Blood-sucking insects that live in your bedroom
Bed bugs and fleas may be living in your bedroom waiting for the lights to go out and for you to fall asleep to celebrate their blood feast. If you have animals in your home, such as cats or dogs, it is very likely that you also have blood-sucking insects in your home. These insects are difficult to find because they are so small, but they will usually leave telltale marks on your body in the form of bites. Bed bugs and fleas the main food source is human blood.
The smallest of these insects is the flea. It measures between 2 and 3 millimeters in length and can jump more than a hundred times the length of its body. If a human had this super power, we could skip a city block. This amazing jumping ability allows the flea to find an animal to take home and then jump on its human host. Fleas like to live and hide in feathers and hair, they have a small, flat body like brown with a small head. This body design has the optimal purpose of slipping unnoticed through your hair as a place to hide and feed. These tiny blood-sucking insects do not have wings. They do not need to fly to find a host due to the jumping powers they have.
Flea reproduction begins with an egg that an adult lays on the carpet. These eggs take between two and twelve days to hatch and become worms or larvae. These baby bloodsuckers can survive in your carpet on the food they collect for a long time before going through the two phases of a shedding process. After the maggot larvae molt twice, they will turn into a cocoon. Fleas can stay in this cocoon on your carpet for up to a year. The cocoon acts as a protection or barrier against damage. Protect the flea from things like climate change or pesticides. This is why it is so difficult to get rid of these little insects in your home. After the cocoon hatches, the adult flea emerges and is ready for its blood feast.
When most people think of blood-sucking insects in their bedroom, they think of the bed bug. This parasitic animal is making a major comeback in the United States due to the ban on DDT. While dust mites live on human skin, bed bugs feed on human blood in the middle of the night when you are asleep. These nasty little critters have only one food source, you. These insects are like tiny vampires. They are very small and flat, about 1/5 of an inch in total. Bed bugs are large enough for the human eye to see, but they hide during the day and come out at night when you sleep to feed. They are very adept at hiding in crevices and on your mattress.
These insects are designed to suck blood. Their flattened body frame allows them to easily slip into tight spots and crevices to hide in during the day. Bed bugs have a needle-like mouth that they use to pierce humans. Before these parasites start drinking your blood, they inject saliva into your system. This saliva works in two ways. First, the chemicals in the saliva cause a numbing effect, so that its human host cannot feel the sting. Second, this saliva makes the blood flow freely, so that the insect can easily feed.
Bed bugs go through five stages in their life. The first is the egg stage, which takes one to four weeks to hatch and give rise to nymphs. This parasitic nymph will molt five times during its lifetime on the journey to adulthood. During each molt, the bed bug will have to feast on human blood in order to grow and survive. A female bed bug can produce more than two hundred eggs in her lifetime. This is what causes these insects to multiply so quickly.
