How it is that bed bugs can reinfest an area so quickly and thoroughly after having been exterminated has finally been explained by a team of English researchers.

How it is that bed bugs can re-infest an area so quickly and thoroughly after having been exterminated has finally been explained by a team of English researchers.

It all comes down to reproductive power.

Should a pregnant one escape a pest controller’s raid it can, in no time, manage to spawn a whole new colony of bed bugs.

All they need to sustain life is a single human, and they can live for a month waiting for food to arrive.

They also rely upon humans for getting from place to place. The pests can’t fly, so they travel where people travel.

The mysterious part has long been how they’ve managed to continue to exist in such strong numbers even after extermination.

Given the recent findings on how quickly they can multiply, and how few are needed to create thousands, researchers say that their rapid spread as of late makes a lot more sense.

If an exterminator misses a pregnant one and it hitches a ride somewhere else in somebody’s luggage, within weeks a whole new place could be teeming with them.

To discover this unsettling fact, the scientists traced the DNA of bedbug colonies and found that an entire hotel’s worth could all have a common ancestor.

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