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

You can be sure that most hotel managers will take complaints about bed bugs very gravely, because it is well known that the numbers of bedbugs are rising rapidly and have been since 1995. It is also common knowledge that large compensation awards have been made against hotels. Some of them were at 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 every 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 bedbugs 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 pumps spittle into you and the other sucks blood out. The spittle 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 saliva, others get a lump or slight swelling almost immediately, but sometimes the swelling can take a week to come out. These bites may or may not be itchy.

If you travel a lot, or if you go to regions of the world that are less concerned with hygiene, you must be careful about not taking bedbugs home with you. They will not remain on your body, but they may lay eggs in your clothing or hide in your suitcase. Therefore, either before you go home or without delay 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 currently 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 details.

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 kind of situation for about sixty years. However, since 1995, bed bugs have been multiplying almost unbridled and we are approaching the conditions people were living in before the Second World War. That is a very sad state of affairs indeed.

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

Although bedbugs inflict most havoc in a bed, that is not normally where people get them from. They also live 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 crawl into a hem or a pocket or under a collar, attracted 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 by insect terms, but do you want 301 bedbugs in your bedroom wardrobe by the end of next week?

I am certain that you have realized how hard it is to totally avoid the risks of picking up bed bugs and carrying them home. Bed bugs have natural predators, 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 successful.

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 survive temperatures above 45c.

This may be noteworthy, because modern washing powders are intended to get clothes clean at 30c, thereby saving electricity, but they also unintentionally save the lives of the bedbugs on your clothing 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 way of exterminating an infestation of bedbugs.

It is time for people to be conscious of this relatively 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 suspect that you may have been exposed to an infestation of bed bugs.

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

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 problem is that bed bugs are pretty much tolerant to every insecticide that we have. They were nearly 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 brought into the country are tolerant to insecticides.

Scientists are working on insecticides that will be effective against bed bugs, but there is no light at the end of the tunnel so far.

So, we are stuck with a burgeoning population of bed bugs. How do you get bed bugs? Usually, you just pick them up and take them home or someone does it for you. It is thought that foreign travel and immigration are largely responsible for the first 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 thought that bed bugs only flourished in poor peoples’ houses, but this is untrue. In fact, the rich are more prone to get them than the poor, because they travel more often. You can also be given bedbugs in secondhand 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 nuzzle under your collar. There it might lay a few eggs and walk off or it might go to sleep. When you get home, you will put your coat in the wardrobe and a few days later you will have your very own family of hungry little bedbugs. It is that easy.

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 inform 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 after 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 around ten days. So, you only have to have one expectant female and you are in trouble very soon.

If you have a few dozen females laying eggs in your mattress, it will take less than a fortnight before dozens of newborn bedbugs (called nymphs) are hatching out every day and then one of their relatives will lead them straight to you.

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

The resurgence of the population of bed bugs over the last fifteen years has been attributed to the higher number of people going on long-haul holidays and the enlarged amount of immigration from Asia and Africa. It is not that people carry the bed bugs home on their bodies, but bedbugs may have laid eggs in the travellers’ clothing or the bedbugs may have taken sanctuary in the luggage.

In this way they are taken home, and being very resilient to temperature change they thrive in their new home country. If the carriers are tourists, then the bedbugs could easily be brought into the hotel. This is how bed bugs can be dispersed unwittingly by humans.

You see, bed bugs do not thrive in a filthy environment necessarily. Bed bugs do not mind whether you dropped a bit of potato on the floor last week and did not pick it up. They do not eat what we eat, even if they are starving. They only eat blood.

If you exist like this, then you will attract mice or rats, cockroaches and ants, but not bed bugs. It is a mistake to think that bedbugs like dirt and filth. They probably prefer it pretty clean actually, but they do have to have cracks and crevices to hide in, but there are plenty of those in most rooms.

They like to get behind the skirtings and other woodwork. They also like damaged plaster, peeling wall paper and ripped mattresses. Because they are so flat, they can get into almost any crack. This means that any hotel can be stricken with bedbugs, the Ritz, the Carlton, Holiday Inn – any of them.

This is the problem for us. If it was only run-down, shabby hotels that had bed bugs, we could avoid them, but you just cannot judge a book by its cover.

There are methods of checking your room though. Look out for small bugs that look a bit like an apple seed. Look in the seams of the chairs and check the mattress, if there are any rips in it, have it swapped.

You can also test by lying on the bed to warm it up and then throw back the bed clothes swiftly. You may spot a few fleet-footed insects running for cover. They are bedbugs.

Clearly, the first thing you have to do is warn the hotel manager. If you are not content that he or she is taking you seriously, move or / and phone the environmental health department of the local authority.

Whether you find bedbugs or not, they still may be about to snag a ride home with you, so spray or dust your suitcase with a powerful pesticide before you travel home and to be really safe, have your clothes boil washed, because bedbugs cannot endure temperatures above 45c.

If you cannot arrange this on the last day of your holiday, make certain you do it when you arrive home, but make certain that you do not give anything you have brought with you a chance to escape and reproduce.

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