At Gilles Lambert Pest Control, we know bed bugs, and we won’t stop until your house is rid of them.
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Their behaviour includes hiding in tiny crevices and coming out at night to feed, making them difficult to detect and eliminate.
Bed bugs have been with us for millenia; most researchers think they began feasting on blood while we were still dwelling in caves with bats. The bugs are from the genus Cimex, and their primary food is human blood; they’ve adapted to feed off of humans with few repercussions. They do this by injecting us with anticoagulants so our blood doesn’t clot as they feed, and painkillers so we can’t feel the bites. One bedbug wouldn’t be a drastic problem, but the species reproduces very quickly, with a female bed bug laying up to 500 eggs at a time.
They find humans primarily by detecting the carbon dioxide we breathe out, and they can also track us by our warmth and other chemical compounds. They are nocturnal, hiding and resting during the day and attacking humans at night, when we are asleep and they are undetectable. Part of what makes bed bug infestations so difficult to manage is that many people don’t have reactions to their bites, and others might at first believe the bites are from other insects; given that they bite at night, they’re also hard to spot. This means that by the time you realize you have bed bugs, they’ve likely been there for a long time.
Let’s summarize what we’ve covered so far: bed bugs are really good at hiding, really good at infesting new areas, cause physical and psychological distress, feed exclusively on human blood at night and can lie dormant for up to a year without feeding. They can lay up to 500 bed bug eggs at a time, they’re resistant to insecticides and they don’t congregate in hives, so the elimination of one cluster doesn’t mean the whole group are gone. What this all translates to is a bug that’s incredibly difficult to get rid of; even if you think they’re all gone, the chances aren’t bad that there are more bed bug eggs lurking around somewhere. You need a professional exterminator.