The bed bug invasion has reached epidemic proportion because they breed so quickly and are hitchhiking everywhere. Cities like New York are especially hard hit due to population density and a flourishing tourist trade. These brownish-red bugs are wingless and prefer to come out in the dark to feed on your blood. They use their host as a taxi, often meaning they latch onto your clothes and travel on your person or in your suitcase. Once they arrive the bugs will feed and reproduce, an interesting fact is that bed bugs cannot reproduce without a blood meal. Adult bed bugs are flat, brown colored insects that are wingless. The off-white colored youngsters (nymphs) can actually detect the breath of people up to 160 feet away and crawl to that new food source. After the nymph reaches its dinner (you) it will spend three minutes feeding and then scurry away to a safe dark hiding place. Your new parasite needs four more blood meals to complete its 5-stage growth cycleso it will be back again and again over the next three weeks. So will all the other bed bugs! Now here is the scary information about how fast these bugs can multiply. A single adult female lays around 70 eggs\/week (1\/2 male. female). Assuming all nymphs can get blood meals as needed here is what we get. Two tiny eggs that find their way into your home can produce over 10,000 bed bugs in 3-1\/2 months, with hundreds of thousands eggs ready to hatch. That is just plain scary! <\/p>\n
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