Diamond Rings and More

Posts Tagged ‘Insects’

Do you know whether you have ever come across a bed bug? You probably have not. Not yet, but the chances that you will are growing every day. This is because bed bugs are undergoing an explosion in their numbers and mankind is quite powerless to stop them at the moment, although a number of people are working on it.

You see, the difficulty is that bed bugs are pretty much resistant to every pesticide that we have. They were almost wiped out in the West in the Forties and Fifties with the widespread use of DDT, but the ones that survived and the ones that have been carried into the country are tolerant to pesticides.

Scientists are working on pesticides that will be effective against bed bugs, but there is no light at the end of the tunnel so far.

So, we are stuck with a growing population of bed bugs. How do you acquire bed bugs? Normally, you just pick them up and take them home or someone does it for you. It is reckoned that foreign travel and immigration are largely responsible for the original members of our new bed bug community.

Nowadays, you can pick them up anyplace where people go: taxis, cinemas, restaurants, hotels, motels, cars, buses and planes. Even in the doctor’s surgery.

It used to be thought that bed bugs only flourished in poor peoples’ houses, but this is untrue. In fact, the rich are more prone to get them than the poor, because they travel more often. You can also be given bedbugs in secondhand furniture, clothing and suitcases.

Bedbugs like to hide in cracks, so you could be sitting on a bus and one will clamber up the back of your coat and nuzzle under your collar. There it might lay a few eggs and walk off or it might go to sleep. When you get home, you will put your coat in the closet and a few days later you will have your very own family of hungry little bedbugs. It is that easily done.

Some bedbugs will also reside on birds and bats. These bedbugs prefer bird blood, but if there are not many around, you may find them dropping from the ceiling onto you, if you have birds or bats in your attic. Bats are protected now, so you will have to have them removed, but you ought to discourage birds from nesting above you.

The bedbugs will be attracted to the CO2 on your breath and your body heat and then they use pheromones to tell the others where you are. It usually only takes a bedbug five minutes to feed and then it goes back home to sleep it off for three to five days.

A mature bedbug has gone through six moultings and when a mature female has been inseminated, she can lay between 300 and 1,000 eggs in her lifetime of about six to twelve months. She will lay several eggs a day and they will hatch out in about ten days. So, you only need one pregnant female and you are in trouble very soon.

If you have a few dozen females laying eggs in your mattress, it will take less than a fortnight before dozens of newborn bedbugs (called nymphs) are hatching out every day and then one of their relatives will lead them straight to you.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on many topics, but is at present concerned with how do you get bed bugs? If you are interested in this, please visit our website now at Picture Of Bed Bugs for more information.

Bed bugs are a relentless concern, if you suspect that they are in the bed with you. In fact, it is known that when people have been bitten often, they can become anxious, strained and obsessed. Insomnia soon follows. This situation can quickly lead to tetchiness, domestic squabbles and the loss of your job.

This obsession can clearly get out of hand unless you do something about it quickly. If you are in a hotel, then you ought to tell the manager immediately. If you are in rented housing, then your landlord has the responsibility to keep his property pest free, but if it is your own place, you have a problem. Or at least, you can get the problem sorted out, but it will cost you.

The Latin name for the kind of bed bug that only drinks human blood is Cimex lectularius and they were first written about in Greece in about 400 BC. They did not arrive in Great Britain in large numbers until about 1670 and by 1726, they were in Jamaica and probably the United States as well.

Bedbugs were wiped out from the developed world by and large by the late 1950’s due to the widespread use of pesticides such as DDT to constrain other household pests like ants and cockroaches.

Unfortunately, this has led to bedbugs being resistant to nearly all modern, domestic pesticides. The reappearance of bed bugs is blamed on increased foreign travel and higher amounts of immigration from Asia and Africa.

It is commonly believed that bedbugs only bite people, but that is not right. Cimex lectularius only bites humans, but roughly all warm-blooded animals have their own parasites, which could be called bedbugs.

Cats, dogs, deer, horses and birds (including poultry) have their own bedbugs and these bed bugs will bite humans as well, if their preferred source of a blood meal is not around.

Bedbugs are pretty small, being about a quarter of an inch long and a bit narrower. The are very flat and thin, so that they look as if they have been ironed. They are quite agile when empty, but slow and cumbersome when bloated on blood.

They are most frequently brown in colour, bur they can be almost any shade, even white, until they have eaten and then there is always at least a hint of red about them.

Bedbugs have to shed their skin six times before they become mature and can lay dormant for five months without food. They are woken up by body heat and CO2 and can alert their comrades that food is about by the release of pheromones.

Bedbugs prefer to live in narrow cracks and crevices. They like loose skirtings and architraves, damaged plaster and wall paper, ripped mattresses and slack joints in timber furniture. They will even hole up, quite literally, in a the sunken-screw hole – the countersink.

Bedbug bites often look like mosquito bites, but there is no red dot and they can take longer to come up and longer to go down and like flea bites, bedbug bites are frequently in a line of three.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with bed bugs extermination. If you are interested in this, please visit our website now at Picture Of Bed Bugs for further information.

Stick insects have quite a few names. First of all the order to which they belong is called either Phasmatodea or Phasmida. Then they are known as stick insects in Europe and Australasia, but walking sticks or stick-bugs in America and Canada. Some also go by the name of phasmids, leaf insects and ghost insects.

Needless to say, most of them look like twigs, sticks or leaves. Most stick insects come from South East Asia, but they are abundant in many tropical climates including Australia and the southern states of America. Most of the stick insects that are kept as pets are Indian (or Laboratory) stick insects and they grow to around four inches long and live for about a year.

There are very exotic species of stick insect like the Vietnamese thorny stick insect and the pink-winged flying stick insect, but they are more difficult to look after. It is better to begin with the Indian common form. They will live fairly happily in a vivarium, which is an aquarium for reptiles and insects.

Except for providing fresh food and water from time to time and taking out old food, there is no maintenance needed for these animals. They will require a relatively warm climate but that is not difficult to arrange with a heater, a thermostat and a timer.

Food is not difficult for common stick insects, The most common foods given are privet and lettuce, but they also like ivy, oak, bramble, blueberry and raspberry. You have to put enough of these plants in the vivarium to provide cover for the residents so that they do not feel out in the open and at risk but not so much that you never get sight of them.

Make sure that there are lots of air holes in the vivarium, but for the sake of security, they ought to be covered with fly screen or netting, because these creatures can wriggle through small openings. The tanks ought to be kept at 70F during the day and 60F at night with moderate humidity. They may be permitted to forage for food at will, but be careful that the water supply is very shallow, because they been known to drop in and drown.

You will be surprised to discover that the overwhelming majority of Indian stick insects are female, but that they do not require a male to have fertile eggs. Young are capable of laying eggs after their sixth moult, all of which moults they consume. Stick insects can lay hundreds of eggs which just drop down among the leaf litter on the floor of the vivarium.

If you want to hatch them out, spray a little water on them to simulate light rain and they should hatch. If you do not want to be troubled with them, burn the contents of the tank after the last adult has passed away. You might need a permit to keep stick insects, especially in the United States..

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece writes on several subjects, but is currently involved with finding a home remededy for mosquito bites. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Getting Rid of Mosquito Bites.

Were you aware that Eastern Equine Encephalitis can be spread to humans? It is rare, but mosquitoes can give humans EEE and at least one resident of Middleborough can corroborate it. What is more EEE is worse for humans than West Nile Virus, which is spread by the same species of mosquito in the North East of the United States.

Eastern Equine Encephalitis attacks the brain and the nervous system and frequently either kills of leaves its victim in significant trouble.

The one man who is known to have been infected with EEE in NE America in August 2010, is still in a wheel chair a year afterward and there is no foreseeable end to his pain.

The health authorities in nearby Plymouth and Bristol counties where there were also plenty of these mosquitoes (Culex pipiens) last year have advised that this could be a bad year for them too.

They warned householders to start on home defence by repairing broken and damaged fly screens now. They have also recommended cleaning up mosquitoes’ breeding grounds.

This involves up-turning any bins that could hold water for them to breed in. Do not forget that a mosquito just needs a half inch of water to lay 400 eggs. Drill holes in flower pots and long forgotten tyres so that they cannot hold water any longer.

Old tyres are cited as one of the main causes for the proliferation of mosquitoes and the spreading of new species.

The next couple of weeks are the linchpin of how many mosquitoes will be around later in the summer and autumn. The more you exterminate now, the fewer there will be to make further generations and mosquitoes may breed a new generation approximately once a month.

That is 1×400x400×400 mosquitoes each quarter for every mosquito that escapes. A great-grandmother mosquito can become responsible for 64 million offspring every quarter!

These mosquitoes (C. pipiens) breed in water, but hang out in damp, dark undergrowth, so you could spray in there as well. Some local authorities have been out spraying the parks and verges, but you can do your bit by taking control of your own micro-environment – your backyard, shed and garage.

EEE has not been seen this year in the North East so far, but West Nile Virus has been observed twice already. The weather has been ideal for mosquitoes – rain followed by warm weather.

The symptoms of West Nile and Easter Equine are comparable to those of flu. The difference is that around 1% of those with WNF might die, but a lot more with EEE will almost certainly die. Around a third will suffer permanent brain injury

People are worried by last year’s incident. For example, the authorities in Plymouth County have already received almost 10,000 requests to spray against mosquitoes. This situation can only get worse unless residents help by checking their gardens and nearby garbage ground for likely breeding sites and destroying them. But it is not easy, mosquitoes can breed in a waste potato chip packet, so refuse becomes a big topic too.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece writes on more than a few subjects, but is currently involved with how to stop mosquito bite itch. If you want to know more, please go to our web site at Getting Rid of Mosquito Bites.

You cannot tell where bed bugs are living; you cannot even guess, just by looking around you. You could be sitting in a chair in a fine hotel waiting for someone to come down or you could be having tea at a friend’s house and you are equally as likely to pick up a bed bug.

The developed Western world has not experienced this kind of situation for about sixty years. However, since 1995, bed bugs have been increasing practically uninhibited and we are approaching the conditions people were living in before the Second World War. That is a very sad state of affairs indeed.

Especially when you appreciate that before the war, you could put a bit of poison down and kill them. These days, you cannot, because some bedbugs have become resistant to a lot of the insecticides commonly available to domestic households. So, in one way we are worse off than we were 60 years ago and unless something comes to our aid, it will only get worse.

Although bedbugs wreak most mayhem in a bed, that is not normally where people get them from. They also reside in the folds of fabric in the seats of buses, trains, taxis, hotel rooms, restaurants and even airplanes. However, bedbugs are not taken home stuck to your skin like a flea or a tick.

Instead they will crawl into a hem or a pocket or under a collar, drawn by your body heat or breath and either go to sleep or lay eggs. A female can lay 300 eggs in a single day – not a great deal by insect terms, but do you want 301 bedbugs in your bedroom wardrobe by the end of next week?

I am sure that you have become aware how hard it is to totally avoid the risks of picking up bed bugs and carrying them home. Bed bugs have natural predators, but it is uncertain that you would rather have bed bugs than the insects that prey on them – cockroaches, ants, spiders and centipedes – and insecticides are not always successful.

The one thing that certainly kills them, besides being trodden on by a size ten army boot, is heat. No stages of the bedbug’s life can withstand temperatures above 45c.

This may be noteworthy, because modern washing powders are intended to get clothes clean at 30c, thus saving electricity, but they also unintentionally save the lives of the bedbugs on your clothing as well. You can make sure that your clothes are bedbug-free by washing them at 46-50c and you can kill existing bedbugs in your house by steam cleaning it, which is the professional way of getting rid of an infestation of bedbugs.

It is time for people to be aware of this fairly new threat to their well-being. The key things you can do are: acquaint yourself with what a bedbug looks like and have your clothes laundered at temperatures above 46c if you think that you may have been exposed to an infestation of bed bugs.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many topics, but is at present involved with bed bugs extermination. If you are interested in this, please visit our website now at Picture Of Bed Bugs for further information.