To successfully get rid of bedbugs, it’s a good idea to know their life cycle. That’s why we’ve prepared an article for you, in which you’ll learn information about all their developmental stages, including detailed photos and high-resolution graphics. This should help you understand what they look like at each stage, but also how to best get rid of them.
Bed bugs, also known as house bugs, are the most well-known pest and parasite of humans, feeding on their blood. It is relatively difficult to get rid of bed bugs, but it is not impossible. Fortunately, there are ways to control these pests at different stages of their life and completely eradicate them from your home. However, it is important to know their life cycle.
The life cycle of a bedbug has these stages:
- Bedbug eggs
- Nymphs (larvae) of bedbugs
- Adult bedbug
1. Bedbug eggs
Like most pests, it begins its life cycle as an egg. The female lays and uses secretions to adhere up to 5 eggs to surfaces per day. They look like white grains the size of rice. An adult bedbug can lay up to 500 eggs in its lifetime.
Recommendation: Because they are very small, a whole colony doesn’t take up much space and can easily be overlooked, which can cause bedbug overgrowth. It is therefore important that any treatment is as effective as possible, very fast and ideally done before the eggs hatch and active individuals begin to grow.
2. Nymphs (larvae) of bedbugs
After about a week, the eggs hatch into nymphs, or larvae, which immediately begin to search for food – blood. In the first stage of growth, they are slightly transparent to yellowish. Once they start drinking blood and growing, their color changes to shades of red.
Before a bed bug nymph becomes an adult, it must go through 5 molting stages. This takes about 1 to 2 months, depending on other factors (temperature, food). In order for this entire process to be successful and for the larva to continue its development, it must suck blood sufficiently during each molting.
Recommendation: The remains of the fledged nymphs are often irritating to allergy sufferers. Therefore, if you exterminate the entire colony, you must also perform a detailed cleaning not only of the infested area, but ideally of the entire living space – the apartment.
3. Adult bedbug
If bedbug larvae have good access to food and sufficient temperature, they can reach adulthood and sexual maturity in just 5 weeks. While at 18°C they become adults in over 100 days, at 23°C they become adults in just 60 days.
“The life span of a bedbug is 4-12 months”
As adults, bedbugs turn a reddish-brown color. Some people even confuse them with ticks and other blood-sucking insects. To avoid confusion, remember that bedbugs have:
- six legs,
- two antennae,
- wide flat shield-shaped body.
Bedbugs tend to feed only one to three times a week and can survive for a surprisingly long time without food (blood) – several weeks to months. Under good conditions, they can live for up to a year.
You can find them under your mattress or sofa, behind cabinets, under the floor or door sill, in your clothing, or even in building materials. For more information, see How to identify bedbugs and how to get rid of them?
Recommendation: If you have found adult bedbugs in your apartment, and in an overgrown state, it can be a really big problem. Their elimination on your own, i.e. at home, will not succeed in the vast majority of cases. Although there are many methods for getting rid of bedbugs, it is better to contact a specialized pest control company that can exterminate bedbugs in all stages of growth, i.e. from eggs to adults. Bedbugs have a wide and flat body shape, so they can hide very well even in hard-to-reach places, such as gaps in the floor, but also corners in a suitcase. You can easily miss them, because they can be in the egg or nymph stage. We therefore recommend leaving this job to professionals who have many years of experience.
