help!! bedbugs? body lice? help please!!
Location: southern Maryland
August 5, 2011 5:29 pm
Please help, my husband’s niece house sit for us & the next day after being home we found all these little bugs on top of the bed. We thought they were baby dog ticks round & black grey in color. We vacuumed them up & stripped the bed. The next day we came home to them on the bed again & I went into overdrive cleaning, even encased our bed. I have bites on my, neck, shoulders & around hairline. My husband & daughter have no signs….I. have checked our heads for lice & nothing!! I am losing my mind over this & getting tired of our nightly ritual of bed cleaning. We live in southern Maryland. I am also submitting a pic of a black bug we have seen a lot of, that bug is upside down in the pic….thank you!!
Signature: desperately need help
Thing found on the bed
Dear desperately need help,
We cannot make out any details in the thing you found on the bed. Did they move? Are you certain they were living things? We sometimes get reports of Tropical Fowl Mites or Tropical Rat Mites entering homes and biting the occupants, but this generally happens if there was a bird nest on the roof or a rat’s nest the attic, and the occupants “flew the coop”, leaving nothing else for the Mites to feed upon. Again, we cannot make out any details in your photo to be certain. Here is a link to Biting Mites in the home from CityBugs website. The second creature is a Grain Weevil, and it may be infesting stored grain products in the pantry or pet foods including bird seed. You will need to find the source of the infestation to eliminate that problem. Just discard the infested food products. Here is a recent posting on Grain Weevils.
Grain Weevil
help!!! bedbugs? body lice? please help
Location: southern maryland
August 6, 2011 1:33 am
Thank you for responding so quickly! The weivels are an easy fix. The bugs found on bed were alive. At first glance it looked like dirt & then I did think were dead….but they moved very slowly. Sort of just pulling themselves along with their very tiny (many) legs. I took a couple of more pics, hope they help. Also the one in the pic seems to be dried up kind of shriveled…probably from one the many products I used. However my itching has not subsided. Thank you again!
Signature: desperately need help
Unidentified Bed Thing is probably Tick Larva
Hi again desperately need help,
We are sorry, but we cannot tell what this is. It might be a Mite. Perhaps one of our readers will be able to provide some information.
I like This
Can the poster count the legs? That would help us to see if it’s an insect or a mite. With regard to the weevils – these are common in the tropics and we sift them out of the flour with a sieve! We don’t throw away the flour.
Thanks Juliet,
We strongly believe that many old recipes call for sifting flour specifically to remove any insect pests that have infested it during its storage. While this is an easy fix with flour, with other stored products, there is not an easy means of separating food from pest and it is easier to discard than to have an infestation spread. We recently had an issue with meal moths in the nut canister. We were able to pick through the whole nuts, but all the nut meal that accumulated in the bottom of the canister, which we love to include in the batter for German Chocolate Cake, needed to be discarded. Corn meal is another product that is easier to discard than to try to salvage. We do give our flour sifter quite a workout, especially during the summer.
The rounded creatures look to me rather like small, blood-engorged, grey ticks, as desperately need help (dnh) suggested in the original post. The grey color is indeed reminiscent of dog ticks, but on the other hand, there are a lot of different species of ticks. I wonder if dnh currently has a dog that likes to snooze on the bed? Anyway, it looks as if the ticks were collected using a piece of scotch tape. After collecting, dropping the piece of scotch tape into a small bottle of alcohol would preserve the creatures so that dnh can show them to an expert.
Susan J. Hewitt
Thanks Susan,
We also thought they might be Ticks, but they seemed too small.
Ticks start out as minute miniature versions of how they look in the adult form, so why not? Take a look at these hatched tick eggs here:
http://tgaw.wordpress.com/2009/05/04/introducing-the-baby-ticks/
Thanks Susan. Your comments are always appreciated.
I agree with Susan that it’s a larval tick.
Thanks for your input.