Bug Identification Help: Compare Your Bug or Bite

Melissa K. sent us pictures of her bites which turned out to be from bed bugs. It all started when the bed bug infested apartment next to her was treated, and as is most often the case after a failed treatment, the bugs made their way through the electrical outlets and into her apartment.

Only two weeks after the failed treatment next door, Melissa and her elderly mother started getting bit. Melissa discovered 13 huge, itchy, painful bites that oozed with pus.

Melissa tried to explain all this to the apartment manager, but he just wouldn’t listen and told her it was her own fault. It was so bad that her bedtime friend was a flashlight and rest came only after her fearful eyes couldn’t stay open.

She sent us pictures of her bites which we posted along with her story. She read our bed bug checklist, found the bugs and showed them to the manager, along with a link to our page covering her story.

We are happy to report that the manager “made it right” by treating the apartment at their cost. Melissa and her mother are not longer being bitten, although she still sleeps with a flashlight close at hand.

If your photos and symptoms point to bed bugs, our practical guide to getting rid of bed bugs can help you move from identification to treatment.

Reader ID cases: how they found the proof

Four condensed cases from this page’s long identification thread, each one showing where the evidence actually turns up.

Helen: rows are not spider bites

Helen woke up in her new apartment with hard, painful bites in straight rows of three to six and dismissed them as spider bites for weeks. The bug that finally ran across her pillow at dusk went into a ziplock bag, and the exterminator confirmed it: bed bugs, in most of the building. The row pattern was the clue she wishes she had trusted sooner, and the sealed bag is the move that turned suspicion into a confirmed treatment plan.

marie’s light bulb

marie kept her bedroom lamp on all night out of fear of the dark, and found a full nest, eggs and hatched shells included, coiled inside the spiral fluorescent bulb of that very lamp. Days later she steamed a monster off the underside of a kitchen cabinet handle she touched every day. Her conclusion after both finds: they are brilliant hiders, and no spot that stays warm and close to people is beneath suspicion.

bedbug assassin and the wall

After killing a couple of stray bugs in bed, he went looking for the source and pulled his mattress away from the wall. Hundreds were clustered in the gap. The colony lives where the bed meets something dark and undisturbed, which is exactly where an inspection has to go, and exactly where nobody wants to look. Food grade diatomaceous earth dusted through the room finished the job at his place.

Danielle reads a mattress

Danielle, a property manager who had helped tenants through infestations, still needed five nights of bites at her boyfriend’s place before she tore the bed apart. Under the mattress folds she found the full signature this page teaches: shed exoskeletons, black fecal specks, and rusty smear streaks. He had slept there for months without a mark on him, which is the other lesson: one unbitten sleeper proves nothing.