What are bed bugs?

Photo of a bedbug.

There’s been a lot of press on bed bugs in hotels and I’ve definitely had patients come in who had stayed in a random hotel only to wake up the next day with itchy welts on the skin.

Heck, there’s even a bed bug registry to check whether your apartment, hotel or motel has had cases of bed bugs.

So what are bed bugs?

They are little bugs with flat oval bodies which feed on blood. They have fancy names too, e.g. Cimex lectularius and Cimex hemipterus. They often feed when you’re sleeping, coming out and feeding on your blood by puncturing your skin with their mouth parts. They inject a little bit of anesthetic into your skin too so that you don’t feel the bite. Sneaky!

These bed bugs can crawl through cracks and crevices so if a neighboring apartment or hotel room is infested, yours can become infested too.

If you’re concerned, you might want to call an exterminator. There are also special stands for your bed post.

Lastly, here’s a random fact about bed bugs. Do you know how they mate? It’s by a process called traumatic insemination, where the male bedbug punctures the female bedbug’s body directly and injects the sperm directly into the female bedbug’s body.  Now that’s TMI about bedbugs…