If you wake up one day with prickly lumps on your body, you will probably think that you had been bitten by mosquitoes or ants the night beforehand, but there is also a possibility 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 make a complaint 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 available, 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 widespread use of DDT in residences 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 each year.

The resurgence 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 eradicated and that they have become tolerant 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. Occasionally, they look banded because bedbugs are covered with short hairs which reflect light like a stripy lawn.

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

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

If you travel a lot, or if you go to regions of the world that are less concerned 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 without delay 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 article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with bed bugs extermination. If you are interested in this, please visit our website now at Picture Of Bed Bugs for further details.

Do you know whether you have ever come across a bed bug? You probably have not. Not yet, but the odds that you will are increasing every day. This is because bed bugs are undergoing an explosion in their numbers and mankind is quite helpless to stop them at the moment, although a number of people are working on it.

You see, the problem is that bed bugs are pretty much tolerant to every insecticide that we have. They were almost wiped out in the West in the Forties and Fifties with the extensive use of DDT, but the ones that survived and the ones that have been brought into the country are resistant to pesticides.

Scientists are working on pesticides that will be effective against bed bugs, but there is no light at the end of the tunnel yet.

So, we are stuck with a burgeoning population of bed bugs. How do you get bed bugs? Normally, you just pick them up and take them home or someone does it for you. It is thought that foreign travel and immigration are largely responsible for the first members of our new bed bug population.

These days, you can pick them up anyplace where people go: taxis, movie theaters, bars, hotels, motels, cars, buses and planes. Even in the doctor’s surgery.

It used to be thought that bed bugs only flourished in poor peoples’ houses, but this is untrue. In fact, the rich are more prone to get them than the poor, because they travel more often. You can also be given bedbugs in secondhand furniture, clothing and suitcases.

Bedbugs like to hide in cracks, so you could be sitting on a bus and one will clamber up the back of your coat and nuzzle under your collar. There it might lay a few eggs and walk off or it might go to sleep. When you get home, you will put your coat in the wardrobe and a few days later you will have your very own colony of hungry little bedbugs. It is that easy.

Some bedbugs will also live on birds and bats. These bedbugs would rather bird blood, but if there are not many around, you may find them dropping from the ceiling onto you, if you have birds or bats in your loft. Bats are protected now, so you will have to have them removed, but you ought to discourage birds from nesting above you.

The bedbugs will be drawn to the CO2 on your breath and your body heat and then they employ pheromones to tell the others where you are. It typically only takes a bedbug five minutes to feed and then it goes back home to sleep it off for three to five days.

A mature bedbug has gone through six moultings and when a mature female has been inseminated, she can lay between 300 and 1,000 eggs in her lifetime of from six to twelve months. She will lay several eggs a day and they will hatch out in about ten days. So, you only need one pregnant female and you are in trouble very soon.

If you have a few dozen females laying eggs in your mattress, it will take less than a fortnight before dozens of newborn bedbugs (called nymphs) are hatching out every day and then one of their relatives will lead them straight to you.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with how do you get bed bugs? If you are interested in this, please go over to our website now at Picture Of Bed Bugs for further information.

Bed bugs are forging a gigantic revival in the West. They were practically wiped out in the Fifties due to the widespread use of DDT, which has since been proscribed. It took them forty to fifty years to recover, but in 1995 they started their comeback. In 2004, there were 82 instances of bed bugs in New York, but only five years later, in 2009, that figure had mushroomed to 10,985.

Of the top three Western cities with bed bug problems, two of them are in the USA. First is Colorado, Ohio, second is New York and third is Toronto, Canada. Luckily, bedbugs do not transmit human diseases, although there is no known reason why they do not. They feed by inserting two tubes into the victim’s skin and squirting spittle containing anaesthetic and anticoagulant through one and sucking blood with the other.

This injection of spittle means that bedbugs can feed on you without you even being aware of it, although that same saliva is to blame for the allergic reaction that most people feel in the form of red marks, swelling and itchiness.

Once bedbugs have established themselves in a property, and by the time you see them, there is normally a heavy infestation in your premises, they are very hard to get rid of.

Once infested, you could have hundreds or even thousands of bedbugs. If you let it get this far, you will have to call in professional pest controllers and you may also have to throw out a lot of your furniture including your bed.

The main refuge locations for bedbugs are mattresses, sofas, curtains, clothing, pillows and carpets. They may have to be thrown out as well. In very acute cases, you will have to move out for weeks while your residence is being treated.

Other favourite hiding places are furniture, the bed frame, skirtings, architrave, loose wall paper and broken plaster. Sometimes whole plasterboard partition walls will have to be taken down, as might skirtings and architraves. Another way of combatting bedbugs is to seal this woodwork off with caulk, mastic or silicone.

The difficulty is that even if you get rid of your bedbugs, you may get them back quite easily. Just as easily as anyone else can. This is because bedbugs like to hitch a lift. They manage this by attaching themselves to your clothing, for example, under your collar, in your pocket or in the lining and letting you take them home, where they can begin a new infestation.

In Denver, staff at the central library discovered that bedbugs were distributing themselves inside the spine of their books. The fact is that you cannot forecast where you will not uncover bedbugs. Infestations in judges’ chambers, dentists’ offices, doctors’ surgeries, cinemas, buses, taxis, schools and waiting rooms have all had to be de-infested.

It is time to be conscious of bedbugs, they are not a grave health threat, but they are not nice either. Nobody wants them. So, keep your eyes open, be careful of buying second-hand furniture and launder your clothes in very hot water or dry clean them if you can.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many subjects, but is at present concerned with getting rid of bedbugs? If you are interested in this, please visit our website now at Picture Of Bed Bugs for more information.