Bed frame with bed bugs in Pennington, New Jersey

These are photos of the bed and frame in this home. You can see all of the different stages of bed bugs. The bed bug life cycle is short. A bed bug can go from egg to adult in a few as 40 days if the insects have access to all the blood meals they need. Bed bugs start out as tiny pearl-white eggs about the size of a pinhead. The insects then go through a series of nymph stages where the bug takes a blood meal and then molts. The bugs go through five molts before reaching maturity, and they will not molt unless they've had a blood meal. If not recently fed, nymphs are translucent or whitish-below in color, and are next to impossible to find, unless you are an eagle-eyed bed bug specialist who is actively inspecting for them. Nymphs start out at about 1.5 mm and continue to grow to about 4.5 mm (a little more than 1/8 of an inch) before their final molting. Adult bed bugs are still small 5-7 mm (up to 1/4 inch), or about the size of an apple seed. If not fed recently, they have a flat, oval-shaped body, and if fed, they become filled with blood and look like little water balloons.