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If you wake up one morning with prickly lumps on your body, you will probably think that you had been bitten by mosquitoes or ants the night before, but there is also a possibility that bedbugs have got at you. If this occurs in your own bed, then you have problems. If you are in a hotel, go and make a complaint to the manager.

You can be sure that most hotel bosses will take complaints about bed bugs very gravely, because it is well known that the incidents of bedbugs are increasing fast and have been since 1995. It is also everyday knowledge that large compensation awards have been made against hotels. Some of them were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Most so-called ‘bed bugs’ will only feed on people if their favourite host, often poultry, are not on hand, but there is one that only sucks 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 extensive use of DDT in residences and hotels to eradicate 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 bed bugs 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 tint to them. However, they can also be white to yellowish. Sometimes, 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 squirts spittle into you and the other sucks blood out. The saliva contains anti-coagulant and a pain-killer, so that you do not know that you have been bitten until long after the bedbug has gone home.

Some people never know, because they are not allergic to the spittle, others get a bump or slight swelling almost right away, 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 parts of the world that are less involved with hygiene, you must be careful about not taking bedbugs home with you. They will not stay on your body, but they may lay eggs in your clothing or hide in your suitcase. Therefore, either before you go home or immediately 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 piece, writes on many topics, but is at present involved with bed bugs extermination. If you are interested in this, please go over to our website now at Picture Of Bed Bugs for further information.

You cannot tell where bed bugs are living; you cannot even guess, just by looking at a building. You could be sitting in a chair in a posh hotel waiting for someone to come down or you could be having tea at a friend’s house and you are equally as likely to pick up a bed bug.

The developed Western world has not been through this sort of situation for about sixty years. However, since 1995, bed bugs have been increasing practically unbridled and we are approaching the situation people were living in before the Second World War. That is a very sad state of affairs indeed.

Especially when you realize that before the war, you could lay a bit of poison down and kill them. Nowadays, you cannot, because some bedbugs have become resistant to a lot of the insecticides normally available to family households. So, in a way we are worse off than we were 60 years ago and unless something comes to our aid, it can only get worse.

Although bedbugs wreak most mayhem in a bed, that is not normally where people get them from. They also reside in the folds of fabric in the seats of buses, trains, taxis, hotel rooms, restaurants and even airplanes. However, bedbugs are not taken home stuck to your skin like a flea or a tick.

Rather they will creep into a hem or a pocket or under a collar, drawn by your body heat or breath and either go to sleep or lay eggs. A female can lay 300 eggs in a single day - not a lot in insect terms, but do you want 301 bedbugs in your bedroom closet by the end of next week?

I am certain that you have become aware how difficult it is to completely avoid the risks of picking up bed bugs and taking them home. Bed bugs have natural enemies, but it is arguable that you would rather have bed bugs than the insects that prey on them - cockroaches, ants, spiders and centipedes - and insecticides are not always effective.

The one thing that certainly kills them, besides being trodden on by a size ten army boot, is heat. No stages of the bedbug’s life can withstand temperatures above 45c.

This may be significant, because modern washing powders are meant to get clothes clean at 30c, thus saving electricity, but they also inadvertently save the lives of the bedbugs on your clothes as well. You can make sure that your clothes are bedbug-free by washing them at 46-50c and you can kill existing bedbugs in your house by steam cleaning it, which is the professional approach to exterminating an infestation of bedbugs.

It is time for people to be aware of this fairly new threat to their well-being. The key things you can do are: acquaint yourself with what a bedbug looks like and have your clothing cleaned at temperatures above 46c if you think that you may have been exposed to an infestation of bed bugs.

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

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

You see, the difficulty is that bed bugs are pretty much resistant 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 carried 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 acquire bed bugs? Normally, you just pick them up and carry them home or someone does it for you. It is thought that foreign travel and immigration are primarily responsible for the original members of our new bed bug community.

Nowadays, you can pick them up anyplace where people go: taxis, cinemas, restaurants, hotels, motels, cars, buses and planes. Even in the doctor’s surgery.

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

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

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 usually 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 about 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 couple of dozen females laying eggs in your mattress, it will take less than a fortnight before dozens of baby bedbugs (called nymphs) are hatching out every day and then one of their relations will lead them right to you.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many topics, but is at present concerned with how do you get bed bugs? If you are interested in this, please visit our website now at Picture Of Bed Bugs for further information.

Bed bugs are making a massive revival in the West. They were practically wiped out in the Fifties due to the widespread use of DDT, which has subsequently 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. Fortunately, bedbugs do not transmit human diseases, although there is no known reason why they should not. They feed by inserting two tubes into the host’s skin and squirting spittle containing anaesthetic and anticoagulant through one and drawing 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 spittle is responsible for the allergic reaction that most people undergo 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 infected, 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 pile of your furniture including your bed.

The main refuge locations for bedbugs are mattresses, sofas, curtains, clothes, pillows and rugs. They may have to be thrown out too. In very severe cases, you will have to move out for weeks while your dwelling is being cleaned.

Other favourite hiding locations are furniture, the bed frame, skirtings, architrave, loose wall paper and broken plaster. Sometimes whole plasterboard partition walls will have to be removed, as might skirtings and architraves. Another way of fighting 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 found 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 fumigated.

It is time to be aware of bedbugs, they are not a serious health threat, but they are not pleasant 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 piece, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with getting rid of bedbugs? If you are interested in this, please go over to our website now at Picture Of Bed Bugs for further details.

Although people are severely affected by an influx of bed bugs, the medical authorities proclaim that they are not a significant health hazard. Tell that to those who are suffering from bed bugs! Bed bugs are not known to pass on disease, that is a fact, but they instigate paranoia and insomnia which can have far ranging results.

On top of this, bed bugs are very difficult to eradicate from one’s home. The difficulty is that bedbugs are almost totally resistant to insecticides. This is because they have a thick waxy coat which stops chemicals from attacking the insect. Bedbugs are like a cross between a beetle and a tick.

Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to eradicate an infestation of bed bugs on your own. Bedbugs are susceptible to heat, so you can steam clean your house to get rid of bedbugs, but the only guaranteed method is to call in professional pest controllers.

If you think that you might have a bedbug infestation, there are a number of things that you must look out for. Firstly, the bugs themselves: if you have a great deal of clutter in your accommodation like heaps of newspapers, heaps of ironing or clothes, move them and be on the look out for insects running for cover. Bedbugs are actually fairly shy animals.

Look in your bed sheets. Look for specks of blood - your blood - and excrement - the bedbugs’ excrement, which looks like brown smears. You may also see shed skins - skins that the bedbugs have shed as part of their growing process, like a snake does.

Bed bugs live in beds, clutter, clothing, cracks, torn wallpaper, damaged plaster, under carpets and anywhere that is small and safe. They love to conceal themselves behind skirting boards, so sealing these up with mastic is a good idea.

The best way to be clear of bed bugs is not to have them in the first place, but this is easier said than done, because there is a real epidemic of bedbugs in the West. Almost all western cities are experiencing a plague of bedbugs and have been since the mid-Nineties.

Bed bugs do not only live in homes. Bed bugs live everywhere: not just in poor homes, not only in dirty houses and not only in houses even. A bedbug can be picked from anywhere where people congregate, because bedbugs move about by hitching a lift on a human carrier. You can pick up a bedbug on a bus, in a taxi, at the cinema, in your doctor’s surgery or in a hotel.

This is quite frightening, because it means that you can not be safe from bed bugs. If you hang your coat up in a cloakroom or travel on public transport, you have a very high chance of picking up a bed bug and one bedbug can lay 300 eggs. Then you are really in trouble.

Not just that, but bedbugs can go without food for a year, like fleas can, so if you move into a ‘new’ apartment or house, these insects could be lying dormant waiting for you to give them a wake-up call.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many subjects, but is at present involved with bed bugs spray. If you are interested in this, please go over to our website now at Picture Of Bed Bugs for more details.