Bedbugs are currently one of the most important problems of modern society, and for many city residents they are an inevitable, expensive and painful problem. In Russia, bed bug infestation in city apartments is worsening every day, so it is not surprising that in the regions of the country this is a fairly common phenomenon.
And in New York, the parasite infestation is considered a full-blown epidemic. It's so bad that at the beginning of the year a summit was held to combat bed bugs in city apartments. Blood-sucking bugs will not destroy you, but they can drive you crazy (they affect the human psyche): it is impossible to sleep in your own apartment, cozy houses turn into dangerous places, the night is terrifying and many victims of bed bugs cannot get rid of the fear of parasites.
Bed bugs reproduce at an incredibly fast rate. One female can lay from 4 to 10 larvae per day and approximately 500 eggs over the entire period of life, and her relatives can reproduce themselves within a month. In a week, these insects are able to inhabit a 2-room apartment, in a month, the 1st floor of an apartment building, and in six months, a 5-story panel building.
Habitats and breeding places for bedbugs in an apartment
Once in a new place, house bugs very quickly begin to settle in and reproduce. As a rule, for permanent residence these “neighbors” choose places that are difficult to access and inconspicuous for humans. However, not everything is as scary as it might seem at first glance; a colony of domestic bugs can be detected if you know the main areas of their accumulation.
1. First of all, what you should pay attention to are sleeping places (bed, sofa, sofa, crib, etc.), since domestic bugs mainly feed on human blood, it is much more convenient and easier for them to settle near the source food, that is, with our body. You need to carefully inspect the bed frame, the seams of the mattresses, under the mattress, you may find black spots (excrement) of insects, remains of eggs, or bed bugs themselves. You may also find bloody stains on your bed linen.
2. Look behind paintings, behind carpets, rugs and shelves; you can also find bedbugs or traces of their habitat there, especially if they are located near a person’s place of rest at night.
3. Carefully inspect corners, floor crevices, baseboards, under nightstands, beds and cabinets. Take a broom and dustpan, walk through these places, if you find black dots and insect skins in the garbage, then this is an alarm bell, you have bedbugs.
4. Sockets, another favorite place for house bugs, the heat that electricity produces, as well as the seclusion of the place, makes these parasites comfortable to stay. Under no circumstances try to lure them out of there yourself.
5. Wardrobes, chests of drawers, clothes, books and bookshelves; bedbugs can hide in all these secluded places. Don’t be lazy and inspect the joints of doors, under the window sill, and the folds of curtains.
6. In places where the wallpaper comes away from the walls, bedbugs can also build their “nest”, hiding from the human eye during the daytime. They can be easily detected by simply knocking on the walls.
7. “Our smaller brothers”, they are also susceptible to attack by bedbugs. If you begin to notice that your pet is often itching and suffering from bites, then it is quite possible that this is the work of domestic bugs. Carefully inspect your pet's cage, tray, and sleeping place.
House bugs in an apartment, like any other insects, leave traces characteristic of them, which can be used to detect places of their accumulation and reproduction, as well as to determine the population size. These simple tips will help you in the fight against “bloodsuckers”, and remember, the sooner resistance begins, the easier it will be to clear your home of these unwanted guests.
What to do if there are a lot of bedbugs?
Is it easy to squash one bedbug? Certainly. If you find a lot of parasites on your bed at once, squashing them all is not a good idea. This will ruin the bed linen and probably your mood.
In this case, you need to quickly wrap the sheet with the parasites in a ball before they scatter, and put it in the washing machine. Set the temperature and speed to high and wash the clothes. This will kill the insects without bleeding, get rid of the unpleasant smell and appearance, and help preserve the sheet. In addition to such destruction, it will be necessary to carry out a complete disinfection, because there are likely to be many other parasites and larvae in the bed walls and in the mattress. Therefore, if you don’t want to fight pests every night or suffer from their bites, call a specialist, or use products to clean your home yourself. They will also help get rid of other insects that you might not have noticed.
What to remember:
- It is not advisable to crush bedbugs, because... They are difficult to catch and can stain the bed and walls of the room.
- It is better to crush a large, well-fed individual, it is slower. If you decide to crush a bedbug, take precautions first.
- Bedbugs reproduce quickly, so if you see one individual, you can be sure that there are many more of them. A comprehensive treatment of the apartment and belongings will be required.
See you in the next article!
How to determine if there are bedbugs in the house? Signs of bedbugs in an apartment
The house bug, a small insect, appears mainly at night, and the pest can be detected almost only by accident. Often we discover their appearance in our apartment when their numbers have already increased. determine whether bedbugs have settled in an apartment , but there are several simple and effective ways to recognize the presence of a homebug.
• If you wake up and see swelling and redness on your body, you should know that you were obviously bitten at night. Bites are the first sign that you have bedbugs. Many people, perplexed, attribute such bites to mosquitoes, especially those who were bitten for the first time, but in vain, there are still differences. When mosquitoes bite, they produce an enzyme that promotes blood clotting, but bedbugs do not have such an enzyme, so a drop of dried blood will be visible at the site of the bite. If the redness is located in the form of random paths, then you have definitely been fed by a bug. Itching, burning, and, in rare cases, allergic reactions, all these can be signs of bedbug bites.
• The appearance of bloody, brown marks on the bed linen is another signal that uninvited guests have come to you, this is due to the incoagulability of blood during a bite, but this is not a direct sign of the appearance of bedbugs in your apartment, the origin of such stains may be different.
• Another proven way to detect a house bug, get up at night, the peak of insect activity occurs at 5-6 in the morning, turn on the light, inspect the bed, if your apartment is infested, then one bug will come to your bed.
• Bedbugs have the ability to shed skins (exoskeletons). If during cleaning you find dried insect shells, this may also indicate that “bloodsuckers” live in the room; you can also find them along with black dots and white larvae in the upholstery of upholstered furniture, mattresses, and books.
• Smell, bedbugs emit a specific smell, reminiscent of the smell of spoiled raspberries, or cognac, if you smell such a “scent” in your apartment, it means that the population is very high, the apartment is quite heavily infested.
Bites, black dots (excrement), white larvae and keratinized membranes are all signs that your home has been infested by bedbugs, and of course the most obvious sign is the detection of the insect itself. If at least one of these indicators is detected, measures should be taken immediately to combat parasites. Even if you haven’t found a large outbreak of infection in your apartment, don’t put things off, start the war right now!
What to do if you find a bedbug?
If you manage to catch a parasite in bed, your first impulse is to crush it. This may be difficult. It is quite difficult to crush an adult hungry bug that has not drunk blood with your fingers - it is very flat, hard, and slips out of your hands. A hungry small insect is unlikely to be caught due to its agility and size.
The easiest way is to crush a large, well-fed pest, fat and slow with blood. But is it possible to do this and will there be blood if you crush a bug? Since it is full of what it feeds on, you may end up with difficult-to-remove stains of blood and dark bug-like lymph on your bed after you destroy it. Particularly large parasites are crushed with an unpleasant crash, so that blood can splatter the wall, so it is better not to do this right in bed.
Where do bedbugs come from in an apartment? Routes of entry
Unfortunately, none of us are immune from the appearance of bedbugs in our apartments. There is an opinion that bedbugs live only in dirty, unsanitary rooms; this is far from true; they can inhabit absolutely any apartment. Even if you do a thorough cleaning of your home every day, these “guests” can come to you at any time, or you can bring them into your home yourself.
So where do bed bugs come from? This question is asked by most people who have suffered such a misfortune. There are several common options for the appearance of domestic bedbugs.
- No matter how strange and ridiculous it may sound, it is really possible. Without knowing it, you can bring a bug into your home in a new, just purchased sofa or mattress, in clothes, or in a soft toy. This can happen if the store you shop at is infested with these insects.
— When going on a trip or a business trip, be careful, you can easily “pick up” a bedbug on trains; they can hide behind shelves or in the upholstery of a mattress. In a hotel, especially cheap motels, in a rented apartment, carefully inspect your bags, suitcases, and clothes before returning home.
— House bugs can also come to you from your neighbors. This may be their natural migration, since bedbugs like to travel from apartment to apartment looking for a source of food. Also, if the neighbors left their home for a long time, thereby depriving the bug of food, then the insects will begin to move into the apartment next door. If you smell chemicals, or find out that parasites are being poisoned nearby, then be prepared to meet uninvited “guests”. A bedbug only needs a small gap in the wall, floor, or ceiling to enter your home.
— Your friends, acquaintances, relatives, whose apartment is infested with insects, can also bring a bedbug into your home when they come to visit you. It is possible that, having been in such a house, you will bring yourself a parasite in your belongings or clothes. Bedbugs in the apartment
may remain from the previous owners or tenants of the premises. Hospitals and kindergartens, health camps and sanatoriums, these places can also be infested with bedbugs.
Remember that the bug is a synanthropic arthropod, that is, individuals live in residential premises, populated areas, and on the human body. Bed bugs do not like to remain without food for a long time, so they travel with humans. They are able to cover long distances in a short time. The appearance of a domestic bug in an apartment is fraught with various troubles, such as sleepless nights, nervous shock, bites, rashes, allergic reactions; it has also been established that pathogens of diseases such as the hepatitis B virus, typhoid, Q fever can remain in the insect’s body.
In what cases is it impossible to get rid of bedbugs forever?
But there are also rooms in which it is practically impossible to eliminate bedbugs forever. These are not so much premises as establishments - hostels, hotels, apartments for daily rent, where new people constantly spend the night. Some of these people, completely unintentionally, can and regularly do bring bedbugs in their bags and belongings. It is almost impossible to prevent this by organizational measures and in such rooms, treatments must be done regularly.
Here, for example, is the destruction of bedbugs in a hostel:
It was possible to destroy them, but it is impossible to guarantee that they will no longer be here.
Your situation is most likely not the same. Most of our viewers are residents of ordinary apartments, where there are no new guests, where bedbugs are rarely brought, and where these insects most often get into on their own. Accordingly, before processing, you need to understand where they are coming from and block this path.
Self-extermination of bedbugs at home
Currently, quite a lot of people are faced with the problem of house bugs and are looking for the most effective ways to destroy them. You need to start pest control of bedbugs as soon as you find them in your apartment, don’t put it off “until tomorrow,” because these insects reproduce very quickly; a female bedbug can lay 5-7 eggs a day. Therefore, you should not hope that bedbugs will leave your home on their own; you need to start disinfesting your home yourself as soon as possible. Let's look at several basic methods for disinfesting bedbugs at home.
Home Remedies
It is worth noting here that the use of improvised means is not a sufficiently effective way to combat bedbugs. These methods can be used, for example, to temporarily get rid of insects, as well as if the population size is very small.
— For the disinfestation of bedbugs, a method such as evaporation is used. Insect habitats must be doused with boiling water or treated with steam. At high temperatures, above 48ºC, bedbugs die. You also need to wash your linens and clothes.
— You can walk around the apartment with a vacuum cleaner, thoroughly vacuuming the upholstery, bed, corners and crevices. But bedbugs often hide in secluded, hard-to-reach places where you simply cannot reach them with a vacuum cleaner.
— Bedbugs cannot stand the smell of fresh Wormwood, so it is placed under the bed and in areas where insects live. You can also mix a solution of table vinegar and turpentine in equal proportions and spray the areas where bedbugs accumulate with a spray bottle.
Modern chemicals
For more effective pest control of house bugs, it is best to use chemicals specifically designed to combat parasites. Although home remedies can bring results, they are usually temporary; to completely eliminate bedbugs, modern chemicals should be used. Currently, there are many products on the market for disinsection of bed bugs. Let's look at several of the most effective modern chemical insecticides.
— The drug “Delta Zone”, a microencapsulated product, is effective against domestic bugs; the poison contained in the microcapsule penetrates the intestines and envelops the body of the insect, thereby killing not only the “parasite” itself, but also infecting its relatives. A distinctive property of this drug is its absolute safety for people and animals, it is non-toxic, odorless, and does not leave streaks or marks.
— “Avalon”, a sharp insecticidal chemistry, perfectly deals with pests such as house bugs, cockroaches, flies, ticks and fleas. The product belongs to class 3 of moderately hazardous substances, so it only kills insects. During processing, be sure to take care of chemical protection: respirator, gloves, suit, spray bottle. Does not leave marks or stains on the treated surface.
— “Tsifoks”, another remedy that is no less effective. Contains cypermethrin at a concentration of 25%. It has a powerful effect on house bugs from the first minutes after using the drug. It has a subtle odor, but it disappears as soon as the solution is ready for application. After treatment it does not leave streaks or stains.
— A Spanish-made drug “Xulat”, it contains three active ingredients: cypermethrin 10%, tetramethrin 2.2%, piperonyl butoxide 10%. What makes it a truly effective remedy against bedbugs. Also, the drug is absolutely safe for people and animals, odorless and non-toxic.
— The South Korean drug “Lambda Zone” has also proven itself as an effective remedy against insects. The new patented drug was created using a unique technology: lambda-cyhalothrin insecticide at a concentration of 2.5%, which is contained inside a nano capsule; insects are completely enveloped in this poison and die one after another. The product is safe for humans and animals, just like regular water.
— “Get,” a Russian-made product created using European technology, is a microencapsulated suspension. Contains chlorpyrifos as an active ingredient - 5%, effectively fights not only bedbugs, but also cockroaches, fleas, ticks, ants and flies. “Get”, safe for animals and people, does not leave stains.
Before disinfestation with chemicals, especially with sharp insecticides, be sure to follow protective measures, wear gloves, a respirator and closed clothing, remove utensils, food products and personal hygiene items. Read the instructions carefully and follow the correct proportions of dilution of chemicals.
Remember that the effectiveness of the drugs depends greatly on how carefully and conscientiously you treat the room. Apply the product thoroughly to each square. meter of your apartment.
If the number of insects is large enough and you cannot cope on your own, all your attempts are in vain, do not waste your energy and money. Contact specialists, call a pest control service. Currently, extermination services use modern control methods, such as a cold fog generator and a hot fog generator to kill house bugs. They will quickly and professionally treat your apartment, and you will forget about insects for a long time.
If you don't choke
If the bug you caught does not choke on your fingers, then most likely it is a tick. The integument of a tick's body is much denser and thicker than that of bedbugs, which makes it almost impossible to crush them with your hands if they are hungry. In fact, the principle of killing ticks is similar to bedbugs; it is enough to press harder with the edge of your nail on top of the body of the parasite to flatten it.
Hungry and well-fed bed bugs
However, it is highly not recommended to take risks and crush the tick with your hands . These insects are much more dangerous than bedbugs and fleas, and the diseases they carry are much worse. And the tick will not miss the opportunity to bite you if you pick it up in your hands in an attempt to crush it. Every living creature fights for life, so a tick will not just sit and wait to be killed. You need to fight these insects in the same way as with others, namely with the use of chemicals, and not with your hands. After all, if a tick bites you, then there is a high probability that you will remove it from your body incorrectly, which can end badly.
Hungry and well-fed ticks
Moreover, in appearance, a bug and a tick have some significant differences: the legs of a tick are located closer to the chest, and not along the perimeter of the abdomen, and in a well-fed state they resemble a large bean or pea, even in color, so they can be confused with the elongated brown abdomen of a well-fed bug extremely difficult.
Protecting your apartment from bed bugs
No one is immune from the appearance of such unpleasant insects as house bugs. But if you try to follow the simple, most effective tips, you can protect your home from bed bug infestations.
— When planning a trip, do not choose the cheapest hotels possible, always inspect the bed and mattresses, and if you find insects, ask to change your room. When you return home, inspect all your belongings.
— If you know that friends or relatives have bedbugs in their apartment, try not to visit this house until they are completely destroyed. If this cannot be avoided, then when you come into an infected room, put your outerwear and bags in sealed bags, put on shoe covers, and better yet, do not take off your shoes.
— If you spent the night in an apartment infested with bedbugs, then upon arriving home, immediately take off all your clothes and pack them in a bag. Wash everything at a high temperature of 48ºC, then iron.
— Never bring into your home furniture found on the street or in the entrance; it may have been thrown away precisely because there were bedbugs in it.
- If bedbugs get to you from your neighbors, you definitely need to fight together, you don’t need to be afraid or embarrassed. Well, if an agreement did not work out, then systematic treatment of the apartment will be required every time insects appear.
— To significantly protect your apartment from “neighborhood” bedbugs, try to isolate the room as much as possible. Seal all the cracks on the floor and ceiling, replace the old wallpaper with new ones, install a fine mesh for ventilation, replace ordinary sockets with sockets with protective covers.
— If there is a large infestation of apartments, call a specialized pest control service as soon as possible to treat the entire house.
Smell
Probably everyone knows what a bug smells like when you crush it. This specific smell is somewhat similar to the usual smell of females, but the bed bug itself does not stink as much as its wild brothers. The stink bugs that can be found in the country have a pungent and disgusting smell .
The stink bug has a very pungent odor, unlike the bed bug
How to find them
To detect bedbugs in your home, you need to carefully check the places where they are hiding: first, carefully inspect the furniture, then pay attention to the seams of mattresses and bed linen.
Parasites can get into the joints between the back and seat of chairs or sofas. Insects often hide on the back of pieces of furniture or even crawl under the bottom. They can live in pillows with removable covers.
Places where bedbugs accumulate.
When there are a lot of bedbugs, the pests can be detected by the results of their vital activity. If you don't look closely, their excrement looks like mold. Over time, the parasites begin to lay larvae, which are white in color and elongated in shape.
We suggest you read: Do bedbugs freeze in the cold?
Every week, adult individuals molt, shedding their chitinous cover of a light gray color, almost transparent. If there are a lot of bedbugs, you can notice them during the day. The insects are small in size, up to 4 mm, brown in color, 6 limbs and mustache.
A sweetish smell indicates the presence of bedbugs in the apartment. Despite this specific sign, the inhabitants of the house often get used to the strange aroma. It can be clearly seen when entering the room from the street.
Extermination of bedbugs: choosing the appropriate method
There are many methods that have their own characteristics and give different results. In advanced situations, when nothing helps, it is advisable to turn to professional exterminators. They treat the room with cold or hot mist that kills parasites. The services of pest control specialists are not cheap, so people choose other options that also help clean the room from bedbugs. This:
- sprays, aerosols;
- powders, dusts;
- chemicals for wet processing;
- folk remedies - mixtures based on vinegar, turpentine, kerosene.
Sprays and aerosols are very convenient to use. They have a local effect on bedbug nests and the parasites themselves. These drugs affect the nervous system of the insect, causing paralysis, which causes rapid death. They usually treat carpets, rugs, and upholstered furniture. Some sprays have additional nozzles that help penetrate the most difficult to reach places. Dusts, powders or crayons cannot be called effective. To activate them, direct contact with the bug is necessary, so simultaneous destruction of the entire population is impossible. It is best to use them as preventive agents - for example, to prevent the appearance of new pests after treatment. The most popular drugs from the group of dusts include:
- "Phenaxin";
- "Clean house";
- "Face double";
- chalk "Mashenka".
For self-removal of bedbugs, chemical agents that are used for wet treatment are also good. Thus, the active substance that is part of such a drug gets into the most inaccessible places. They are sold as concentrates or dry. The most common include:
- "Foresight";
- "Executioner";
- "Cucaracha";
- "Karbofos";
- "Get."
You need to use insecticides very carefully, as they are very poisonous and harmful to people and animals. When working with household chemicals, it is recommended to wear rubber gloves, protective suits, and respirators. After treating the room with such preparations, you need to close the windows and leave the apartment for several hours.
Wet cleaning should not be carried out for 3-5 days after the procedure. Most insecticides do not destroy oviposition, so you will have to re-treat them in about a week or two, when the young individuals hatch.
How to improve your health after bedbugs
First of all, you need to take care of proper care of the affected areas of the skin; this can be done at home. The damaged area is washed with water and treated with alcohol or medicinal tincture. If inflammation occurs, ice or some cooled object wrapped in cloth or gauze is applied for a while. Bite areas are treated with aloe juice 2-3 times a day.
Cream “Triacutan”.
If an allergic reaction occurs, antihistamines such as Loratadine, Diazolin will be required. Local manifestations of allergies are reduced when Triakutan or another product prescribed by the doctor is applied to the abrasions.
In addition to treating damaged skin, you should restore the nervous system, get enough sleep, drink herbal tea with lemon balm, chamomile and thyme. Tablets “Glycine” and “Novopassit” help reduce irritability. The listed methods will only work after the complete destruction of insects in the house.
To improve immunity, it is useful to take vitamins, eat vegetables and fruits more often, take daily walks in the fresh air, play sports and avoid stressful situations.
Consequences of insect bites
According to statistics, almost 80% of people suffer from an allergic reaction after being bitten by a pest. Symptoms may include:
- Anaphylactic shock.
- Rash.
- Redness of the skin.
- Burning.
- Itching.
Festering of a bug bite
The danger also lies in intensively scratching the site of the bug bite, on which pustules may appear. Due to itching, if you scratch the wound, there is a risk of infection, which can lead to more serious consequences.
In addition to an allergic reaction, bedbug bites that occur at night have a negative impact on a person’s psychological and psychophysical state. Insect bites disrupt sleep, impairing a person's rest and disrupting sleep patterns, which leads to loss of performance, irritability and other consequences.
If the intensity of the bites is high, children may suffer from iron deficiency anemia. In addition, hepatitis type B can remain active for a long time in insect excrement. Therefore, if an apartment is highly infested with bedbugs, a person can become infected through inhalation - through inhalation of particles of excrement.
As mentioned above, bedbugs feed on the blood of humans or small pets. Parasites go hunting in the dead of night, but if the level of infestation in the home is high, they can bite during the day. At the moment of the bite, the bloodsuckers inject saliva into the wound, the composition of which prevents the blood from clotting. Saliva also has an analgesic effect, so the victim does not feel pain when the skin is punctured.
Bedbugs in furniture deprive a person of proper sleep: the victim wakes up from itching and cannot sleep for a long time, suffering mentally from the presence of crawling insects in the bed. Sleep disturbances lead to psychological distress. Often, families even have scandals due to sleepless nights. But these are not all the consequences of living in a bedbug-infested apartment. Are bedbugs dangerous to humans and why exactly?
Linen parasites are especially annoying to families with small children. Children's skin is delicate and sensitive, so allergies to bedbugs in babies are more severe than in adults. The painfully itchy bites lead to the development of anemia in children and pregnant women. If bloodsuckers are found in such an apartment, the bedbugs in the apartment must be killed immediately.
Grass that smells like bedbugs
It’s a surprising thing, but this seasoning, so beloved by many, especially in Caucasian cuisine, actually smells like bedbugs. Moreover, one of its names – “bedbug plant” – already speaks for itself. We are talking about a spicy vegetable crop - cilantro or coriander. This annual plant gets its name from the Greek "koris", which means "bug".
If you lightly mash young greens or unripe cilantro fruits in your hands, your palms will retain the specific (bedbug) aroma of the seasoning for a long time. And yet this herb occupies a very honorable place among culinary specialists all over the world. There is no secret here - in combination with other spices, especially garlic, this plant acquires an excellent taste.
But why cilantro smells like bedbugs is easy to explain. Its juice contains the same aldehyde substance (trans-tricedenol-2), which is also found in insect secretions. When coriander is dried, its seed is filled with a pleasant cool pungency and subtle aroma, as the chemical component completely evaporates. With the help of decyl aldehyde, the green seasoning is protected from insect pests; when dried, this need disappears along with the odorous weapon.
The danger of bedbugs when traveling to foreign countries
When traveling abroad, especially to the countries of the South, if you suffer from local bedbugs, be prepared for more serious consequences.
When visiting the countries of South America and Africa and encountering bedbugs, there is a chance of becoming infected with the following diseases:
- Yellow fever.
This virus lives inside an insect for up to two weeks, and infection is possible even if bedbug excrement comes into contact with human skin. According to statistics, the disease kills 30 thousand people every year; yellow fever causes liver and kidney failure. For your own safety, it is better to get vaccinated, which will reduce the risk of infection by almost 100%. - Monkeypox.
Not only does it function in the body of the bug, but it is also released through saliva. Smallpox infection occurs as a result of bites from insects that carry it. Today, smallpox does not develop in its usual form, but monkeypox can easily be caught by visiting Africa and being bitten by a bug. In some cases, this disease leads to the death of the infected person. - Leishmaniasis.
Caused by parasites and promotes the formation of ulcers on the skin, mucous membranes and organs. There is a possibility of contracting it in the countries of Western and South Asia.
The real risk of contracting infections comes when visiting Latin America. The insects that live there cause more than 10 thousand deaths annually from Chagas disease.
Bedbugs are capable of carrying the smallest parasites, which make their way to the internal organs of a person through the bloodstream. As a result, the lymph nodes become inflamed, swelling occurs, and the functioning of the gastrointestinal tract and heart muscle is disrupted.
