“Because all you need is one pregnant female, and you get a whole new population going there rather quickly,” says Rajotte. Plus, in order to truly get rid of bed bugs, you need to banish all of them. It’s particularly difficult to get rid of bed bugs because they’re resistant to a lot of insecticides, including many of those you’ll find in bed bug treatments at the hardware store, says Gibb. “Once they find us, then they take their soda straw-like mouth part and stick it directly into a blood capillary and tap into their food,” says Haynes. and 4 a.m.-our body odor, body heat, and the carbon dioxide we emit stimulates the bugs to get close to us for feeding. Then, during the middle of the night-typically between 2 a.m. “They like to live near the host, meaning in our bedrooms, near our beds-as close as they can get to where we sleep as is possible,” says Haynes.īut another hard part of realizing you have a bed bug infestation is that bed bugs will remain hidden until nighttime, using a chemical signal to aggregate together in cracks, crevices, or other dark spaces, says Haynes. That need for our blood is why bed bugs are often found exactly where their name implies: our beds. What are bed bugs, anyway?Ī bed bug is what is called a blood-feeding ectoparasite, which means its only source of food is our blood, says Kenneth Haynes, PhD, a professor of entomology at the University of Kentucky who specializes in bed bug biology. That means you often won’t realize you might have a problem until the bed bug population has become especially pervasive, or until you start waking up with bites you received the night before. “They’ve had millions of years of evolution to fine-tune their feeding system and not wake the host,” says Edwin Rajotte, PhD, a professor of entomology at Penn State University. The reason bed bugs are able to stick around so long, often going unnoticed until they’ve become a bigger problem, is that they’ve evolved to become the “perfect parasite,” says Timothy Gibb, PhD, a clinical professor of entomology at Purdue University who’s studied bed bug infestations. It’s understandable why: Bed bugs can be difficult-not to mention expensive-to get rid of.
Thinking you may have a pest problem is never fun, but most homeowners dread one infestation in particular: bed bugs.
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