Just about anyone could have bed bugs and not even know it. I had no idea that I had them, and there were so many of them before I finally had to admit I had a bed bug problem, that obviously, they had been living with me for a while.

Bed bugs come in many different sizes due to the fact that they transform or molt between each feeding. Here is the best image I could find that shows the six different sizes that bed bugs can infest your home as.

Bed bug life cycle

Bed bug life cycle

The top two are actually at the same stage, except that one is empty and the other is completely full of blood. Don’t worry, this picture does not represent the actual sizes of the bed bugs.

Female adult bed bugs can lay roughly 200 to 500 eggs over their lifetime, so it’s easy to imagine how quickly they can spread if you don’t know that you have them.

One of my biggest surprises I got while doing my bed bug research was that bed bugs can actually go a long time without feeding. Some sources said that they can actually go a year and a half without a blood meal if the food supply is low.

Bed bugs also like to live as close to their food supply as possible, and they have been known to travel to other apartments if starving. They are quite similar to mosquitoes in that they are attracted to the body heat of warm blooded animals, and to carbon dioxide that animals breathe out. (Yes, that’s how they find you.) Their advanced senses for heat and CO2 detection will lead them to you, and then they’ll generally take up residence close to a good host as soon as possible.

If you suspect you might have them, you should check around the area where you spend most of your time stationary, like in your bed in the middle of the night. You should check around the mattresses and in cracks around the area, especially in areas that are on the opposite side of the sunlight. They hate light, and they’ll most likely be in places where the least amount of light is.

The space between your wall and baseboards: a favorite bed bug hiding place

Another sign you can look for — and it was one of the biggest pieces of evidence for me — is black spots on your bed sheets. This is actually bed bug feces that they leave behind after feeding. You might find blood spots, too, that could be the result of you crushing one by accident.

My situation was a bit unique in that I didn’t have them in my bed, really. My bed bug infestation was centered behind my computer desk in the baseboard, and there was also one in my computer chair, as hard as that might be to believe. I think I know how it probably happened, too. Well, I don’t know how the bed bugs got here to begin with, but I know how I could have raised an entire population of them once they got here. I had a habit of using my computer in the middle of the night with the lights off, and I was often drinking at that time, and many times, I fell asleep on my computer chair. I can just imagine them feasting on my feet and legs when I didn’t even realize it, and then crawling up my body and making a new residence in my computer chair. It’s actually quite embarrassing that I took so long to realize this was going on, despite the fact that they are amazingly sneaky.

Do you think you might have bed bugs? Well, I hope my post will help you to determine whether or not you do. Hopefully, your place is bed bug free, but if you end up realizing that you have them, and you have concrete proof of it, it’s time to call the exterminator.

In my next and final post about bed bugs, I will explain some the steps I took to finally get rid of them. Also, be sure to check out part 1 where I talk in detail about my experience in discovering I had a bed bug problem.