Did your parents or your grandparents use to say ‘Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed bugs bite’ when they tucked you up in bed as a child? You had probably never seen a bed bug and perhaps did not even know what they were talking about, but they would have. This is because anybody living prior to the Second World War would probably have been bitten quite often.

Up until the 1940’s or 1950’s, depending upon where your family lived, bed bugs were extremely common. Practically every street had them and because the houses were not sealed off from each other and because people were in and out of each other’s houses more frequently, bed bugs were spread everywhere. When they tell you: ‘Don’t Let The Bed Bugs Bite’, they are repeating a real wish, even a prayer from earlier days.

Bed bugs were a part of everyday, or rather every night, life for millions of people in Great Britain for four hundred years. They had been around in warmer parts in Europe and the world for thousands of years before that, but they did not proliferate in Britain until after the Great Fire of London in 1666.

It is thought that they came to Britain with the timber and tradesmen that were brought in to rebuild London. By 1670, bedbugs had become a plague on the population of the UK, like they were elsewhere in Europe. Fifty years afterward, bedbugs had established themselves in Jamaica and probably the United States of America as well.

Bedbugs like to live in dark cracks near to their source of food, which is blood. Not all bedbugs prefer human blood; some prefer dogs’ blood others prefer chickens’ blood et cetera. However, they will all eat human blood if their preferred host is not about.

There is one bedbug though, Cimex lectularius, that does only eat human blood and this is the little blighter that people are referring to when they say: ;Don’t let the bed bugs bite’.

So, bedbugs, if you have them, will be behind any loose-fitting skirting boards or architraves, loose wall paper or in damaged plaster or lino. Their favourite place of all in in a torn mattress. They are attracted to their blood donor by CO2 on the breath and body heat.

When they have located a host, they send out a message to all their friends and relatives by the use of pheromones. Bed bugs are most lively an hour before dawn and it takes them only five minutes to finish their lunch.

When they bite, bedbugs insert two tubes into you, one squirts saliva containing coagulant and anaesthetic and the other sucks up blood. This is why individuals seldom feel that they are being bitten. Sometimes they do not know for up to nine days and some people never know, because they are not allergic to the saliva.

Those that are allergic, may get an itchy swelling, but it may not itch either. It depends on the person. Often the lumps are in rows of three, like flea bites. They are quite similar to mosquito bites, but they do not have a red dot at the centre. Luckily for us, bedbugs do not transmit human diseases, although many bites can temporarily damage the immune system and can lead to anaemia.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on many topics, but is currently concerned with bed bugs spray. If you are interested in this, please go over to our website now at Picture Of Bed Bugs for more information.

If you wake up one morning with itchy bumps on your body, you will probably think that you had been bitten by mosquitoes or ants the night beforehand, but there is also a chance that bedbugs have got at you. If this happens in your own bed, then you have problems. If you are in a hotel, go and complain to the boss.

You can be certain that most hotel bosses will take complaints about bed bugs very gravely, because it is well known that the numbers of bedbugs are increasing fast and have been since 1995. It is also common knowledge that huge compensation awards have been made against hotels. Some of them were at hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Most so-called ‘bed bugs’ will only feed on people if their preferred host, often chickens, are not on hand, but there is one that only feeds on human blood and that species is called Cimex lectularius.

Cimex lectularius was virtually extinct in the developed world by the late 1950’s because of the extensive use of DDT in homes and hotels to kill all insects such as ants, bed bugs, silverfish, millipedes and cockroaches.

However, there has been a gigantic revival in the number of bedbugs since 1995. In fact, between 1995 and 2001, one report on bedbugs in London stated that incidents of bedbug call-outs had doubled every year.

The recovery in bedbug numbers has been ascribed to global travel and immigration from Asia and Africa. However, it is also likely that they were never completely wiped out and that they have become resistant to modern pesticides. There is not much you can put down or spray around now that will kill bedbugs.

So, what do bedbugs look like? Well, there are lots of different types of bed bugs, but most of them are brownish, unless they have just fed and then there is a red tinge to them. However, they can also be white to yellowish. Sometimes, they look banded because bedbugs are covered with short hairs which reflect light like a striped lawn.

Bedbugs have a beak-like mouth-piece with two tubes. One tube squirts spittle into you and the other sucks blood out. The saliva contains anti-coagulant and a pain-killer, so that you do not know that you have been bitten until long after the bedbug has gone home.

Some people never know, because they are not allergic to the saliva, others get a lump or slight swelling almost right away, but sometimes the swelling can take a week to come out. These bites may or may not be itchy.

If you travel a lot, or if you go to parts of the world that are less involved with hygiene, you must be careful about not taking bedbugs home with you. They will not remain on your body, but they may lay eggs in your clothing or hole up in your suitcase. Therefore, either before you go home or immediately on arrival have your clothes washed at a temperature above 46c and blast your suitcase with a jet of steam or hot air.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many topics, but is at present concerned with bed bugs extermination. If you are interested in this, please go over to our website now at Picture Of Bed Bugs for more information.

There 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 tiny, but not too small to see. Adults are about four or five millimetres in length and one-and-a-half to three millimetres wide. They are brownish in colour, but may appear banded because they are covered in short hairs.

Having said that, they are still not easy to have a close look at, because they are very quick and only come out at night. In fact, their preferred dinner time is more of an early breakfast, because they normally dine on us an hour before dawn. If you want to find 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 few 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 method 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 bed bugs with the soap.

Then you will have plenty of time to study them under a magnifying glass. If they are not residing in your mattress and you are sure that you have bed bugs, check behind any loose-fitting woodwork.

They love to get into dark crevices 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 thin for them, because they are so flat themselves, as you can observe from photos. They look as if they have been flattened. However, the nymphs or babies are very small, a bit rounder and frequently 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 sort of sucked out.

The bedbug’s skin is in fact the key to killing it, as bedbugs have become tolerant to most everyday pesticides. Their skin, or exoskeleton, has a waxy layer on it to stop dehydration. If you can remove that wax, the insect will dry out and die.

Some modern bedbug sprays incorporate finely powdered glass or silicone which sticks to the insect and as it wriggles into crevices, the powder scrapes the wax off. Diatomaceous earth was used for the same purpose long ago and it is making a comeback in the fight to eradicate bed bugs. It is non-toxic and environmentally friendly, so safe to deploy in your home and close to your pets.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently concerned with bed bugs extermination. If you are interested in this, please go over to our website now at Picture Of Bed Bugs for further information.