Bed bugs are tiny in size yet huge in their harmful crime. These little, brownish insects invade a house, hide invisibly, and cause invincibly troubles. They will disturb your peaceful night sleeps into a nightmare.
Although they cannot jump or fly, they are frequently misunderstood as mosquito since bed bugs surprisingly target the blood as their basic food. Not only make you wake up for sleepless nights, but they also add more harmful effects to your health.
The fatal thing about these bug beds is that they are nearly harmless due to their almost invisible existence, more particularly during the outset of their infestation. Thus it is highly troublesome to indicate their tiny presence.
Known as the slipperiest pests to beat off all the time, you have to put extra efforts into dealing with them, as well as extra caution and patience. However, don’t fret as at least you can identify their being, for example, bed bug signs in mattress. It will lead to some solutions of how to remove them.
Of course, we need to have better knowledge about bed bugs before taking any action to get rid of them. Knowing where they come from and their hiding places also can be useful before starting the investigation on the signs of bed bugs in mattress. Let’s start first with their physical look.
The Physical Look
It seems that everyone knows bed bugs, yet not all of them sure what exactly this pesterer look like since they are too small to see. A brief physical description of a bed bug is as follows:
| Shape | Oval and flat |
| Size | An apple seed (4-5mm-long for mature one) |
| Color | Rust-brown to darker reddish-brown |
| Other descriptions | Six legs Two antennas Short-length, gilded body hair |
As previously stated, bed bugs get their food from the blood, either from other animals or human. After sucking blood, especially the adult bug beds, their body gets bigger, and their abdomen color turns into deeper reddish-brown.
The following are some further detailed information about bed bugs:
- Even though unable to leap or fly, yet they are extremely fast runners over floors, walls, and even ceilings.
- Over their lifetime, hundreds of eggs may be laid by the female bed bugs.
- Each freshly-laid egg is super tiny in size, about as big as a speck of debris in the air.
- Baby bed bugs are called nymphs.
- Each immature nymph demands a meal of blood for molting phase.
- Nymphs have their skin shed for five times before becoming adult bed bugs.
- They can fully develop in less than a month, provided that the conditions are favorable and multiply into three or more generations annually.
Where Are They From?
There are many undetected routes of how bed bugs are able to come to your home living.
Due to their petite and flat shape, bed bugs can enter your house via clothing, second-hand furniture like beds or sofas, baggage, and many other seasons. The extreme case can be flattened bed bugs that fit even diminutive item as wide as a credit card.
Where is Their Secret Hideout?
Unlike bees or ants, bed bugs do not build their nests, rather they are more likely to hide in their secret hideout and live in groups.
However, since their dependency on blood, it makes sense to assume that they will stay hidden not far from the human as they are their source of food.
Thus their first typical places to hide, more especially in a bedroom, will be the ones that give them the closest and easiest access to bite their preys at night.
As a result, along the seams of a mattress, box springs, bed frames, baseboards, and headboards are the most common areas for bed bugs to retreat and live safely.
As the trickiest pests, they just can hide everywhere, scattered in your bedroom. There are high possibilities that you may also discover them hiding behind photographs, along or under the carpet edges, bedside tables, silty wallpaper, small cracks, window sills, door framing, and the list can go longer.
Even worse, from your bedroom, they may disperse to the closest rooms. This happens usually when they need a new safe place for hiding.
Bed bugs tend to keep hiding during the daytime and will come out to hunt for blood at nighttime. This causes the homeowners often fail to recognize them since the infestation of these insects usually quickly takes place and gives almost no warning.
Missing out the early plague of bed bugs tends to lead to catastrophic future problems, in which the time when the population of these harmful insects is extremely difficult to deal with.
Signs of Bed Bugs in Mattress
If you happen to find the following situations, it means that you identify the bed bug signs in mattress. Let’s take a closer look.
1. Traces of Fecal Waste
Not only their hideouts but bed bugs also leave traces of their fluid fecal waste just everywhere. The color shades of this feces are from deep brown to black. Remember that the mature bed bugs turn into darker brown after consuming blood.
These fecal excrements are scattered on the bed linens or through the mattress. Doing further in-depth inspection into your mattress, box springs and headboards, if you encounter odd of brown or black spots, it means that you are suspecting the signs of bed bugs in mattress.
In other words, you are discovering the infestation of bug beds. In this kind of situation, don’t miss to regularly and carefully check all the sheets and pillowcases, more particularly to closely examine the seams and folds.
Furthermore, inspect the areas around your bed. This will include immediate checking to the surrounding furnishings, the edge lines of the carpet up to the electrical outlets. Also, open and look inside your wardrobe since those kinds of insects may invade your clothes.
2. Stings
Bed bugs are nocturnal predators. By and large, they actively come out at nighttime and remarkably bite the human targets while they are snoozing.Through their elongated beaks, bed bugs penetrate the skin and intake the blood.
Those stings are mostly pain-free at first, but later causing itchy weals. Bed bugs commonly bite only on the area of exposed skin like arms and shoulders.
Those needle-like bites are the most apparent signs of bed bugs in mattress. This biting and feeding process last for 3 to 10 minutes until they feel full and then creeping away unnoticed.
The level of this skin-piercing by bed bugs are different among individuals. Some have zero-tolerance unless they are attacked by an army of bed bugs. Meanwhile, others are too sensitive to feel that those tiny little creatures crawling in their skins.
If you sense that your bed is like giving you piercing pain sensation, consider asking more professional information about the bed bug infestation.
3. Blood Stains
While doing the blood-feeding parties, bed bugs also leave smears on your clothes, pillowcase, the bed lines, as well as the mattress.
The bloodstains are proof that some naughty creatures crawling in and under your mattress.
4. Shells and Skins
For bed bugs, each meal of blood means they are growing up. The immature bed bugs, or called nymphs, shed their skins every time they feed before becoming mature.
As mentioned above, this baby bug beds have to pass five phases of maturity. This process of losing natural old shell is coined as molting.
As a result, look for empty hatched eggshells and skin on your bed for the bed bug signs in mattress, usually found pasted on the mattress seams or headboard.
Those hatched and un-hatched pearl white eggshells, as well as skins, are not the indication that bed bugs have died, but contrarily the evidence that they are growing up.
5. The Smell
Another sign of the bed bug presence can be found by using your nose. Why? Because bed bugs commonly emit a very peculiar and moldy aroma produced by their scent glands.
It is quite offending as well, and if there is a huge infestation of bed bug groups, it will release a prominent sweet yet strangely unpleasant smell.
Bed bugs are not only pestering pests, but they are also awful and uncomfortable issues. You cannot immediately detect the signs of bed bugs in mattress even from the very beginning. They are persistently harder to manage, mature bed bugs have the ability of a year survival even without feeding, for example.
Thus the safest and most effective thing to do is looking for experts in pest control, for wiping out the bed bugs.