Bedbugs are insects that feed on blood. They are nocturnal, and the rest of the time they prefer to hide from view. Parasites do not like sunlight and artificial light, so they try to hide from it, often choosing human housing. They make their way not only into wooden houses, but also do not stop in front of stone buildings, so their appearance no longer surprises even residents of high-rise buildings.
Bedbugs settle in warmth and away from lighting. As a shelter, they prefer to choose pieces of furniture, baseboards, walls and wallpaper, as well as book bindings. The appearance of several individuals already poses a significant danger - thanks to very rapid reproduction, over time, a whole colony of blood-sucking insects can appear within the walls of your house. And if you don’t take care of how to get rid of bedbugs in your apartment while there are only a few of them, in a few months you will not be able to do without a special team of exterminators.
What do bedbugs look like?
There are about 40,000 species of bedbugs in the world, not all of which are considered pests. At home, bed bugs are most often found, but they cannot be called harmless.
Bed bugs grow to sizes of 9 mm, but males are usually a couple of millimeters smaller than females. The flat body of the bug can be yellow, brown or dark brown, depending on the saturation of blood. The insect's head has a proboscis, with which bedbugs pierce the skin and feed.
Instead of teeth, there are bristles on the upper and lower jaws of bedbugs, and the jaws themselves perform two main functions in nutrition: through them not only blood enters the insect’s body, but also saliva is released for the bite.
Unlike fleas, bedbugs cannot jump high, but the tenacious notches on their legs and low weight are no less serious advantages. Thanks to them, the parasite can move along vertical planes, crawl along walls, ceilings and penetrate into a person’s home.
Peak bedbug activity occurs between 1 a.m. and 7 a.m. During this period, it is much easier for him to get close to a sleeping person or pet to eat. It only takes 10 minutes for the insect to get enough blood for the next 5 days and hide until the next meal. When a bug becomes saturated with blood, its body grows, and its predator functions and reaction speed decrease. Therefore, it is during the period of satiety that he is most vulnerable and clumsy.
A good sense of smell is a bedbug’s secret weapon. He is able to sense a person at a distance of several meters.
Bedbugs reproduce rapidly - a female is capable of laying about 5 eggs in just 1 day, and more than 500 in her entire life. Such hordes settle in certain places:
- Behind the baseboards
- Inside and behind cabinets
- In upholstered furniture
- In carpets
- In picture frames
- In sockets
- In cases with clothes
- In the spines of books
- In ventilation systems
- In household appliances
- In beds
Since pests like to hide in secluded corners, before getting rid of bedbugs in an apartment, they check all hard-to-reach places.
Insects live up to 14 months and during this time they can flood an apartment and become a real disaster for its residents.
How dangerous are bedbugs to humans?
Bedbugs are not just unfavorable neighbors, but dangerous creatures. In one night, a bug can make 7-10 painful bites that cause irritation and itching. In addition to the fact that bedbugs feed on human blood, they are carriers of allergies, infections and diseases that can lead to serious complications, including death.
The main danger of such a parasite appearing in the house is their hidden lifestyle and the absence of painful sensations after a bite in some people. Since bedbugs are active and feed at night, detecting their presence in the house during the day can be extremely problematic. All people react differently to bites: some experience redness and distinct marks, while others do not feel any discomfort at all.
Bedbug bites can lead to:
- Skin redness
- Itching and scabies
- Urticaria
- Dermatitis
- Allergic reactions
- Asthma
- Anaphylactic shock
- Insomnia
- Skin infections
Despite the fact that bedbugs feed on blood, they cannot transmit HIV infection to humans during feeding.
Children and pregnant women are most vulnerable to parasite bites, since many medications are contraindicated for them. If allergies develop, you should immediately consult a doctor to get appropriate help.
Pets can also become victims of bedbugs. Most often, insects attack small animals - rabbits, hamsters, guinea pigs, parrots. Dogs and cats are less likely to be attacked due to their thicker skin and denser fur. Redness, bumps and lumps appear at the bite sites, and hair may fall out. But these signs do not always indicate bedbugs - other insects can also be the culprits. Only a veterinarian can point out the source and advise how to get rid of fleas or ticks.
Appearance of a bug
You can see what street bugs look like in the photo below. They have a flattened body resembling an irregular pentagon, a proboscis and six legs. In our article you can read about the habits and characteristics of the insect.
It is not difficult to recognize the forest bug among its other relatives. Its body has a characteristic shape, wide and dense and of a certain color.
There are several known species of these insects, and each color is quite original. On the Internet you can find many interesting photos of representatives of different types of forest bugs.
The green wood bug usually lives in Russia. The insect has the unique ability to change its color. In spring it is disguised as the first leaves and therefore has a light green color. In summer, brown spots appear on the chitinous shell. Towards the end of autumn, a brown tree beetle appears in the forest and blends in with the fallen leaves. This allows him to become invisible and protect himself from enemies.
Insects can travel considerable distances, although they rarely need to fly. Long antennae are located on the head of the beetle and smell glands are located on the chest.
Important! All types of forest bugs have a characteristic, very unpleasant odor.
Habitat
Forest bugs are ideally camouflaged to match the color of foliage or tree bark, so in nature you can find individuals whose color varies from pale green to brown. Forest bugs primarily inhabit forests and their surroundings. With the onset of cold weather, they hibernate and spend the winter under fallen leaves or hiding under the bark of old trees.
Woodbugs love to live in an atmosphere where the ideal temperature and humidity are maintained. When the situation changes and there is severe cooling, warming or humidity fluctuates greatly, insects begin to wander and can find comfortable conditions in a person's apartment.
Where could they be
To destroy bedbugs, you need to know where their nests may be. You can get rid of these insects only if you simultaneously treat all their habitats - nests. If at least one living individual remains (a female at any stage of development), everything will have to be repeated. And they are so tenacious that they will definitely remain. Until now, they have not found a remedy that would kill all the bedbugs at once.
For the fight against bedbugs to be effective, you need to know where they can hide.
Bed bugs usually make nests near the feeding area - 2-3 meters from the bed. In this area, they can live in any crack, recess, or hole that is larger than 0.5 mm in size. Here's where to look:
- Under and in mattresses.
- In the bed frame.
- In bedside tables, chairs, armchairs, cabinets.
- On the back of carpets and rugs.
- Behind the baseboard.
- In sockets, switches, electrical appliances, in electrical wiring channels.
- Behind the peeling wallpaper.
- In the cracks between the floor/ceiling and the wall.
- In the cavities of frames and frames of paintings and photographs.
- Under floor coverings and in floor crevices.
- In the recesses of the wall.
- In clothes.
This is what bedbug bites look like.
Actually, all places where it is dry and warm at a distance of a couple of meters from the bed can be breeding grounds for bedbugs. Here's an example: if the plaster is behind, then they will be behind it. Or under the laminate. Or under linoleum. In any cavity.
Inspection Process: Example
When fighting bedbugs, you need to thoroughly inspect all possible places of their nests. For example, in furniture, inspect the bottom and legs. Remove the back wall if possible. Be sure to pull out drawers and shelves. Inspect all joints of furniture parts, under fastening and mounting plates, in recesses for fasteners. Even remove the handles and check for bedbugs.
If you want to find all bedbug nests, remove all parts that you can
This is how meticulously and scrupulously everything needs to be checked. Otherwise, even the best remedy will not help. When processing, go through even those places where theoretically there should not be bedbugs. They are found in strange and remote places. And if one survives, then after a while there will be a hundred again, and then a thousand.
Signs of appearance
Leaving their usual habitat, forest bugs can appear in a person’s home. This mainly occurs at the end of summer, when temperature conditions and humidity can change dramatically. In search of a pleasant environment, insects rush closer to humans.
Street bugs rarely end up in an apartment, because they are not human parasites and can only enter the house by accident. This usually happens when forests - their natural habitat - become too wet or vice versa when forest fires occur.
These smelly forest dwellers may only scare people with their unattractive appearance, but they are harmless.
If you find a stink bug in your home, you must act immediately. A female can lay up to 100 eggs, so you need to start fighting before the bed bugs multiply. Stink bugs are not a sign of lack of cleanliness and do not cause damage - so be calm and gentle in the fight!
Steam generator
This destruction method is based on exposure to high temperatures.
The steam generator should be used to treat all surfaces that allow this, all pieces of furniture and textiles in the house, including carpets, joints between the floor and the wall.
Many people advise treating the walls, but there is a chance that the wallpaper will move away from the surface under such influence. also use powerful steam generators .
Don't kill street bugs
To remove the insect, you have several options. It is important, first of all, that you take the six-legged animal safely outside. If you crush or kill them, they will start to stink and you will have to live in a foul-smelling apartment for days.
- Use paper first
You can use a broom to move the insect onto a sheet of paper and then release it into nature.
- With a vacuum cleaner
Alternatively, you can also use a vacuum cleaner. To protect your device from the evil smell of six-legged creatures, use the following trick: attach a stocking or the end of pantyhose to the vacuum cleaner pipe and suck the beetle at the lowest level. Then you can release the intruder from the stocking to freedom.
- Proprietary bug spray
Instead of buying chemical bug spray, you can make your own. Simply mix 120ml vinegar, 60ml dish soap and 250ml hot water and place in a spray bottle.
Clove oil, ammonia, and juniper can help drive out invaders with their strong scent.
You can prevent intrusion with simple techniques:
- Spray or wipe window and door frames with vinegar, the smell will keep insects away.
- Check your attic, through which six-legged criminals can enter your home. Seal the cracks with silicone or sealant.
- Intruders are attracted to light, so you need to minimize lighting outside your home.
- Place sticky traps on your windowsills so you can catch the bugs before they get into your home.
Vinegar and ammonia
It is a mistake to think that a bite or ammonia has a detrimental effect on bedbugs. They simply do not like the smell of these substances, nothing more.
Therefore, treatment with these drugs
more suitable for preventive measures .
A solution with the addition of vinegar is prepared on a water basis in a 1:1 ratio. The resulting composition is used to wipe windows, both inside and outside, because special bristles on the legs of bedbugs allow them to easily move along the outer walls of the house. Moreover, they can cover a distance of about 1 meter in just 1 minute. If there are screens on the windows, you can also treat them with vinegar and check the quality of their fit to the frame, since insects have a flat body and can penetrate into the narrowest gaps. They process slopes, window sills and ebbs, furniture, baseboards, and floors. It is reasonable to periodically carry out such treatment if you live in an old house, where complaints about the activity of various insects are much more common. If you use ammonia, it can be added to the water during wet cleaning at the rate of 2 tbsp. alcohol to a bucket of water. After evaporation, ammonia creates a transparent film on the surface, which has a repellent odor for insects for a long time.
Reproduction
After hibernation (April-May), insects move to places where they have enough food. It will not be difficult to determine what forest bugs feed on, since their accumulation is greatest in places where young trees and the first green spaces grow. Their main product is vegetable juice.
The new offspring of insects are in close proximity to forest restaurants. Under favorable temperature conditions, the female can lay eggs twice a season on the inside of the leaves.
The forest beetle reproduces without leaving its feeding area. The female lays hundreds of eggs on the leaves and stems of plants and holds them so that each egg is difficult to remove with a fingernail.
The development of the egg takes about 10 days, after which the larva emerges, which is similar in appearance to the adult, but has a smaller size and a slightly different color.
The transformation of the larva into an adult takes about 30 days. During this time, the future forest green beetle will have time to shed several skins. The larva goes through five stages in its development. An adult insect has a body length of about 15 mm.
Boiling water
Bed bugs cannot tolerate high temperatures. Therefore, many recommend simply scalding the insects with boiling water.
Yes, every adult that comes into contact with boiling liquid will indeed die instantly.
Such a short-term effect will not have on the larvae . And it is simply not possible to treat all the walls in the room and pieces of furniture with this product. Boiling water can scald baseboards, naturally, in dismantled form, cornices, walls and floors lined with tiles.
Harm or benefit of a bug
In fact, bedbugs are harmless to people, except for bed burglars who feed on the blood of animals and people. Wood bugs bite people much less often than bed bugs, but they are dangerous because they transmit serious diseases.
Harm
Forest bugs can really cause harm when they settle en masse on ornamental, garden or food crops.
Bugs in the forest, with an unpleasant odor and ugly appearance, do not harm anyone. But among them there are varieties that can attack farmland and cause significant damage. They inject poison into the sprouts, which leads to the death of young shoots.
Insects may also appear in the garden. The reason for this invasion is a strong drop in temperature or forest fires, so hordes of insects move into gardens in search of food. The most common targets of attack are raspberries and gooseberries. Forest bugs not only destroy raspberries, they also leave a smell on the berries, which they also sometimes eat.
Benefit
However, there are also very useful predatory bugs that destroy many harmful insects. These include Antocoris and other bugs belonging to the same family. They suck out aphids, mites, small caterpillars, and egg laying of many pests.
There are even bugs with which they try to fight the Colorado potato beetle, for example the perillus bug (unfortunately, it is very heat-loving).
Predatory bugs are usually distinguished by greater mobility than herbivorous species and always have a “slender”, elongated body with long legs.
FUN!
There is no benefit from the insect. But there is one recipe that can be used wisely. The raspberry beetle is used in folk medicine to produce vodka tincture for alcoholism. The bitter taste of the drug and intolerance to the smell causes disgust and rejection of alcoholic beverages, which discouraged drunkards from their destructive illness.
Should you be afraid of a forest bug bite?
The bite of a forest beetle does not pose any danger, especially since these insects are not at all inclined to bite humans. Many people confuse these insects with mites, but this is completely incorrect: mites are warm-blooded parasites (and their bite can cause health problems), while forest bugs parasitize plants. Diseases are carried only by tropical bugs.
Of course, there are bedbugs whose bite can be very painful and unpleasant. These rather large predators (up to 2 cm), feeding on small invertebrates, have a long, piercing proboscis, with which they hunt spiders, imitating the prey being caught in a web. The bite of a predator is painful, but predators themselves rarely enter a human home, and cases of their bites are rare.
Who can be confused with
In central Russia there are many varieties: the berry bug, which damages the leaves and fruits of various berry crops, and the meadow bug, which lives on herbaceous vegetation and ornamental crops.
There are different types of cruciferous bugs: the cabbage bug, which damages cabbage, radishes, turnips, etc. Pests include the sorrel bug, some lace bugs, and the pear bug.
There are bedbugs that can cause harm only occasionally. These are soldier bugs that prefer fallen seeds and fruits, organic debris and dead insects, but sometimes damage seedlings of garden crops.
Stink bugs should not be confused with their smaller cousins, bed bugs. A telltale sign of a bed bug infestation is small black spots on wallpaper or bed frames because the animals have left their excrement there.
How to get rid of forest bugs - the harm of forest bugs
Experts advise against using strong chemicals or killing insects. Even if you observe excessive activity of these insects and they are literally “confiscating” your home, it is better to simply try to prevent their invasion.
This can be done using a regular mosquito net. The forest guest is quite large and cannot pass this reliable barrier.
As a rule, infestations of forest bugs in the city are temporary, and the insects soon return to their usual habitats. Don't worry about wood bugs in your home. This plant pest is absolutely safe for humans.
To fight forest beetles, it is advisable to simply collect them in a pile and throw them out the window.
Alternatively, dissolve two bars of soap in ten liters of water and treat garden fruit.
As a precaution, it is necessary to collect and destroy all fallen leaves on the site so as not to leave the forest bug a comfortable shelter for wintering.
Products and chemicals
When bedbugs are found in your home, experts do not recommend using strong chemicals or calling a special service to get rid of them. Insects do not settle forever in a city apartment. They soon return to their natural habitat. Once you find a forest dweller, simply throw it out the window. Insects are not dangerous, but they can interfere with the usual way of life and sometimes harm indoor plants.
Fighting forest bugs in the garden
If all measures do not give the desired result and forest bugs continue to cause damage to berry and vegetable crops, you can resort to extreme measures, the use of chemicals.
The most effective in this case are:
- chlorophos;
- dichlorvos;
- phosphamide
All these products can be purchased in stores. Destruction must be carried out using personal protective equipment.
Traditional methods
There are many different ways to solve the problem of how to get rid of forest bugs that have settled in the garden or are in a city apartment. They are much easier to deal with than bed bugs. It is advisable to start exterminating insects in the garden with popular recipes that will successfully solve the problem.
You can proceed as follows:
- Try collecting all adult parasites by hand and removing their larvae from the leaves;
- Prepare an infusion based on onion peel or mustard powder and spray the plants 2-3 times a day.
- You can plant a cohosh plant (a perennial of the ranunculaceae family), popularly referred to as “black cohosh.”
Preparing to kill parasites
Before you start exterminating insects using one or another means, you need to check all the premises step by step.
- Inspect all small objects - books, toys, dishes, small equipment, etc. for the presence of bedbugs or their larvae. Regardless of the inspection results, pack your belongings in sealed, thick plastic bags and remove them from the apartment. This will protect clean things from being colonized by parasites, and the room from the spread of insects from infected things;
- We collect bed linen, things hanging on the bed or chair, curtains and put them in the washing machine. They must be washed at the highest possible temperature. Those fabrics that cannot be washed at high temperatures, and other things that do not fit into the washing machine, must be packed in sealed bags and left for a while;
- Next, remove all paintings, photo frames, clocks, panels and other decor from the walls;
- Empty the bookcases, clear out all the books, move the furniture away from the walls and unscrew the baseboards;
- Furniture that can be disassembled must also be placed in separate bags and removed from the premises. If the covers are removed, they are placed in a separate bag;
- Next, all indoor plants and pets are taken out;
- After the apartment has been vacated as much as possible, it is necessary to treat it with an insecticide strictly according to the instructions or the chosen folk remedy;
- After this, all isolated items are processed. It is advisable to do this outside.
Prevention
To get rid of stink bugs, you don't have to kill them. When beetles feel threatened or die, they release their smelly secretions.
The best tips for fighting forest bugs:
- Mosquito screens on windows and doors are most effective against stink bugs.
- Just don't keep windows and doors open in the summer.
- Since insects are attracted to heat and light, especially in the evening, do not ventilate with the lights on. This procedure is also suitable for other troublemakers such as moths and flies.
- As soon as the forest guest has entered the home, he can and should be caught and released again outside. This is best done with a glass and a piece of paper or cardboard.
- The use of toxic insecticides is not recommended. They harm not only insects, but possibly also their own health, especially in enclosed spaces.
