Bothersome Bugs: What Do Bed Bug Eggs Look Like?

Nidhi Sahai
Nov 18, 2022 By Nidhi Sahai
Originally Published on Oct 22, 2021
Edited by Luca Demetriou
Fact-checked by Vikhaash Sundararaj
Have bugs in your house? Know what do bed bug eggs look like
?
Age: 3-18
Read time: 12.4 Min

The bedbugs problem you are facing today is not just a problem of the modern generation, rather has been in existence for centuries.

But during the '50s, with help of proper hygiene, heat treatment, and pest control treatment, the infestations became minimum. Though now again they have made a comeback.

Corner and isolated places of homes, shelters, schools, college dorms, offices, are the locations where you can easily notice the bed bug eggs. The lifespan of these tiny bugs is about 10-11 months which involves the development from a bed bug egg to an adult.

The female bug starts laying a bed bug egg after successfully getting two to three good complete meals.

She lay eggs at the rate of two to three eggs every week. But a well-fertilized female could even lay up to 12 per week.

Later, the bed bug eggs hatch in two weeks, and the newborn bug (nymphs) starts to search for any food source immediately after that to grow into an adult in the time span of four months. Their lifestyle and lifespan are highly influenced by the amount of heat that particular space is getting.

The perfect temperature for that is around 68 ℉ (20 ℃).

They tend to lay at least 400-bed bug eggs in their 10-months life cycle. There are many factors that can kill bed bug eggs and stop bed bug infestation.

On realizing that you have bedbugs, it is very important to go for their treatment immediately after that. These bugs feed on a blood meal, and once someone got bed bug bites, there are many chances that they will spread on the furniture, clothes.

You might be wondering how to detect the presence of bedbugs in your house.

The bed bug eggs hatch within a week.

The most appropriate places to find bed bug eggs are the rough surfaces of bed frames in the room, corners or folds of mattresses, and cracks or crevices in walls.

As soon as you see blood stains on your bedsheets, pillows, or fabrics, small red bites on the skin in a line, a weird smell behind your furniture, you need to go for a hygiene treatment and recover the infested areas as these bedbugs are recurring.

The bed bug eggs do not have any such defined texture, they are in general very small and fragile, almost like dust. They stick very strongly to the items they lay bed bug eggs on.

They can be identified as a line of white dust in the corner of your house. Any well-protected area of your house is the perfect place for these bugs to lay bed bug eggs.

Rarely anybody comes to that area of the house so that place looks perfect to them. It doesn’t matter if the bed bug eggs are laid upside down, because they stick so strong to the material that they almost defy the law of gravity.

These tiny bed bigs are reddish to brown in shade and are called parasitic insects. There are very high chances that if anyhow you have an uncovered skin area, these bugs can bite you as their main diet is blood, which they need to grow and develop.

Their bite will cause several red rashes and irritation. There is no clarity on the topic of disease spread because of these bed bugs, but they can harm public health and economic issues.

They are so small that they almost look like an apple seed.

There are suitable places in every house where they can hide very effectively like headboards, box springs, bed frames. There are high chances of your encounter with bed bugs when you visit hotels, homeless shelters, or hospitals.

The problems with bedbugs seem never-ending, and so here you can also read about what do flea eggs look like and where do bed bugs come from.

What do bed bug eggs look like to the human eye?

To the human eye, these tiny bed bug eggs are completely visible, a microscope is not needed to see them. They might not seem like bed bug eggs but you can see them with naked eyes.

You might be having an idea of how do they look if you’re constantly looking for them, but if you have no idea about their appearance, here we will tell you everything about that.

Bed bug eggs are very similar to that of rice in appearance but are very much smaller in size. They are pearl white to greyish and have an oval shape with only 1mm in length.

These eggs have a hinged cap at their one end, which is the place these nymphs come from where they hatch. You can see whether the eggs are hatched or not.

There will be a hole on that side of the bed bug eggs if they are already hatched. The female bed bug is very efficient in hiding them and sticking them to the surface of the surface on which they lay eggs.

The harborage areas are the perfect place for the female bed bug to lay eggs.

Bed bugs lay eggs which can sometimes cause reddish-brown rashes. These sticky eggs may appear flat on mattresses, crevices, rooms, cracks, empty spaces.

The heat or the perfect temperature that these bugs require is around 68-86 ℉(20-30 ℃). The infestation of nymphs can be mostly seen near places that life-supporting agents like places that are away from pests, have a food source and heat, comfortable mattress.

The eggs can be very dangerous to small babies as these eggs are very small, which a baby might swallow unknowingly and that can cause diseases. You can use heat treatment very well against them.

Sometimes it is possible that the naked humane eye can’t see them and might need a microscope for that. The walls or isolated places that have light color or are white are the places where it becomes very tough to identify them.

The light color hides the eggs from the magnifying glass also. You will need to look closely to identify that these eggs are silver rather than just white.

The eggs, which are not hatched yet will have a cream color. But later, the hatched one is silver.

In a dark light setting, it becomes quite easy to identify them even without a magnifying glass. The eggs accumulate together which makes them clearly and easily visible to the naked eye.

There are many factors that can kill bed bug eggs and stop bed bug infestation. There are many types of bed bug sprays available in the market to prevent infestations in the isolated places of houses or hotels.

But there have been instances that even these sprays couldn’t control the population increase of these bugs. They are effective against other types of insects.

These tiny bedbugs get mostly active at night to bite people when they are sleeping as they feed on blood. They pierce the skin and then suck the blood out through it.

They feed for around 3-11 minutes and after that, they just crawl away. You won’t recognize the bite early as it feels quite harmless in the start, but it turns very itchy later. Unlike other insects, which mostly have a specific area to bite, bed bugs can bite anywhere on the exposed skin.

What do bed bug eggs look like on clothes?

These bugs are those creatures of nature which nobody wants to meet ever. Not at home, office, or school at least. They are masters in hiding themselves away from humans because of their super small size. You can take heat treatment, pest control treatment to get rid of them after the infestation.

These small bugs just love fabrics and furniture in the house, and if you have these two in the corner of your house, they will love to give you some company and it will become almost impossible to identify their infestation.

It is very easy to find them on clothes and brown wood in the house of the host. Depending on the color of the clothing, you will be able to notice them quite easily with almost no trouble.

We know that the eggs of bed bugs are white or silvery in color, and made it easy to locate them on darker shade color clothes.

But if you didn’t notice any on your clothes and you are continuously wearing those infested clothes, there are high possibilities that you will encounter blood stains on the fabric and red bed bug bites in a line on your back.

These tiny creatures feed on blood meal and that’s why it becomes easy to locate them on clothes. We know how much these pests love to hide, so before wearing any of your clothing, just check all the pockets, sleeves, collars for these places could have been a reproducing site for these pests.

The female bug starts laying eggs after successfully getting 2-3 good complete meals.

The eggshells are silver to white in color and their body is somewhat dark, which you can observe at any site of infestation.

The infestation of bed bugs on clothes is quite common these days. That used to happen in earlier times also.

Clothes packed in the cupboard without naphthalin balls have high chances to become the egg-laying sites of the mother bed bug.

There will be times when you won’t be able to distinguish between the bites of bedbugs and other insects. The area where we can see the bites have a red spot in the middle with the red rashes around.

It feels very itchy and is arranged in a linear way on the skin. You can check your neck, underarms, back, arms, and hands. There are possibilities of developing an allergy to the bites of bedbugs, although mostly, the people didn’t have any allergy.

If not cleaned, your house can become their house as well

What do bed bug eggs look like after they hatch?

The period which these bedbugs require to hatch is roughly around 6-10 days. After hatching they are called nymphs and they leave their eggshells to go for a later developmental stage, which is called the ‘larvae stages’.

Further, this stage is subdivided into cycles. They need to find some blood to feed on it so that they can start to molt. They need it to grow into a much-developed stage called the larvae stage and spread everywhere and cause huge bed bug infestation.

Their lifestyle and lifespan are highly influenced by the amount of heat that particular space is getting. The perfect temperature for their suitable growth is around 68 ℉ (20 ℃).

The larvae of these bedbugs are very small and have a shiny color with a lighter shade as compared to the adult bed bugs. It is during their growth that these insects develop a darker shade of color and a clear body contour.

After each feeding they have of blood, they tend to grow half a millimeter in length. We know that these bedbugs develop by molting, and so you will notice many skin castings they leave behind.

It is yellow-pale white and has a resemblance to the dry skin of humans.

These sticky eggs may appear flat on the infested areas like mattresses, crevices, rooms, cracks, empty spaces. You can take heat treatment, pest control treatment to get rid of them after the infestation.

The hatching of the eggs of bed bugs requires lots of favorable conditions around it. Many insects have the same conditions to hatch.

The heat or the perfect temperature that these insects require is around 68-86 ℉(20-30 ℃). There is a specific amount of humidity as well that they require to develop which is around 70-80%. One of the most important conditions is the requirement of a good pesticide-free environment for their development.

Many compounds are responsible for the destruction of the eggs of bed bugs after identifying them. Even the newly hatched nymphs can die just after hatching. But these eggs are very much resilient to pesticides.

Oxygen is very important as well. These insects need oxygen also.

They use their exoskeleton to absorb oxygen from the environment around them. Nymphs require plenty of oxygen to move to the next stages of development and later become adult bed bugs.

These few conditions are quite basic for them to hatch and develop. The nymphs and eggs are so small that if there is a walking predator near any of them, they will die in a second. The heat treatment is very useful against the infestation of bed bugs after identifying them.

Do bed bug eggs look like rice?

The eggs of the bed bugs are small and pearl white in color with a translucent texture making it difficult for the naked eye to see. A wet spot is present on the surface of these rice-like eggs.

The spread of these bugs is rapid and their treatment should not be based on homemade operations. It is almost impossible to eradicate them without any professional help. The shape of the eggs of the bed bugs is oval.

They can get compared to the size of the grain of salt. You can even find them by using a magnifying glass and a flashlight.

It is very difficult to distinguish between a grain of rice and the eggs of bed bugs as they are almost of the same size and texture.

With the naked eye, the identification of these eggs is almost impossible. The female bed bug glues the bed bug egg from the place where they lay them.

They feel on blood to reproduce. The female lays so many eggs that they form a cluster-like shape and look very similar to the grains of uncooked rice at a place.

Their size is not exactly that of a grain of rice, they are 50 times smaller. The most fertilized female can lay eggs up to 500 in 10 months and can cause huge infestations.

They have a length of 0.04 in (1 mm) and are very light almost like a milky texture.

With the eggs, you can also encounter fecal droppings at the place where there is the cluster of eggs located. Reaching the growth stage of the adult bed bugs, they develop to be the size of an apple seed.

The heat or the perfect temperature that these bugs require is around 68-86 ℉ (20-30 ℃). Bed bugs have good hiding ability and identifying them is almost impossible.

You can see the nymph infestations on furniture, mattress, and it becomes very tough to get rid of the eggs once they have been laid or hatch. Bed bugs stick to the body of human beings and cause infestation.

They can even lay eggs on the body and spend the few days of their lie there if you wear unhygienic clothes, which is the prime site of infestation.

The life span of bed bugs is not much, they have about 10-months of life. On brown clothes, it becomes very easy to recognize the eggs of bed bugs as they have white eggshells.

Here at Kidadl, we have carefully created lots of interesting family-friendly facts for everyone to enjoy! If you liked our suggestions for what do bed bug eggs look like, then why not take a look at what do snake eggs look like or Bed Bug Facts?

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Written by Nidhi Sahai

Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and Mass Communication

Nidhi Sahai picture

Nidhi SahaiBachelor of Arts in Journalism and Mass Communication

Dedicated and experienced, Nidhi is a professional content writer with a strong reputation for delivering high-quality work. She has contributed her expertise to esteemed organizations, including Network 18 Media and Investment Ltd. Driven by her insatiable curiosity and love for journalism and mass communication, Nidhi pursued a Bachelor of Arts degree from Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, graduating with distinction in 2021. During her college years, she discovered her passion for Video Journalism, showcasing her skills as a videographer for her institution. Nidhi's commitment to making a positive impact extends beyond her professional pursuits. Actively engaging in volunteer work, she has contributed to various events and initiatives throughout her academic career.

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Fact-checked by Vikhaash Sundararaj

Bachelor of Fine Arts specializing in International Business

Vikhaash Sundararaj picture

Vikhaash SundararajBachelor of Fine Arts specializing in International Business

With a background in International Business Management, having completed his degree at the University of Hull. Vikhaash has volunteered with 'Teach For India' to help students create a monthly newsletter. In his free time, he enjoys sports and was the assistant captain of his school's hockey team. He has also gained marketing experience through an internship at Decathlon Sports India.

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