Bedbugs and fleas may be living in your room waiting for the lights to go out and for you to go to sleep to celebrate their blood feast. If you have animals in your home, such as cats or dogs, chances are you also have blood-sucking insects in your home. These insects are hard to find because they are so small, but they usually leave telltale marks on your body in the form of bites. Bedbugs and fleas are the main food source of human blood.
The smallest of these insects is the flea. It is between 2 and 3 millimeters long and can jump more than a hundred times its body length. If a human had this superpower, we would be able to jump a city block. This incredible jumping ability allows the flea to find an animal to get to its home, and then jump on its human host. Fleas like to live and hide among feathers and hair, they have a small, flat, brown-like body with a small head. This body design is optimally designed to blend in with your hair as a place to hide and eat. These tiny blood-sucking insects do not have wings. They do not need to fly to find a host due to the jumping powers they have.
Flea reproduction begins with an egg that an adult lays on your carpet. These eggs take between two and twelve days to develop into maggots or larvae. These bloodsucking babies can survive on their mat on the food they seek for a long time before going through the two phases of a molting process. After the worm larvae moult twice, they will hatch into a cocoon. Fleas can stay in this cocoon on your carpet for up to a year. The cocoon acts as a protection or barrier against harm. It protects the flea from things like climate change and pesticides. That is why it is so difficult to get rid of these little insects in your home. After the cocoon hatches, the adult flea emerges and is ready for its blood feast.
When most people think of blood-sucking insects in their bedroom, they think of bed bugs. This parasitic animal is making a strong comeback in the United States due to the ban on DDT. While dust mites live on human skin, bed bugs feast on human blood in the middle of the night when you’re asleep. These nasty little critters only have one food source, you. These insects are like little vampires. They are very small and flat, about 1/5 inch overall. Bed bugs are large enough to be seen by the human eye, but they hide during the day and come out at night when you sleep to feed. They are very adept at hiding in crevices and in your mattress.
These bugs are made to suck blood. Their flattened body structure makes it easy for them to slip into tight spots and crevices to hide in during the day. Bed bugs have a needle-like mouth that they use to pierce humans. Before these parasites start drinking your blood, they inject saliva into your system. This saliva works in two ways. First, the chemicals in the saliva have a numbing effect, so their human host cannot feel the bite. Second, this saliva causes blood to flow freely, so the insect can easily feed.
Bed bugs go through five stages in their lives. The first is the egg stage, which takes one to four weeks to hatch into nymphs. This parasitic nymph will molt five times during its life on the journey to adulthood. During each molt, the bed bug will need to feast on human blood in order to grow and survive. A female bed bug can produce more than two hundred eggs during her lifetime. This is what makes these insects multiply so quickly.