How long can bed bugs live without human blood?

• By Vil Malinoshevsky
• About bedbugs

Bed bugs are a very subtle and ambiguous issue. The fact is that if bedbugs hide in the bed itself - in the sheets, in the pillowcases of the pillows, inside the duvet covers - then there are always fewer of them here than in other places in the room. For example, look at where the main clusters of bedbugs are located in a heavily infested sleeping area in an ordinary apartment:

The situation with beds is similar: bedbugs can live and hide in a bed, but if there are a lot of them in the house, then here, in the bed, only a small part of the total number can be found. This is very important, because people often believe that since bedbugs, or, for example, bedbugs, it means that they only live in beds and beds, and if they are taken out only from the bed, then they can be gotten rid of forever .

In reality, only a small part of those bedbugs that constantly live in the apartment hide and constantly live both in the bed and in the bed. That is why those people who treat only the bed or only the bed, even with very effective means, cannot get rid of them. After this treatment, only those bugs that were on the bed will die. And everyone else will continue to bite safely, having emerged at night from their hiding places in other places in the apartment - from behind baseboards, from under linoleum and from under furniture.

Adult bedbugs on the seam of a mattress on a bed

This is one of the main mistakes when removing bedbugs from an apartment. If you understand well where they hide during the day, where to look for them and where to poison them, then getting them out, in principle, will not be a big problem. But this is only in theory. In practice there are many nuances. Now we will talk about the main points. Plus, we often receive questions by email regarding the removal and general detection of bed bugs in beds, and we will also answer the most common of them.

Feeding features of bedbugs

The blood of warm-blooded creatures is the only suitable food for parasites. These insects most often attack people. This is due to the fact that it is difficult for pests to penetrate the hard outer shell of animals and birds with their mouthparts. Human skin is softer and blood vessels are often located closer to the surface, making it even easier for pests to find food.

Domestic parasites of this species attack humans during sleep. They mostly do this at night, but bedbugs often bite a person while sleeping during the day, under special conditions, for example, when the victim is outside the house for a long time. The best time to eat is between 2 and 5 am. A person does not awaken from the weak activity of parasites, because sleep at this stage is the deepest.

Before eating, the insect injects saliva under the skin, which contains substances that anesthetic the bite. As a result, the person does not feel anything, and in the morning he discovers red spots.

The larvae do not yet have this ability, so their bites are painful.

How to tell if there are bedbugs in your bed

Obviously, the safest thing to do is to disassemble the bed and see whether there are bedbugs in it or not. But it is long and difficult. You can understand that parasites are here or come here at night by certain signs. There are few such signs.

First: the actual bites. Especially if they appear strictly at night and are discovered in the morning - these are small itchy red bumps on the body, arms and legs, among which separate chains of 3-4 bites are found, lined up. It's almost certainly bedbugs.

We are often asked what insects other than bedbugs can bite at night. There are few such insects. These are either fleas, or linen lice, or mosquitoes. Mosquitoes do not bite in winter, plus mosquitoes do not bite parts of the body covered with a blanket. They do not leave chains of 3-4 bites characteristic of bedbugs.

Fleas bite more often during the day, plus they jump well, but bedbugs cannot jump.

People can also be bitten by linen lice, but for people leading a normal social lifestyle this is very rare. Linen lice usually infest and can survive on the underwear and clothing of people who do not change or wash these clothes for months. If you bathe and wash your clothes regularly, the lice on them will die, even if they somehow end up here. Plus, lice bite around the clock, without significant night activity.

There are no other specialized insect parasites in human housing, well, at least in Eurasia. Dust mites, cockroaches, woodlice, and silverfish do not bite people. Therefore, if you are regularly bitten in the house at night, it is almost certainly bedbugs. And if you don’t see them, it doesn’t mean they aren’t bedbugs. It just means you haven't found them yet.

But bedbug bites are not noticeable in all people. More than half of those bitten in the morning do not have any traces of bites on the body and no symptoms. Therefore, you may well find these parasites in the bed, but until then you will not even suspect that they are there.

The next sign is blood stains that are found on the bed. They appear due to the fact that sometimes a person tossing and turning at night presses down and crushes a well-fed bug with his body. Such a bug's abdomen is swollen from the pumped blood, and if you lie on it, the parasite bursts and the blood flows out onto the bed. By morning it dries out and a stain remains in its place. However, such spots are a relative rarity and they appear more or less regularly only when there are a lot of bedbugs in the apartment.

The third is bedbug excrement. They look like small, about a millimeter in diameter, black balls, similar to dots, that can be seen on the bed, and near the bed, and on the mattress, and on the wooden elements of the bed, and even on the body - wherever bedbugs exist, they leave droppings.

By the way, it is in these feces that pathogens of dangerous diseases can be found. When a bug bites itself, it does not infect a person with anything, but if you scratch the bite site and smear such a ball on the scratch, or, for example, inhale it with dust even just from bed, infection, for example, with hepatitis is theoretically possible.

Already in the bed itself, if you disassemble it, you may not catch a live bug, but you may come across the remains of the chitinous coverings of these parasites. They simply look like dry, transparent bugs and are usually found in secluded places where bedbugs hide during the day.

If any of these signs are detected, it means that there are almost certainly bedbugs either in the bed or near it.

There are also such ambiguous signs. For example, smell. Yes, bedbugs themselves smell so unpleasant, sickly sweet, like stinkbugs on the street. But this smell is usually not felt indoors, at least if the infection is not critically strong.

There is an easier way to find out if there are bedbugs in the house: set an alarm clock for 4-5 o’clock in the morning, get up sharply, turn on the light and inspect the bed and your body. If bedbugs bite every day, then you will see such a friend. They are easy to recognize: they look like small, semicircular, flat insects, some brown, others yellowish. If some parasite has sucked blood, then its abdomen is red, because the blood itself is visible through the integument. Moreover, they can be seen - we are sometimes asked about this, and apparently, the person means that bedbugs are microscopically small and cannot be seen with the naked eye. Here you can see. Even the smallest nymphs have a body length of more than a millimeter and are, in principle, distinguishable, especially when well-fed, with blood in the abdomen. But adult bedbugs can be accurately identified: they are the size of a pea. That is, you will look at them even when you are sleepy at night.

If you didn’t find them one night in particular, then set your alarm clock for 3-4 nights in a row - if there are bedbugs in the house, you will find them. If you don’t find it, it means it’s not bedbugs.

How long can a bed bug live?

The persistence of bed bugs is a factor that scares many people. It is assumed that the insect can survive for a very long time without food, and contact with bedbugs is often completely useless. However, it is not.

As experts previously stated, the average life expectancy of a bedbug without food is up to 14 months, but only if it feeds (drinks) blood without long breaks. The bug bites a person several times at a time and receives the required amount of energy.

If there is no access to blood, insects live much shorter, but still quite long compared to other types of living beings.

Life expectancy of bedbugs without feeding:

Without food, life expectancy is significantly reduced. For example, with normal nutrition, bedbug larvae hatch 5-10 days after laying eggs.

Without food, this period increases to 4 months, and the larvae simply “freeze” in their shells. Using various treatment methods, the lifespan of pests can be reduced to several days or even hours.

The influence of temperature and pesticides on the lifespan of insects

Under unfavorable conditions, the population declines noticeably after a few months, but recovers within 1-3 months after people return.

Bed bugs are most active at temperatures around +30°C, that is, indoor conditions are ideal for their development, since they are able to actively reproduce at temperatures from +10 to +40°C.

Moreover, these insects survive even at subzero temperatures. At -17°C they survive for 24 hours, but not at hot temperatures above 40°C.

In the past, bedbugs were removed by scalding with boiling water.

These parasites are quite resistant to pesticides. Each stage of development is characterized by its own survival rate (some 4th stage larvae can live without food for more than a month, others even after 120 days).

This is explained by the facts described by scientists who studied bed bugs from four different cultures. The results are as follows: two varieties of parasites are resistant to insecticides, the other two are sensitive.

The most pesticide-sensitive beetles were collected from laboratory-grown crops, while the resistant species were collected from hotels, apartments and areas where insecticide treatments are regularly carried out. Chemical resistance has been shown to directly affect how long bed bugs survive without feeding.

It is almost impossible to get rid of bed bugs without insecticides. However, you can additionally try to deprive the bloodsuckers of their food source.

For example, place the infested mattress or other items in an airtight cover to prevent the insects from escaping. Since bedbugs can remain without food for a long time, the lid should not be opened until after six months.

How to detect the presence of bedbugs in the house

It’s easy to find out that there are bedbugs in your house or apartment if you know the main signs of their presence:

• The appearance of black dots on the bed linen, mattress, under the pillow - traces of insect feces, which look like traces of a felt-tip pen or black pen. Traces are washed off, and it is easier to detect bedbugs on light-colored bedding.
• Detection of eggs (empty or full), fragments of larval shells, which they shed, moving to the next stage of development.
• Traces of numerous bites. Bed bugs bite more than once, which is why multiple bites can be seen on one area of ​​the skin. It is almost impossible to directly feel the moment of the bite, since during an attack the insect injects a “painkiller” under the victim’s skin.

A sudden inspection of the bed at night will help determine the presence of bloodsuckers in the house. Get up at 4-5 am, turn on the light in the room and examine the bed linen - if there are bedbugs, you will notice them.

How long can bed bugs live without food?

Parasites can survive for some time without food. Breaks between meals are the norm for them. After feeding, their body increases significantly in size and length (several times). The process of digesting the received portion of human body fluid takes some time. This releases enough energy for the reproduction and survival of parasites.

In addition, nature has provided a protective function - a transition to a special state in which all functions are slowed down, which allows the beetles to live much longer. This requires a number of conditions, including fasting.

The digestion process takes a very long time

Anabiosis as a means of survival without food

If the parasite remains without food for a long time, it goes into energy saving mode. All functions are reduced and processes are inhibited. This state is intermediate between deep sleep and suspended animation. The parasite does not die. However, he is in a similar state. The external resemblance of a parasite in suspended animation and a dead insect confirms the truth of these words.

The body of the bed bug is strongly flattened and resembles the dried chitinous shell of the larva, but is larger in size.

If you're wondering how long a bed bug can live without human blood, you should consider that the parasite can remain in a state of suspended animation for many months. However, these insects quickly come to life as soon as the victim is nearby. They focus on the smell of carbon dioxide released by the human body.

During hibernation, processes in the body slow down and the body becomes as flat as possible.

How long do bedbugs live without human blood?

If the victim is constantly nearby and regularly sleeps at home, the parasite can attack at least every day. However, the insect only needs food once every 5-10 days. This is the time during which the parasite can survive without the risk of severe starvation. The lifespan of such pests without access to a food source depends on their age:

• larva at the 1st stage of development (immediately after emerging from the egg) - up to 38 days;
• parasites at stage 2 - up to 74 days;
• bedbugs at the 3rd stage of development - up to 123 days;
• larvae at the 4th stage of development - up to 132 days;
• adult insects - up to 142 days.

When studying the question of how long bedbugs live, it turns out that parasites can survive without food for such a time only under normal conditions.

If the ambient temperature changes, the fasting period can be extended.

An adult who has eaten the maximum amount of food can wait 140 days for the next meal.

How long do bedbugs live in an empty apartment?

If parasites are left without food, they may starve for some time. The beetles are gradually slowing down. This leads to a state resembling suspended animation. As a result, the reproduction rate drops to zero because there is not enough energy to do so. Insects can spend from 10 months to 1.5 years in this state.

An important condition for this is maintaining a cool microclimate.

In addition, remaining in an empty apartment, the parasite has the opportunity to move to neighboring rooms, where it finds food. In a private house everything is much more complicated. In this case, the insect can remain isolated for a long time.

However, the bug will return the next day as soon as a person appears, because it will wake up and start drinking blood.

In an empty apartment, a bug can even move to neighbors to search for food.

Do bedbugs have life after disinfection?

Good news for those wondering how long bed bugs live after disinfection: from a few hours to 5-10 days, depending on how they were killed. It takes longer to kill the eggs as the insecticide penetrates the shell of the embryo. Not all insecticides kill eggs even on direct contact. Therefore, within 14 days the eggs have time to hatch, and the new generation is destroyed upon contact with the pathogen. Modern pest control methods make it possible to be 100% sure that no pest has a chance, but bed bugs can live in a building for up to 21 days after disinfestation.

Hoping that a colony of bloodsuckers will survive the months of life allotted to it by nature and die out naturally is a waste of time. The insect actively takes care of procreation. The female lays up to 10-15 eggs per day and about 500 throughout her life cycle! One generation happily replaces another, and not only does it not die out, but, on the contrary, multiplies exponentially.

This leads to two conclusions:

1. If you leave the premises, bedbugs will not die of old age. Bedbugs will live as long as we humans allow them to.
2. Bed bugs will never leave voluntarily.

Choose effective methods for exterminating these pests and enjoy a comfortable life in a clean, well-kept home!

If the bedbugs do not disappear after treatment

A long-acting insecticide will act on the surface for the period specified in the instructions, sometimes a month, sometimes a month and a half. If after this time the bedbug bites bother you again and you still see living, moving objects, you need to re-treat.

Situation 5: Bedbugs live in an apartment and continue to bite without interruption after treatment

This happens when ineffective drugs are used against bedbugs, or even when effective drugs are used incorrectly. Some of them may die during etching, but a significant number survive and continue to bite as if nothing had happened.

Bugs on the fold of soft parts of the sofa

In such a situation, repeated treatment is required 10-12 days after the first. Such a repetition must necessarily be carried out with a means different from that used before, and based on a different active substance.

If this situation is repeated many times, it means that the problem is not in the means, but in the quality of processing. We encounter similar cases regularly when we see people trying to poison bedbugs themselves. They seem to be using good means, but they are doing it completely wrong. Because of this, bedbugs survive safely and survive many treatments in a row.

According to our statistics, more than 90% of independent treatments for bedbugs do not produce results, regardless of the quality of the product. At the same time, people often do not understand the differences between the groups of products and, for example, first poison the bedbugs with Karbofos, and then try to change the drug, and buy Fufanon for repeated baiting. People don’t know that these products are analogues of each other and work identically.

What’s worse is that, according to surveys of our clients, 65% of treatments from private SES do not produce results in the same way - from such companies, completely unprepared people often come to calls, who just yesterday decided to start poisoning bedbugs, having not found another job, and do not know about this activity nothing at all. Accordingly, the result of their work turns out to be the same as the result of the apartment owners’ independent fight against bedbugs. This is bad not only because people spend significant time and money on such pseudo-specialists, but also because such under-processing greatly reduces trust in pest control services in general. We then have to restore this trust for a long time, both through high-quality pest control and persuasion.

How long do bedbug eggs live?

Bedbugs usually hide their eggs in dark, secluded places in clusters of five to fifty pieces. A bedbug egg is less than one millimeter in size, which is comparable to the size of the eye of a needle. It is almost impossible to discover them by chance.

Depending on the temperature, it takes from 6 to 17 days until a translucent larva about one and a half millimeters in size emerges from the egg.

How to poison bed bugs?

Chemical methods remain the most effective and preferred in the fight against domestic parasites. The toxicity feared by proponents of traditional methods is constantly being reduced thanks to the release of new forms of insecticides. However, before removing bed bugs at home, take all necessary safety measures to avoid poisoning.

Protection against poisoning

• Protect your respiratory tract with a respirator. If you do not have a respirator, make a thick cotton-gauze bandage, but do not use ready-made gauze - they are too thin.

• Clothing must be closed - long sleeves and trousers, socks and shoes that can be washed. Protect your hair with a cap or scarf.

• Work as quickly as possible to reduce your time in the toxic environment.

• After finishing the treatment, immediately go into fresh air, remove all clothes, and wash your hands and face thoroughly.

photo from the site https://www.iney-cleaning.ru

Classification of chemicals

The form of release of insecticides can be different, and you will have to choose the most convenient one for yourself. In specialized stores you will find the following types of drugs:

• Liquid – Get (microencapsulated product with prolonged action, practically odorless), Foxide, Actellik, Forside, Primadid, etc. A sprayer is required for application.

• Aerosols – Carbazol, Perfos-P, Raptor, Reid, etc. They are very easy to apply, which is why they are most often used for non-professional processing.

• Dry products are all kinds of crayons and pencils, produced under the trade names Geradez, Mashenka, etc. They are suitable only as an aid.

• Smoke bombs - in Russia you can buy them under the names City and Quiet Evening. They cope with their tasks perfectly thanks to the ability of smoke to penetrate into all secret corners, furniture, textiles and even things folded in the closet.

Bed bugs: means of extermination from the people's piggy bank

photo from the site budetezdorovy.ru

The accumulated folk experience has its own opinion about what means should be used to eliminate bed bloodsuckers. Despite their rather controversial effectiveness, these methods are still used, but it is unreasonable to compare their work with chemical poisons.

• Wormwood and tansy. Fresh herbs will work to repel bedbugs from your bed until the exterminators arrive.

• Vinegar. It is recommended to thoroughly coat all possible surfaces with vinegar, and saturate the folds of upholstered furniture using a spray bottle.

• Hot mixture of 150 ml water, 20 ml turpentine and 20 ml kerosene

Thanks to this article, you not only know what bed bugs look like in a photo, but also how to get rid of these parasites that are robbing your loved ones of precious hours of a good night's rest.

How long do bedbug larvae live?

Before the larva (or nymph) becomes an adult, it goes through five stages of development, each time freeing itself from the old cuticle (skin). Molting begins only after the larva is saturated with blood. If a food source is always available, each stage lasts about 5-7 days. The entire period from hatching from an egg to an adult is on average 37 days.

But in the fight against parasites, we are more interested in how long bedbugs live without human blood. This determines whether they can somehow be exterminated by cutting off their food source.

How to get rid of parasites?

You can get rid of bedbugs in 2 ways.

1. Call the sanitary service at 8 (800) 775-22-97.
2. Get rid of insects yourself.

How to treat a house yourself?

The most important thing: get rid of adult individuals, which serve as the main source of spread of the rest. Before using chemicals, it is necessary to wet clean the room, disassemble furniture, remove carpets and peel off wallpaper. This is necessary in order to detect nests of parasites in all corners of the house.

It is important to treat cracks, cracks and all possible paths along which insects can move from apartment to apartment, as well as openings between doors and furniture, so that old bugs do not come back and new ones do not come from neighbors.

The product chosen for treatment must be safe for people, pets and indoor plants. The composition of the chemicals should not consist of substances to which insects have immunity: for example, you should not poison bedbugs with pyrethroids. Strong remedies will also not be beneficial, since the bedbugs will feel threatened and go into hibernation. When the remaining chemical wears off, the parasites will begin to multiply again.

An aerosol can be used for treatment. This product quickly disappears from the room, so when using it, you should repeat the treatment process 2-3 times. Bulk powders are also suitable for baiting parasites. They are the most resistant and long-lasting, in addition, they adhere well to surfaces that absorb moisture.

You can mix chemicals yourself (the main thing is to follow safety rules): make an emulsion from water and concentrate, and then spray the surfaces with a spray bottle. For a longer period of action, it is better to use products presented in the form of microcapsules.

When treating a room, special attention should be paid to disinsection of hard-to-reach places. Most likely, bedbugs are hiding there. Self-etching should be carried out several times, preferably with breaks during the week. In this case, the probability of complete disappearance of insects is greatest.

Popular chemicals for control

"Karabafos" is a drug used in agriculture to combat various types of insects. Once in the digestive system, it instantly destroys both adults and larvae. The drug also affects the nervous system of parasites, paralyzing their nerve endings, thereby immobilizing the insect. The only disadvantage of the product is that it can paralyze any living creature. Therefore, before using Karabafos, it is important to carefully read the instructions for use and follow the dosage standards.

“Dichlorvos” is a safe aerosol preparation used to remove insects in agriculture, industry and at home. This is one of the best pest control products that removes bedbugs from your home forever. “Dichlorvos” quickly destroys insects and disappears from surfaces in the shortest possible time. It is best to treat the apartment with this product several times a week until it is completely eliminated.

Hot steam is the fastest and most effective remedy. However, to use it, you should contact the sanitary service of GorSES, which will treat the room with fog heated to 90 degrees. The steam will heat the air in the apartment to the required temperature at which the bedbugs die. After heat treatment, you should leave the house for at least a day, and upon returning, carry out a thorough cleaning.

Reaction to starvation of bedbugs

To get rid of parasites, it is important to know exactly how long bedbugs live without people in the apartment, how often they feed and where they live. The myth that insects are overly resilient is so common that many people wonder if bed bugs can live 4 years and if dry bed bugs can survive.

Although bed bugs are designed to survive, they will die if they are starved of nutrients for a long period of time.

What happens to a bed bug if you don't feed it?

1. Life processes slow down. The insect goes into suspended animation.
2. The body shrinks and becomes flat.
3. The insect becomes inactive and does not reproduce.
4. Body growth stops.
5. It remains alive for an average of 142 days, depending on the species.

Hibernation continues until people enter the house. So the question of whether hibernating beetles can come back to life is really important.

If food is provided before the period of complete destruction, the insect will actually emerge from suspended animation and begin to perform its main functions - feeding and reproduction. This should be taken into account when starting to spray the poison.

To solve the problem, it is necessary to provide exposure to insecticides for 2-4 weeks. This happens because bedbugs do not disappear immediately, but gradually new ones appear, which are also exposed to the poison.

Found? It's time to destroy...

There is nothing more to say about this. The basics are indicated; in principle, there cannot be any additives. Now you know how to detect bed bugs. The management should help in ambiguous situations, and the reality will certainly become obvious to you!

PS Don't forget to find out on the website about the most effective methods of fighting enemies. This will both save a lot of money and restore comfortable conditions faster. For example, you can read an article on how to get rid of bedbugs forever, or use the search to find a more suitable manual for your problem.

Scientific research on the survival rate of bedbugs at different temperatures

Entomologists have conducted many studies to find out how long bed bugs live without food, what their diet is, how they digest blood, whether they live in unoccupied homes, and what affects their lifespan.

Some studies have been aimed at studying and describing the heat resistance of bedbugs.

Particular attention was paid to the question of whether it is realistic to destroy bedbugs by hunger and cold. The results showed that lack of food is not a problem for most individuals, and bed bugs can easily tolerate starvation for long periods of time.

However, the survival of insects indoors is greatly affected by frost, and when they are exposed to it, the life cycle is reduced to a minimum - this has been noted in a number of scientific papers.

The American entomologist Benoit J.B. plunged especially deeply into these studies. He used several temperature regimes to influence pests and came to the conclusion that animals subjected to short-term freezing not only survived, but were also “hardened.”

This is very important when working with household pests - subzero temperatures are required for a certain period of time to kill them.

A home freezer is suitable for controlling bed bugs in bedding or clothing. The ideal solution is a combination of these two methods: cryotherapy and heat treatment using a steam generator.

Other scientists have conducted research into the optimal combination of temperature and time for treating parasites. They determined at what temperature insects die - a temperature of -30 degrees.

If you cool the room to this temperature, you can only put the bedbugs into suspended animation, from which they will emerge as soon as the temperature returns to normal.

Results of a study of the effects of different temperatures on bedbugs

Bed bugs at each stage of development were placed in a chamber where the temperature could be precisely calibrated.

In general, all bedbugs died at temperatures of 48, 49, 50 °C and above (see Fig. 1 below), and during the remaining periods of temperature exposure (see Fig. 2), with the exception of 10 minutes at 48 °C, 90% of the bedbugs were killed.

Diagram No. 1. Bed bug survival rate based on temperature

Diagram No. 2. Death rate of bed bugs based on temperature

Bed bug eggs were completely killed at temperatures of 49, 50, 51 °C and above (see chart 3 below), and exposure times of 5 minutes for 51 °C, 20 minutes for 50 °C and 40 minutes for 49 °C ( see diagram 4 below).

Diagram No. 3. Survival rate of bed bug eggs based on temperature

Diagram No. 4. The rate of death of bed bug eggs based on temperature

Although bed bugs hibernate and can survive long periods of suspended animation, exposure to certain temperatures is fatal.

Most types of bedbugs enter the phase of active growth and reproduction when the temperature rises to +30 degrees Celsius.

Bed bugs: how to get rid of them at home

To eliminate domestic bloodsuckers, you will have to work hard to ensure that your efforts are crowned with success in the shortest possible time. Every day of delay increases the number of insects, and insufficiently thorough treatment leads to the fact that surviving individuals become resistant to the insecticide used, and pass on such immunity to their offspring. You can destroy bedbugs using one of the following methods, or using a combination of them:

• Physical;

• Chemical;

• Folk;

• Professional.

Calling professional exterminators is not cheap, so they resort to it in extreme cases. People who have bed bugs choose how to get rid of them on their own from the first two groups, using folk remedies to prevent recurrence.

photo from the site https://dezins.ru/

Answers on questions

To understand how long bedbugs live without human blood, you need to know how their body works and whether they have other food sources.

Can bedbugs live without air?

These are hardy insects that adapt well to any conditions. However, in order to save resources, the body enters diapause when there is minimal oxygen consumption. Insects cannot fully survive without air.

Does a bug need water to live and eat?

Parasites do not need liquid. Their outer shells are well hydrated and they do not need to drink to stay alive. Insects are able to survive without water. They receive liquid food that satisfies several body needs at the same time. These include the need for moisture.

How long do bedbugs live under ideal living conditions?

When considering the most suitable environmental conditions, insects survive for 12 months (1 year) in the same environment. The slightest deviation and the reverse process will occur. The lifespan of insects will decrease or increase. Environmental parameters can be adjusted to influence the pests themselves.

Bedbugs, unlike cockroaches, can survive without water.

What you need to know about bedbugs

The most common question is: how to detect bedbugs in or in bed. It directly and unequivocally confirms all of the above. Let’s just imagine a situation in which a person could have such a problem: he is bitten by insects at night, in the morning he wakes up covered in bites, suspects that they are bedbugs, starts looking for them, and does not find them. Why? That's right, because there aren't any in the bed. And therefore you need to look for them not in the bed, but in other places in the room.

Another question may be related to this: who, besides bedbugs, can bite in bed. The situation is the same - a person is bitten, but he does not find bedbugs. And he begins to wonder who it is. It gets to the point where he thinks he was bitten by cockroaches. We have already said before that this is practically impossible and cockroaches do not bite people. Although in reality other insects can bite a person in bed. But first things first.

First: where do bed bugs come from? They come on their own. They are either taken into the premises from neighbors, or people accidentally bring them in with bags, furniture or household appliances. Animals cannot tolerate bedbugs. Only people - either the residents themselves or their guests. All. There are no other reasons for the appearance of bedbugs in the apartment.

Indoors, they hide in a variety of places - wherever they are not visible, where they are not disturbed by people and pets, where they are difficult to reach, and from where they can quickly run to a sleeping person at night. They can be everywhere in the bedroom, and even outside it.

And, by the way, immediately after an apartment is infested, people practically do not feel bedbugs. Usually 1-2 bedbugs get into an apartment, rarely more. And it takes several months until they have offspring and there are so many of them that the bites will be regular and multiple. That is, usually if bedbugs appear in your bed, it means that they entered the apartment no less than a few weeks or months ago. The only exception is insect baiting from your neighbors, when bedbugs can move to you in hordes and bite you a lot at once.

It is from here, from different places in the house, that they come to bed at night. It takes a bedbug less than a minute to run from the opposite corner of the room to the bed, that is, they do not have an urgent need to settle in the mattress. However, if there are secluded safe places here, in the bed or on the sofa, the bedbugs remain here for the day.

By the way, we already talked about sofas. This is a separate big song. Sofas have a huge number of places where bedbugs can hide, and therefore they are found in them much more often than in beds. Moreover, the older the sofa and the more opportunities bedbugs have to get under the upholstery into the filling, the more likely it is that they will be there and the sofa will need to be thrown away.

Beds are better in this regard because they have fewer places for bedbugs to hide. Consequently, beds almost never have to be thrown away.

However, you also need to look for bedbugs in the bed itself before poisoning them. To do this, the bed needs to be disassembled. The mattress is removed and carefully inspected - there may be bedbugs on its seams, in the places where it touches the frame and sides. Here you can also find dry chitinous coverings shed by insects during molting, the bugs themselves of different ages - both adult brown and young nymphs, white and translucent - all this must be carefully examined.

If the mattress is intact, then there are no bedbugs inside it. If it is full of holes, then perhaps there are parasites inside it and it is easier to throw it out than to remove insects from it.

Next, you need to inspect the sheathing itself and the entire frame, all the cracks and joints of wooden structures. It doesn’t matter whether you find bedbugs or traces of their activity here or not, this entire frame needs to be disassembled: remove the sheathing, unscrew the frame, put all the parts separately from each other.

The fact is that bedbugs, due to their flattened bodies, can even climb into the cracks in the joints between boards, and until you unscrew these boards from each other, you will not see these parasites. And when all these elements lie separately, you will be able to see how many bedbugs there are in the bed.

By the way, bedbugs also live in iron beds. Both in cribs and folding beds. Moreover, where the metal tubes are not closed with plugs, they get inside and cannot be seen there. But, in fact, this is the easiest way to kill them - just close the tube with a stopper and that’s it, the bugs won’t be able to get out of there.

In practice, cases are different. There are situations when a bed or sofa is completely disassembled, and there are no bedbugs visible at all. Or you get 1-2 parasites. And it happens that the mattress is removed, and underneath it there are crowds of bedbugs running all over the boards. But almost always, if bedbugs are found in a bed, they can also be found in other places in the room.

Here we also need to say how to find out that there are bedbugs in the bed.