What Causes Bed Bugs ?

What causes bed bugs? Although bed bugs have been know for hundreds, if not thousands of years it took until the war in the 1940s to eradicate most of the problems with bed bugs. Unfortunately they are again on the increase .

What causes bed bugs? The modern vogue for world and local travel and hotels has created a perfect environment and method of transfer for these pests. Also like many  pests they are gaining a resistance to the standard  pesticides.

For bed bugs to infest your home, they have to hitch a ride on someone or something. Bed bugs feed on humans (they are blood suckers) but rarely stay on your person once it has gorged. What tends to happen is they hide in clothing and get a free ride to the next destination.

Hitching a ride is what causes bed bugs to spread and so infestations are more common in places where many people come and go. Apartment buildings and shared dormitories, hotels and motels are high on the list.
Homeless shelters and  even army barracks are not safe from this traveller. Any where you’ve got a lot of people coming back and forth then the risk of bring in a few eager bed bugs is increased.

Infested hotel rooms make it easy for bed bugs to hide in the guests luggage or cloths. In fact ant public place with shared soft furnishings, like movie theatres or coffee houses offer an opportunity for these pests to live and spread. Happy to hitch a ride on any coat, rucksack or anything else you may be wearing or carrying.

What Causes Bed Bugs

Once you get your new “friends” home they will quickly make themselves comfortable in any quite dark place and being so small they are hard to see and can hide in the smallest places. One of their favourite locations is the in seams of soft furnishings like sofa’s beds and chairs but they can be just as happy behind the loose edge of a wallpaper strip or the cracks in your skirting.

What causes bed bugs is also their ability to reproduce and “fast”.  A single female may already  have 100′s of eggs and those 100′s can very quickly turn into thousands.

You may think that filth and dirt will make things worse but you would be very wrong. Bed bugs don’t care about dirt one way or the other. All they want is a quiet place to hide and humans to feed on. So you may not be able to stop people coming to your home but you can reduce the amount of places that bed bugs can hide.

You know what causes bed bugs but what best to do to avoid them?

Rich or poor ,clean or dirty, it won’t make any difference when your “new friends” come home to roost.

More importantly keep a tidy, uncluttered and well repaired home and furnishings. The less places to hide the less likely you will get infested and the easier it is to fix if you do.