Feeding Habits of Bed Bugs

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Bed Bug Feeding Habits - Cimex Lectularius

Bed bugs are bloodsucking insects. Most species feed on humans only when other prey is unavailable. Bed bugs are attracted to their hosts primarily by carbon dioxide and secondarily by warmth. Certain chemicals can also promote attraction.

A bed bug pierces the skin of its host with what is called a stylet fascicle. This is a unit composed of the maxillae and mandibles which have been modified into elongated shapes from a basic, ancestral style. The right and left maxillary stylets are connected at their midline and a section at the centerline forms a large food canal and a smaller salivary canal. The entire maxillary and mandibular bundle penetrates the skin. The tips of the right and left maxillary stylets are not the same: the right is hooklike and curved, the left is straight. The right and left mandibular stylets extend along the outer sides of their respective maxillary stylets and do not reach anywhere near the tip of the fused maxillary stylets. The stylets are retained in a groove in the labium, and during feeding, they are freed from the groove as the jointed labium is bent or folded out of the way: its tip never enters the wound. The mandibular stylet tips have small teeth and through alternately moving these stylets back and forth, the insect cuts a path through tissue for the maxillary bundle to reach an appropriate sized blood vessel.

Bed bugs can live up to a year without feeding.

They have been known to get a blood meal from other bed bugs when no host is present.

Feeding by sucking for about three to five minutes or more, the bug then withdraws the stylet bundle from the feeding position and retracts it back into the labial groove, folds the entire unit back under the head, and returns to its hiding place.

It takes between five to ten minutes for a bed bug to become completely engorged with blood. Although bed bugs can live for a year without feeding, they normally try to feed every five to ten days. DNA from human blood meals can be recovered from bed bugs for up to 90 days, which may allow them to be used for forensic purposes for identifying on whom the bed bugs have been feeding.

Bed Bug Nymph Feeding

Video courtesy of PJB Pest Management

Portions of content provided by:

Entomologist Paul J. Bello, PJB Pest Management Consulting, LLC. - Author of "The Bed Bug Combat Manual"

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