Bedbugs live where we sleep and only come out at night. The bedbug does not like light and during the day, it hides in cracks and crevices, underneath your bed and along skirting boards. Here, it digests its food, breeds and lays eggs. Once it is dark, it hunts down its prey which it locates by heat.

The female bedbug lays around 200 eggs in its lifetime, approximately 4-5 eggs per day. The eggs are laid in suitable hiding places where the base is sufficiently sticky for the eggs to remain in place. If the temperature drops to under 10°C, no eggs will be laid. Thus, the amount of eggs laid depends a lot on temperature and other external conditions. An egg measures about 1 mm and evolves through five nymph stages. The nymphs basically resemble small copies of the adult bedbug. In order to evolve, the tick requires blood in every single stage, and it can take between two months to a whole year to evolve from egg to fully-grown bedbug.

Some people experience the bite of a bedbug as small itchy spots on the body. The bites, however, vary considerably in appearance from person to person, so it can often be difficult to determine whether it really is a bedbug bite or not. Up to 30% of Danes have no reaction at all to bedbug bites.

The bedbug has become a large problem in this country at locations such as hotels, residence halls, hostels and on housing estates. They are spread via clothes, luggage and furniture that is brought into the home, or very often following overnight stays in a bedbug-infested environment. Second-hand furniture that has been purchased from a home with bedbugs can also be the reason.

If you live in an apartment, bedbugs can also spread from apartment to apartment via piping and other cracks in the building.