Bed Bugs
Assisting residential and business owners with effective pest control services throughout:
- QLD: Brisbane, Gold Coast, Ipswich, Toowoomba, Sunshine Coast, Townsville
- NSW: Sydney, Newcastle (Hunter & Central Coast), Wagga Wagga, Nowra
- ACT: Canberra
Beyond the Bedroom
Bed Bugs can not only be a problem at home but also in places with numerous beds and visitors such as Hotels, Motels, Backpacker Lodges, Caravan Parks and Boarding Schools. Bed bugs are usually found in unhygienic conditions and inside bedrooms as their name implies.
Habits and Characteristics of Bed Bugs
They have a flattened appearance before ingesting fluid (blood) and are about five millimeters long with the look of a rather wide flea, reddish brown in color.
They hide under the buttons and in creases of old mattresses, behind wallpaper, skirting boards and cracks in the floor. They are wingless so they can’t fly or jump like the flea.
They are active during the night and have been known to drop from the ceilings onto beds. They can survive without a blood feed for up to a year. Bedbugs pass through an egg and five nymph stages to become an adult. The nymphs and adults leave their harborage to feed every 2-3 days. They feed for only 3-5 minutes in the hours prior to dawn and return to their harborage.Their presence can be detected by bite marks, dots of blood on the sheets, a sickly sweet odour and inspection of potential harborages results in visual sighting of dried blood deposits around cracks in the bed, bed head, bedside furniture and mattress.
They are a nuisance pest but generally harmless. They are usually introduced into the home via old mattresses or furniture, so inspection of any recent furniture is essential. Some people react to the bite of bed bugs. Before the bedbug sucks blood it injects saliva, containing an anticoagulant, into the host. The irritancy is caused by the body’s reaction to the saliva.
