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You cannot tell where bed bugs are living; you cannot even guess, just by looking at a building. You could be sitting in a chair in a posh 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 been through this kind of situation for about sixty years. However, since 1995, bed bugs have been multiplying almost unbridled and we are approaching the conditions people were living in before the Second World War. That is a very sad state of affairs indeed.

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

Although bedbugs wreak most mayhem in a bed, that is not normally where people get them from. They also live in the creases of material in the seats of buses, trains, taxis, hotel rooms, restaurants and even airplanes. However, bedbugs are not taken home attached 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 realized how difficult it is to completely avoid the risks of picking up bed bugs and taking them home. Bed bugs have natural enemies, but it is arguable that you would rather have bed bugs than the insects that prey on them – cockroaches, ants, spiders and centipedes – and insecticides are not always effective.

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

This may be significant, because modern washing powders are intended to get clothes clean at 30c, thus saving electricity, but they also inadvertently 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 approach to exterminating 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 clothing cleaned at temperatures above 46c if you think that you may have been exposed to an infestation of bed bugs.

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

For the technically-minded, termites are eusocial animals of the Class Insecta; Subclass Pterygota; Infraclass Neoptera; Superorder Dictyoptera and Order Isoptera. They are not related to ants in any way, although some people refer to them as white ants. Having said, that termites do share certain traits with ants: firstly, work is divided along lines of sex and secondly, the leader of the colony is the termite queen.

A normal, established nest will contain between several hundred and several million insects of the following kinds: nymphs (semi-mature young), workers, soldiers, and reproductive individuals of both sexes and at least one egg-laying queen.

The reproductive caste, also referred to as the winged or alate caste, are usually the only termites with quite well-developed eyes although in some species there are sporadically soldiers with eyes as well. Termites that are suitable to become alates will undergo an incomplete metamorphosis.

These changelings form a sub-caste in certain species of termites, being both as both workers, pseudergates, and also as potential replacement reproductive termite. These back-up alates can be brought on to replace dead primary reproductives and sometimes, in some species, replacement alates are brought on if a primary queen is killed.

In countries with distinct dry and rainy or monsoon seasons, like the tropics, the alates can be seen flying up from the earth in swarms that look like white streamers blowing in a breeze, immediately after a dry spell is broken by rain. These alates have three pairs of wings, but they are not good at flying.

They can be seen in their thousands circling street lights like moths, where people catch them to eat. Lightly fried in their own fat, without the wings, they are said to be, juicy, nutty and full of protein. Quite delicious, in fact. Frogs and toads sit under the street lamps impatiently awaiting a succulent meal too.

A queen is a former winged reproductive termite (of the Winged or Alate Caste. She will have flown away from her nest or nest of birth, dropped to the ground, shed her wings, mated and then crawled into the nearest hole in the soil (depending on her species) to found a new colony or nest. In some species, the queen adds an extra set of ovaries with each molt of her skin and can create 2,000 eggs a day.

A male that has flown and mated with the queen is known as a king. Sometimes, these kings stay near by the queen, but sometimes they do not. At the next molt, the king will be a little larger that he was at first. However, the king and the queen are not monogamous. Several males may mate with the queen and there may be several queens within a nest.

As the queen molts and grows bigger with each molt, her abdomen can become hundreds of times its original size, although her head and legs remain the same as before. Obviously, at this size she can no longer walk as her legs do not reach the ground and would not support her weight anyway. At this juncture, she is totally dependent on the assistance of worker termites, which she controls through pheromones.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on many subjects, but is at present concerned with types of termites. If you are interested in this or if you are wondering: What Does A Termite Look Like?. Please go to our web site now for further details.

Termites are not ants, but they do resemble them in many ways. In fact, termites are not even distantly related to ants, they are more closely related to cockroaches. But, as I said, termites share many characteristics with ants. They live in colonies of many hundreds, thousands and even millions of members, they have a queen termite, they are governed by something we humans do not understand, but which we refer to as ‘collective intelligence’, they are given this information by pheromones and they reproduce by means of eggs. The queen can lay thousands of termite eggs per day and there can be more than one queen per nest.

An adult termite queen is capable of laying thousands of eggs a day. This is achieved by having an enlarged abdomen. Sometimes the abdomen is a hundred times the size of a normal termite, although the head and the legs remain the same size as before.

This procedure produces rather a grotesque creature in relation to her relatives, although we clearly do not know how they look upon her. Being blind and in the darkness of a termite nest they cannot see her anyway. In some species, the queen will grow a new set of ovaries with each shedding of her skin, which will increase her fecundity even more.

When a mature queen is at this phase in her life, she cannot move, because when she lies on her belly her legs do not even reach the ground. If she has to get anywhere for whatever reason, the worker termites will either carry or roll her there. They also tend to her toiletry needs and feed her.

It can take dozens and dozens of workers to shift the queen when she has become an egg factory. If she is moved by the workers, they are rewarded with a liquid that the queen secretes from her behind. It is stimulating enough to revive the workers and encourage them to do the queen’s wishes next time. The queen communicates with her subjects through pheromones.

However we try to humanize this process in order to better understand it, it is virtually impossible to think like a termite or any other insect that uses ‘collective intelligence’. We talk about ‘the queen’, but do termites think of her as ‘the boss’? Do they pity her for not being able to get out? Almost definitely not. She has a job to perform as do the other castes of termites and it is probable that not one caste feels itself to be higher or lower than another.

Calling the various castes of termites queens, kings, soldiers and workers is just a method of explaining things in simple human terms, but it almost certainly bears little relevance to how termites interact within their own community.

An interesting digression to the topic of termite eggs is the winged termites, also called reproductive or alate termites. They can sit in the wings waiting for the right moment to fly off and establish a new colony or one of them can be ‘brought on’ to replace a queen that has died or been killed.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many subjects, but is at present involved with how to get rid of termites. If you are interested in this or if you are wondering: What Does A Termite Look Like?. Please go to our web site now for further details.