensive pandemic of bubonic plague, during which almost a third of the population of Europe died out.

Flea bites are quite similar to bedbug bites and can also form characteristic paths, only short ones.

In the photo - a flea on human skin:

On white bedding, these insects are clearly visible, but it can be quite difficult to catch them: they jump so fast that the jump itself is not noticeable at all.

You need to remove fleas in two stages: first they are poisoned in pets, and then in the whole apartment.

Sometimes fleas have to be poisoned again if the infestation of the premises is especially high.

When baiting fleas in an apartment, they use the same drugs as against bedbugs. But to remove fleas from cats and dogs, you need to use completely different means, more gentle and safe, with low concentrations of insecticides.

 

Lice: parasites that are always there

Lice in bed are quite rare.For these insects, a fall from a person’s hair or body is fatal - they are slow and rarely able to climb back (at the same time, it is vital for them to feed on blood very often). Typically, bed lice cannot be called blood-sucking insects.

Lice spend their whole lives on the head (head lice) or other hairy part of a person (pubic lice). There are also linen lice that live in clothes, but today they are found only in vagrants who very rarely change clothes and never wash them.

Lice bites are usually less outwardly visible and less painful than flea or bedbug bites, but due to their abundance, they can also be very itchy.

In the photo of nits in the hair of a child (lice eggs):

Lice should be removed with special pediculicidal shampoos or sprays. Special thick combs for combing parasites out of the hair also work well against them.

 

Do cockroaches bite at night?

Cockroaches rarely bite a person. They are inhabitants of kitchens, eating crumbs from the table and food leftovers in bins. Only with very abundant reproduction and with a lack of water can they crawl onto the bed and gnaw the epidermis around the lips and nose of people. Today, such situations sometimes occur in hostels.

Of course, cockroaches are not blood-sucking insects, so even if they bite, it is completely different from the way fleas or bed bugs do.

In any case, if you are bitten by insects, their bites should be treated to reduce itching and prevent infections:

• bite sites are washed with soapy water
• the most painful bites are wiped with alcohol or alcohol tincture of calendula or propolis
• itching from bites can be reduced with Fenistil gel.

But if, after the bites of blood-sucking insects, the temperature began to rise and a characteristic rash appeared on the skin, it is advisable to show the person to the doctor. Allergy to bites can have serious consequences, and even if at a particular moment it does not manifest itself very strongly, in the future the reaction to bites can be extremely acute.

 

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Interesting video: where do lice crawl from?

 

When bed bugs go hunting...