by R. Renee Bembry

Created on: June 25, 2009   Last Updated: July 07, 2009

Whether you live in a house an apartment or a high-rise hotel - bedbugs can get into your home. You do not have to be poor or middle class - you can be rich and still get bedbugs. These bloodsucking hemipteran insects do not discriminate against wealthy or un-wealthy and they like houses, apartments, hotels and motels, dormitories, and cruise ships equally the same. In fact, even if you live in a trailer, on a boat, or in a hut - bedbugs will not mind living in your home with you.

Another thing about bedbugs is, despite the fact that we call them bedbugs and we tend to think of their biting humans while in a bed, bedbugs can bite just as well if you sleep on a sofa, a chair, a hammock, or on the floor.

Of the many types of bedbug species, Cimex lectularius, or common bedbugs are the type most likely to invade human households. This is because common bedbugs are more adaptable to human environments than other types of bedbugs.

Bedbugs are able make their way into our homes for several reasons. They are small and barely noticeable. Their bodies are flat like pancakes. This flatness allows them to squeeze into small places. They generally hide during the day, which further lessens chances humans will discover them. Their hiding places include cracks and crevices in walls and floors, undersides of furniture, folds of mattresses, behind molding and between wall-to-wall carpet folds.

As with other animal life, bedbug living quarters can become overcrowded. This is no surprise since females lay as many as five eggs daily and it only takes about a month for bedbugs to mature and start reproducing.

Overcrowding spurs bedbugs to thin out their nests. They accomplish this thinning in several different ways, including making their way into luggage and purses and other personal human affects. They crawl under doorjambs to spread their horizons in apartments, condominiums, hotels and motels. They crawl through unsealed holes in walls and flooring and pipe fixtures in order to enter unpopulated rooms.

Movement from room to room, apartment to apartment, condo-to-condo, etcetera allows bedbugs to expand their population within the same building complex; and, as you can see, this expansion can take place within the same residence or branch out to different residences within the same buildings.

When bedbugs "hitchhike" via people's luggage and other personal items, they can expand their horizons a lot further than an adjacent room or apartment. Hitchhiking allows bedbugs

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>