The June-bug wings of flame,
The Bed-bug has no wings at all,
But it gets there all the same!
The power of ‘getting there’ is truly remarkable. Man, their chief victim, has always warred against bugs, yet, like the poor, bugs ‘are always with us.’ I heard it stated, when I was living in southern Italy, that if you submerged the legs of your bed in metal saucers full of water and placed the bed in the centre of the room, the bugs will crawl up the wall, walk along the ceiling and drop on to the bed and on to you. Anyhow, whether this be so or not, there is no doubt that these insects have a certain success in the struggle for life, and only the most systematic and rigorous measures are capable of ridding a dwelling of their presence.
Fig. 4.—Egg of Cimex lectularius. Enlarged. (After Marlatt.)
The eggs of the bed-bug are pearly white, oval objects, perhaps 1 mm. in length. At one end there is a small cap surrounded by a projecting rim, and it is by pushing off this cap, and through the orifice thus opened, that the young bug makes its way into the outer world after an incubation period of a week or ten days. There is no metamorphosis—no caterpillar and no chrysalis stages. The young hatch out, in structure miniatures of their parents, but in colour they are yellowish-white and nearly transparent. The young feed readily, and feeding takes place between each moult, and the moults are five in number, before the adult imago emerges. This it does about the eleventh or twelfth week after hatching. These time-limits depend, however, upon the temperature after hatching, and the rate of growth depends not only upon the temperature but also upon the amount of food.
When bred artificially and under good conditions, the rate of progress can be ‘speeded up’ so that the eggs hatch out in eight days, and every following moult takes place at intervals of eight days, so that the period from egg to adult can be run through in as short a time as seven weeks.
Fig. 5.—Newly hatched young of Cimex lectularius. 1, Ventral view; 2, dorsal view. Enlarged. (After Marlatt.)