Identifying bugs in house: Identify Common Household Bugs | Insect ID Guide

Some, like the flour beetles and the grain beetles, attack food products in homes. They also damage food in production facilities and stores. Some damage lawns and landscapes. Immature June beetles, called grubs, attack the roots of grass. The elm leaf beetle damages trees by eating the leaves.

Beneficial Beetles

Many beetles are beneficial insects. The lady beetle (often called ladybug) feeds on plant pests like aphids and mealybugs. Gardeners appreciate these insects and try to keep them in the garden.

Sometimes lady beetles can become nuisances. In the late summer and fall, homeowners can find hundreds clustered on the outside of homes. They are trying to invade homes for shelter through the winter or are looking to escape inclement conditions.

More Beetles

Learn about more beetles types.

Larder Beetle

Dermestes lardarius (L.)

Pantry Beetle

Order: Coleoptera

Plaster Beetle

Family Lathridiidae

Sawtoothed Grain Beetle

Oryzaephilus surinamensis (L.)

Shiny Spider Beetle

Mezium affine

Stink Beetle

Eleodes

Warehouse Beetle

Warehouse Beetle

Whitemarked Spider Beetle

Ptinus fur

How to find out if there are bedbugs at home and how to find them in an apartment

• By Wil Malinoshevsky
• About bedbugs

There are several unequivocal signs that clearly indicate that there are bed bugs in the house. If at least one of these signs is present, then parasites can be found here. Moreover, these signs are universal for apartments, for private houses, for hostels, hotels, change houses – for any premises in which bedbugs can start. And it often happens that these signs are in the house, but the bugs themselves are not found in the apartment.

Let’s see why this happens and how to find these parasites. First – how do you know that there are bugs in the house.

Sign #1: Bed bug bites

The first, most unambiguous sign is the traces of bedbug bites on the body. Firstly, they appear after the night, and secondly, they often form characteristic chains, as if the bug walked along the line and bit (this, in fact, was the case).

Another very characteristic sign of bed bug bites is their apparent selectivity. From the same lice and fleas, bites are noticeable in almost all people. But when an apartment is infected with bedbugs, it often seems that the bedbugs of some people in Monsieur bite, but do not touch others. This is not true. It’s just that in some people, the bite sites swell and turn red, while in others, no reaction to bites develops at all (or swelling and redness disappear before the person wakes up). And it seems that some people were bitten by insects, while others were not.

Separately, we spoke in detail about this delusion …

Therefore, by the way, there may be such a situation that bedbugs live in the apartment, and people do not even suspect about it. They are bitten, but they do not feel and do not worry. In such cases, you need to look for other signs of the presence of these parasites in the home.

If such bites appear, and regularly and all year round, it is almost certain that there are bedbugs in the house. By their bites, they can be confused with fleas, but by other signs they can be identified.

In one of the experiments, our volunteer experienced for himself what a person feels when he is bitten by bedbugs …

By the way, bites are the first thing you can understand about the appearance of bedbugs in the house. Bedbugs begin to bite before other traces of their vital activity appear.

Symptom No.

2: Excrement on the bed and in different places of the apartment

The second symptom is excrement that remains on the body, on the bed, on pillows, on the bed or sofa, and in general throughout the apartment, where the bugs run, and in the largest quantities near their nests and in the nests themselves.

Each such excrement looks like a small ball, like a small black dot, and, as a rule, one does not attract attention. They pay attention when there are a lot of them. Nevertheless, even from one such ball you can understand that bedbugs have started up in the house.

Bedbug nymph and feces left by other individuals

Sometimes the bug leaves such faeces directly on the human body, and the person himself, when tossing or itching in his sleep, can accidentally smear them. In this case, a noticeable gray stripe remains on the body. If you find such a strip on yourself, know that you have bed bugs.

Interestingly, these strips are not washed off with just water. Soap only. Apparently they have some kind of ink in them.

These excrements are easiest to detect in the morning on a white bed – although they are small, they contrast with the white cloth and attract attention. Also, when cleaning, try not to vacuum the floor near the bed and along the baseboards, but sweep it with a broom – these black balls will be easy to notice in a pile of dust.

Symptom #3: Blood on bed

Blood stains on the bed in the morning are relatively rare and people do not always pay attention to them. They are small, usually already having time to dry out, but it is still easy to notice them. Even one such spot is an unambiguous signal.

The reason for their appearance is the accidental crushing of a fed bug. He bit you, sucked blood, swelled up, and then you accidentally rolled over, lay down on him and crushed him. All blood – and this is from 1 to 7 micrograms, that is, a clearly visible drop – remains on the bed. If at least one such speck you found – that’s it, you need to look for the bugs themselves.

Trait #4: Chitinous integuments of bedbug nymphs

The chitinous coverings shed by the bed bug nymphs can be found in different parts of the apartment. For example, they can be found behind a retracted closet or bedside table, behind a baseboard, under a mattress on a bed, or inside a drawer in a sofa.

Such shed shells look just like dry bugs and can be of different sizes – large and small. But almost always they are yellowish and translucent. Most often they are found in clusters where the bugs have established their lair.

The smell of bed bugs, as not the most unambiguous sign

Sometimes the smell in the room is indicated as a sign of the presence of bedbugs. Like, the bugs smell like raspberries or cognac, and this smell can be felt.

In reality, this is not the case. In practice, the apartments do not smell the bugs themselves at all. Most likely, in order for it to smell of bedbugs, there must be an incredibly large number of them.

In normal quantities, the bugs do not smell much, their aroma is clogged with other smells in the apartment and sometimes does not even go beyond their shelter. Therefore, this sign should not be considered as significant.

How do you know if your neighbors have bed bugs without asking the neighbors about it?

But it is very difficult to find out if the neighbors have bed bugs without being in their apartment for a long time.

If you visit your neighbors, then take a closer look at their bedding, at the floor near the sleeping places – here you can see excrement with the naked eye. Look at children – if they are bitten by bedbugs, they can often involuntarily scratch themselves. But if you can’t go into the neighbors’ apartment, then you can’t be sure that they have a hotbed. Well, unless you see how crowds of bedbugs run from their door through the vestibule.

How to know for sure if bedbugs live in an apartment

And there is a universal way to understand that bed bugs live in your house. Get up at 4 a.m., turn on the light, and inspect your bed and your body. It is at this time that the parasites bite, and if they are in the room, then at least a few individuals will be on the bed. Even if there are very few of them and they do not bite every day, then 3-4 days in a row you need to get up, check the bed and you can find bedbugs. If for 3-4 days you have not been able to see them at night, most likely they are not in the room.

If any of these four signs are present, then you need to look for the bugs themselves. It is quite possible to do it yourself, there is nothing tricky in this, although you will have to work here.

Why are bed bugs so hard to find in an apartment?

The main difficulty in such a search is that the bugs hide during the day in places that are very difficult to reach. This is the key to their survival, only due to such skill in hiding they have safely lived next to people for thousands of years and, it seems, will continue to live in the future. And the more difficult it is to get to their hiding places, the more likely there will be bed bugs. Conversely, the easier it is for you to check some place in the room, the sooner there will be no parasites in this place, or the main breeding center will not be here.

However, for simplicity, you need to start with the most accessible locations.

Where to look for parasites in the first place

First, if you sleep on a bed, take off the sheets and inspect the mattress. Especially carefully study the seams and corners – there may be bugs themselves, and their larvae.

Then lift the mattress and inspect the wooden crate under it, the joints of all wooden structures, fasteners – bolt heads, nuts, washers.

Now unscrew all these fasteners and disassemble the bed. Inspect all joints of wooden structures. Everywhere there can be either bedbugs or traces of their vital activity.

If you sleep on a sofa, or on a folding chair, then disassemble them too. Here it is also important to walk with a screwdriver or a knife under the pads on the upholstery, and it is desirable to remove these pads altogether and check the space under them. All internal cavities of the sofa are also inspected. Then he disassembles, the backs, armrests, all the elements on which the soft parts come into contact with each other are unscrewed – it is here, between these soft elements, that the bugs most often hide.

If there are holes in the upholstery of the sofa, then with a high probability the bugs will be inside the filler. If you don’t see them anywhere else in the apartment, then most likely they don’t exist at all, and here, under the upholstery, they are also missing. With a strong infection, you can be sure that the bugs almost certainly climbed through the holes inside the filler and here, before processing, you will need to think: fill the sofa with a means so that it soaks the filler, or gut it, or even throw it out and buy a new one. If there are no holes and the upholstery does not move away from the wooden elements anywhere, that is, you can be sure that the bugs have not climbed under the upholstery, then in the future this will simplify the persecution of these insects.

Likewise, the crib needs to be dismantled and inspected. Bed bugs bite children in the same way as adults. And they settle in the crib just as willingly as in the “adult” sofa.

Then, move the bedside tables and cabinets away from the walls, look at their back walls, at the lower surfaces. Here and in general everywhere you are looking for either bedbugs, or their excrement or eggs, or the remains of chitinous covers. As a rule, in places where they accumulate, there is everything – eggs, bedbugs, feces, and a lot of discarded skins.

We are sometimes asked if we should look for bed bugs in our clothes. According to the experience of exterminators, bugs rarely settle in clothes. People often take out clothes, shift them, that is, bedbugs do not feel safe here and do not make nests here. By chance, single insects may be here, but there will be no clusters of them here. So there is no need to sort things out.

And you need to remove the skirting boards and inspect them, the space behind them and under the edges of the floor covering – here are the favorite places for bedbugs to hide. In heavily infested apartments, exterminators sometimes had to remove the parquet – under it there were also breeding centers for bedbugs, with eggs and larvae. But you need to look at the situation – if there are a lot of parasites behind the baseboards, then look beyond the edges of the linoleum or laminate. If there is also there – raise the linoleum itself.

In addition, household appliances should usually be inspected. You need to remove the case from the computer system unit, from the TV – bedbugs can also hide here. If there are bookshelves in the room, you need to remove books from them, and remove the shelves from the walls. And in them, and behind them, and in books – between the binding and the pages – there may be bedbugs.

And so on. Large toys, carpets, paintings on the walls, flower pots, furniture are all possible hiding places for bed bugs. They need to be inspected and look for the parasites themselves here.

It is very important in such searches not to stop only on the sofa, or on the baseboards, finding bedbugs here. The fact is that if you have already found bedbugs in the house, then in any case you will need to fight them. You are unlikely to be able to live with them, at least for a long time. And in order to get rid of them for sure, you will need to treat with poison, or steam, or simply warm all their nests to a high temperature. That is, to process all their nests, you need to open and understand exactly where they managed to settle, and where they have not yet climbed. If you do not do this, there is a risk that individual nests will be left untreated during baiting and parasites will survive in them. This increases the likelihood that getting rid of bedbugs will not work for good. That is, if you have already found these insects, then you need to identify all their nests in the apartment, so that later they can be processed, poisoned and destroyed here parasites.

Who can do all this for you?

The only way to make this task easier for yourself is to call a professional exterminator. His duties include, among other things, the identification and search of all insect nests in the apartment, the search and detection of other parasites and pests – cockroaches, fleas, ants – and then their complete destruction. That is, when a specialist is called, he will do all this hard work.

If you called the exterminator, but he does not do this and just pours the agent on the sofa and baseboards, then know that this is a bad exterminator, he most likely will not remove bedbugs, and by and large, for your money, he just shows you a low-quality show a la “treatment from bedbugs”.

If the exterminator is good, then he will surely be able to find and open most of the nests, at least those that are available, and completely destroy the bugs here. Such exterminators poison bedbugs every day on 2-3 objects, they have come across hundreds of different cases, they know where to look for bedbugs, how to find them the easiest way and by what means to kill them as efficiently as possible.

That is, such a specialist will definitely save you time and most likely will completely remove bedbugs in your apartment the first time. You can then use the same methods that you immediately found the bugs to check the room again and make sure that the bugs have hatched. So look for these parasites, and if you find them, call and don’t delay. The sooner you find them, the easier, faster and cheaper it will be to withdraw them.

You can order an inspection of the apartment and destruction from bedbugs at
https://dezincity.ru/klopy/

Bed bugs, where do they come from and how to get rid of them? Dezinservis St.

Petersburg

Bed bugs have always been considered one of the most vile and harmful types of parasites. These uninvited neighbors bite you, preventing you from sleeping peacefully. The bite of these insects causes severe allergic reactions, which is the reason that the residents of the apartment are not immediately aware of such a settlement. Parasites of this species make themselves felt only late at night, so it is simply impossible to detect them during the day. They choose different places for their colonies. For example, wallpaper joints or book bindings.

The process of reproduction of bed bugs takes several weeks, after which hungry offspring of several dozen individuals are born. A female bed bug can lay over 50 eggs at a time. Therefore, if you find reddish-brown creatures on your bedding, then it’s time to sound the alarm. Your apartment is occupied by bedbugs.

After a bite, a red swollen spot appears on the spot. They are constantly itchy. As parasites multiply, there are more and more such spots every night. For children, such bites are very dangerous at all.

Where bed bugs come from

Bed bugs can enter your home in all sorts of different ways. If they are wound up with your neighbors, then at the time of their long departure, the insects will definitely move to you. Because they need food. And it is human blood. Especially parasites prefer women’s and children’s. Bedbugs can also be brought in by your guests who have recently been in a cheap hotel. Unfortunately, the problem of bedbugs is known to many low-end hotels. And even sadder that few of them are trying to solve this problem.

Bed bugs can quickly establish new colonies by crawling under your bed and other furniture. They are unrealistic to detect, just passing through the apartment. Only a detailed study of the surfaces of objects will help to identify where bed bugs live in your apartment.

In order to destroy bedbugs, in our time, there are many ways. But, unfortunately, not everyone can adequately boast of their performance. And not every owner is able to carry out a full-scale processing of his home. At the same time, more and more advertising of drugs that can destroy insects appears. Many are interested in how to get rid of at home.

Folk methods do not always bring the desired result. As in the case of store-bought chemicals, all of these methods of exterminating bedbugs can only temporarily reduce their numbers. But parasites will quickly restore it. Do not forget that bed bugs develop immunity to various kinds of poison. And, if the destruction of bedbugs by some particular drug failed, then a second attempt will bring even less benefit. And, to be more precise, will not bring at all.

The only way for bed bugs to leave your home is to call disinfection specialists, whose center is located in almost every city in the country. Professionals in their field will arrive at the first call, having all the necessary equipment with them. Having carefully studied the situation, they will select the necessary composition and proceed to spraying.