Where do bed bugs hide?Īnother way to determine if your bites come from bed bugs is to look for the insects themselves.

In fact, if you have screens on your windows-thereby keeping out other insects that might bite-but are still waking up with a line of 3 or 4 bites on your arm, it’s safe to suspect that bed bugs might be to blame, says Edwin Rajotte, Ph.D., a professor of entomology at Penn State University. “They probe the skin in several different places, I think probably to find best access to draw blood,” says Gibb. What do bed bug bites look like?īed bug bites show up in a line, most often in a cluster of 3 to 4 bites. Here’s what to know, including bed bug bites pictures to help you visualize the symptoms. However, there are a few things that can tip you off to the fact that bed bugs are the culprit of your bites.

That’s why it can be difficult to determine if your bite is from a bed bug just by looking at it. In fact, Gibb says some people’s skin doesn’t respond to a bed bug bite at all, which is especially the case for the elderly population. That same mosquito could bite someone else and it’s hardly noticeable.” Some people are going to swell up and it’s going to itch. “Everybody’s going to respond differently,” says Timothy Gibb, Ph.D., a clinical professor of entomology at Purdue University. What, exactly, was biting you in the middle of the night? Was it a spider? A mosquito? Or-possibly the worst case scenario-could it have been bed bugs?Īlthough bed bugs might not be the first thing we think of when we wake up with an itchy or painful welt, the critters do get their food from our blood-and will leave a little red bump after getting their fill.īut the trouble with identifying a bed bug bite-as is true for a lot of insects, including mosquitoes-is that it can be hard to identify the source, as not everyone’s immune response is the same. Waking up with a fresh set of itchy bug bites can bring on its own set of worries.

Bed bugs pictures