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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.