I know you want to learn how to kill bed bugs, but stay with me. The information on their life cycle is important because it will help you understand the strategy for wiping them out.
Every bed bug starts out as an egg. These are very, very small. The average bed bug egg is 1 millimeter in length. That’s not much bigger than a speck of dust. They are whitish or cream-colored, and very hard to see without magnification. When the mother first lays them, they are sticky, and adhere to all kinds of surfaces, like walls, bedframes, baseboards and mattresses. They can be anywhere, and are very hard to find. When they hatch, bed bugs are called nymphs. Another term you’ll hear is “instar nymphs” or “nymphal instars.” Different words that all mean the same thing. The bed bug goes through five growth stages before it reaches adulthood. Each stage requires a blood meal (yes, your blood) before the bed bug can molt (shed its skin) and grow into the next stage. When the eggs hatches, the first instar nymph is 1.5 mm long, and begins to feed immediately. After a week or two, the nymph sheds its skin, and emerges as a 2nd stage nymph, about 2 mm long. A nymph must eat blood at least once in order to advance to the next stage. The cycle repeats; each week or two, the bug sheds its skin and emerges as a larger bug, one step closer to adulthood. The third stage is 2.5 mm, the fourth is 3 mm long, and the fifth is 4.5 mm long. After the fifth stage, the bed bug is an adult and capable of reproduction.
This article has a good diagram of the life stages of a bed bug (scroll down to page 2 to find it): http://medent.usyd.edu.au/bedbug/bedbugs_factsheet.pdf At each stage, the bed bug sheds its old skin. Those skins of maturing nymphs are one of the things you or your exterminator will look for in determining whether you really have bed bugs or something else. Here is a video from the University of Minnesota, showing a second-stage nymph feeding. Note how its color goes from white to bright red as the critter fills itself with blood: http://www.ipmctoc.umn.edu/2nd_instar_nymph_feeding.wmv After the fifth stage, the bed bug reaches maturity. When the temperature is right (about 70-90 F), the bug can complete the journey to adulthood in a month to six weeks. Cooler temperatures and limited access to your blood will slow its development down, but not stop it. Adult bed bugs can survive for over a year without having a blood meal, and the nymphs can survive for many months. So even if you leave your apartment for a year, they’ll still be there, waiting for you when you come back. You cannot just starve out an infestation. It also means that if an apartment was infested and the tenant moved out, the bugs will be waiting there for the next resident. Adulthood is where things get particularly nasty. The adult female bed bug lays from one to twelve eggs per day. Every day. For its entire life, which is 12-18 months. All those eggs hatch in one to two weeks. And in a month, those eggs could grow into reproducing adults. The rate of increase in a population is astounding, and that is probably one of the factors that has led to the resurgence of this plague. As you can imagine, if there is a steady supply of blood from you and your family or the other people in your building, a bedbug population can explode in a matter of months. That’s why it is absolutely critical that you deal with a problem as soon as the first signs of infestation appear. Every day wasted means more eggs laid, more nymphs hatching, and more bugs in your mattress.
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