I’m steam cleaning the carpet in the guest room & found a couple of tablespoons of THESE when I emptied the tank. They look just like dark sesame seeds, with a little dark spot at one end and maybe the suggestion of legs (or some kind of cilia). No head, but the body has striations (wrinkles?) in the shell.
WTF is this?
Ewww, now I’m starting to itch!
We had that bed in storage for several months before moving to this house - along with a chair, which my husband hauled to the curb last night. I swear, I’m allergic to stuff that was stored! When we were unpacking our moving boxes from storage this past winter, I had a terrible time breathing! And now, every time someone opens the door to that room, I start sneezing & wheezing.
Nobody else complains, though, and we HAVE had repeat guests - husband thinks it’s all in my head.
Google gave me bedbugs (they don’t look that fat) or termites (no wings, though, and no separate head).
Scary thing is, all I cleaned was the visible floor (I didn’t move any furniture), and that room has white carpeting. I can’t see a doggone thing.
If all you cleaned was the floor, could they be carpet beetles? We had them in a room we used to store junk while we were renovating part of the house - it looked like someone had spilled uncooked rice on the floor but apparently it was beetles.
Sorry about the lousy pix (arr-arr) - my needs exceeded the limits of my camera phone.
They do look more like the carpet beetles than bedbugs, except they tend to have just one dark line along the perimeter, and I can’t see a bunch of legs, just the merest suggestion of cilia.
Plus I haven’t found any adult beetles anywhere, just these things.
I did cut the cover off the box spring & inspected along the edge, where I found a bug hidden in the piping.
The pictures are a bit too blurry for me to say for sure, but they could be bedbugs. These are apparently making a big comeback. I speak from bitter experience.
There is a simple, if gross, test. Get a strip of masking tape, stick a bug to it (preferably a live or recently dead one), fold the tape on itself, and crush the bug inside it.
If you get a bright red bloodstain . . . I’d say it’s a bedbug.
I think if they were bedbugs, you’d know. They can’t breed without feeding, and they feed by sucking blood out of people. Unless you have been thoroughly chomped on in your sleep, they are unlikely to be bedbugs.
Bleh… congratulations on the identification of your pest, fessie, and after looking up images of carpet beetles, I finally found that that’s exactly what we had at my parents’ house - things my father always called “wood bugs”. Our adult beetles looked just like this, and I’ve been trying to figure out what the hell they were for years. Sometimes we’d find the discarded larvae husks laying around on the carpet or deep in the bottom of random bedroom drawers, yet never once did we make the connection between those creepy, hairy wormy larvae to the grown up black and gold “wood bugs”. :smack:
It was such a common bug in my childhood, and I haven’t seen even* one * since I moved out west. But thank you, fessie, for starting this thread and inadvertently solving one of my life’s little mysteries.
Boy, its too bad I missed the speculative portion of the thread 'cause I was taught while working at the vet clinic that things that look like sesame seed on long-haired cats are tapeworm larvae waiting to be eaten. A woman once brought us a whole baggie of them that her son collected out of his bed. He and the cat had been sharing the tapeworms, apparently.
