Characteristics
The hay-eater is a small insect (up to 10 mm) with two pairs of colorless wings. Sometimes they may have dark streaks or blotches.
The variety of species of this beetle explains the possible external differences between individuals. Some hay-eaters have shorter or no wings than usual.
Visually, male pests differ from females by the presence of:
- antennae with hair.
- Large globular eyes.
One of the insect species is the book louse, which is often found in the territory inhabited by humans.
Where dwells
The habitat of the hayfiller is the whole world. Book louse is a cosmopolitan insect that has spread literally on all continents. But she feels most comfortable in the tropics or subtropics. She is quite adapted to live both in forests (on trees, abundantly overgrown with lichen), and in a human dwelling.
The hay-eaters in the apartment are mostly hiding on shelves with old dusty books that they have not used for a long time. Among other premises, these insects can take a fancy to libraries, archives, as well as barns and grain warehouses.
How to get rid of hay-eaters in an apartment
Once in a dwelling, an insect can immediately begin to manifest itself as damage to books and products. However, it is extremely rare to detect it immediately, due to its small size.
It is difficult to get rid of the hay-eaters on your own, since the apartment has a lot of places where small bugs can settle.
To prevent re-infestation, it is important to eliminate both the pests and the eggs they have laid.
Please note that you should not postpone the fight with intruders, since they will take very little time to reproduce.
Radical methods
A sufficiently effective radical technique for destroying book lice or dusty hay-eating is to contact the appropriate service.
In order for the pest control to be of the highest quality, the specialist uses modern equipment and the most effective chemicals.
One way to combat the pest is to generate hot or cold fog. Spraying insecticide on all surfaces of the room is carried out using a special device.
Due to the small size of the droplets, the chemical penetrates into the most secluded corners, which cannot be reached with a conventional spray.
To get rid of book lice, it is better to resort to specialized help, since the fight against insects using folk methods can only aggravate the situation.
Professional hay eater control
Due to the unusual nature of the phenomenon, no special preparations have been invented to combat the hay-eater within the premises. However, a complex effect will help to destroy pests without harm to humans.
The step-by-step instructions are as follows:
- reduce humidity levels.
- Remove mold. If the fungus persists, beetle control will have a temporary effect.
- Place the contaminated item in the freezer (first wrapped in foil), or in direct sunlight. A day of such exposure will destroy pests. An additional measure is to turn on the fumigator. Important: the method is suitable only at an early stage of infection.
- If there are too many individuals of hay-eaters, it is worth resorting to the help of specialized means. Before use, you must read the instructions.
With a large-scale invasion of beetles, it is unlikely that it will be possible to remove them on their own. For this case, the best solution is to contact competent exterminators.
After processing, you should put a thorough order in the entire apartment. This, as well as controlling humidity levels, will help prevent secondary contamination.
Preventive actions
Since it is not so easy to combat hay-eaters, it is much easier to avoid their appearance in a residential area. Certain preventive measures will help to accomplish this.
Here is a list of them:
- maintaining the permissible humidity level (no more than 50%).
- Regular wet cleaning, no accumulation of dust and dirt.
- Daily ventilation of all rooms.
- Taking proper care of indoor plants.
- Regular checking of books and documents, putting things in order, dusting.
- Disposal of spoiled dry food, expired cereals and pasta.
- Lack of accumulation of debris and unused items.
It is important to prevent possible growth of mold or mildew in the living area.
In the presence of a herbarium or dried berries (herbs), it is necessary to regularly inspect the collection for its integrity and safety.
Video
Insect repellent Confidant 50 ml
Description
Hay-eater is a small whitish or light brown insect, only about 1 mm in length. The insect's head is crowned with long 15-segmented antennae (this is the main difference between book lice and similar domestic parasites). The eyes are compound, sharp teeth, the body is slightly flat, the wings are missing. The hind femora are wide, triangular in shape, the abdomen is rounded. The insect has good mobility.
The book hay-eater reproduces without fertilization (parthenogenesis). Each female lays up to hundreds of eggs at a time. The masonry is placed in small portions on any flat hard surface. Having made such a clutch, the female covers them with feces, as if masking from prying eyes.
Usually, the laying of eggs occurs in the autumn, in the spring the larvae already appear. Book lice larvae pass through 6 instars, and the number of insect generations per year can be 6.
Insect species
To date, more than 5 thousand varieties of hay-eaters are known. Most of them are content with living in the wild, but some have adapted to being close to humans.
In a residential area, two types are usually found:
- book louse.
- Brownie hay-eater.
Despite the visual similarity, the bugs are somewhat different from each other.
Book louse
This small beetle (about 1 mm long) has a light yellowish body and a large head. Antennae exceed it in length and taper evenly towards the edges. A distinctive feature is the absence of wings.
The main habitat is bird nests and rodent burrows. Reproduction takes place without fertilization, which leads to a high rate of appearance of new individuals.
A female beetle is capable of laying up to 100 eggs per day, protecting the clutch with physiological secretions from the intestines. Under favorable natural conditions, the book hay-eater is capable of multiplying up to 6 times throughout the year.
If pests live in a residential area, this process continues without interruption.
Brownie hay-eater
Another name is dusty hay-eater. This is the type of insect that is as close as possible in structure to the book louse. The main difference lies in morphological features.
The pest has a light yellow body and brown stripes on the upper half of the abdomen. Its distinctive feature is the presence of rudimentary wings (appendages of the posterior wall of the body).
The length of the dusty hay-eater is about 2 mm, which is twice the size of a book louse.
Harm
Depending on where exactly the book louse settled, it can harm in different ways:
- Destruction of old books and archival documents.
- Damage to grain and cereals, clogging them with traces of their vital activity. In the conditions of granaries, the grain necessary for sowing is often destroyed.
- Damage to various types of antiques, herbaria and entomological collections.
- Insect excrement and chitin flakes can cause severe allergic reactions in humans and pets.
Answers to popular questions
Hay-eater is an insect that prefers tropical and subtropical climates. His stay in our latitudes is accompanied by a lot of questions. Some of them are answered below.
What does the insect eat
Hay-eaters are rather unpretentious in their food.
For food, bugs are used:
- organic residues.
- Molds.
- Lichens.
- Rotten stumps and trees.
- Green algae.
Having settled in a dwelling, bugs will easily find something to feast on:
- stocks of food (for example, cereals or pasta).
- Carpet covering.
- Furniture.
The abundance of food and favorable conditions contribute to uncontrolled reproduction.
Do book lice jump
The lack of wings does not create obstacles for the book louse. Hay-eaters are not able to jump, but many insects will envy their speed of movement.
Often, beetles are grouped into numerous colonies, although they can exist in small groups and separately. If a bunch of pests begins to move from place to place, this process is accompanied by a characteristic chirp.
Reasons for the appearance
At home, the hay-eater, as this pest is also called, appears due to the lack of regular cleaning of the room, imperfect ventilation, violation of the thermal regime, high humidity. The same applies to storage locations.
With an increase in air temperature and humidity, book-eaters begin active growth and reproduction. Within a year, one female book lice can give six generations of offspring. It is easy to imagine what kind of dominance of insects can be expected if you do not take measures to remove their colonies.
What do meat eaters eat?
Most often, these insects like to feast on mushrooms, lichen, algae, pollen and elements of dead insects. This means that, by and large, their diet can include any ingredients that have mold or plant decay. Therefore, they appear in apartments where there is a fungus. Most often, residents of the top floors in apartment buildings, as well as owners of suburban real estate, where the roof is in a deplorable state, suffer from the appearance of these parasites.
Danger of developing diseases.
Our ubiquitous microscopic neighbors, under favorable conditions, can breed so much that it will not be possible to live next to them. Many people may develop irritation with parasite excrement.
And the reaction to this can be any:
- The onset of allergic rhinitis;
- Conjunctivitis;
- Dermatitis;
- Respiratory allergies;
- Bronchial asthma;
- Quincke's edema.
It can be seen that, despite the microscopic nature, the parasites are dangerous. If you have all the signs of irritation but can't find the cause, try a dust mite intolerance test.
When confirming the diagnosis, you need to immediately start thinking about freeing the apartment from at least most of the pests, because it will not be possible to completely remove them.
Recently, an increase in the number of parasites has been recorded, as evidenced by the following facts:
- 5% of children in Russia have such a disease as bronchial asthma.
- In 6% of people, this disease is fatal.
- Every tenth person has an allergic irritation.
- Half of all cases are household allergies.
- The number of allergy sufferers increases by 40 million every year
If the number of ticks is higher than normal, it negatively affects people's lives, even without an allergic reaction. The head may often hurt, there will be discomfort in the mucous membrane, the person will quickly get tired, be depressed, and skin diseases will appear.
If these signs are typical when staying in a certain part of the apartment, we can say that the number of pests there is exceeded.
Do not disregard all this, otherwise chronic asthma may appear. It arises due to the fact that a person did not begin to receive treatment or remembered about it too late. You also need to remember that it is necessary to be treated for the disease itself and remove its cause, and not stop temporary symptoms.
If you begin to suspect an allergy in yourself or in a child, but do not know for sure, then observe your feelings. When you wake up in the morning, is your nose stuffed up, is it difficult to breathe, and when you get up and during the day, everything is in order, and nothing bothers you. So, most likely, you have a reaction to house dust mites, since there are most of them on the human bed.
Butterflies
These small insects with transparent wings in the apartment usually appear in the bathroom or toilet. Butterflies are small flies with wings bordered with dark fringes. They are well recognizable due to the special shape of the wings.
The photo shows the common butterfly (Psychodidae):
Butterfly larvae develop in garbage, basements and sewers, and adult flies can scatter around all apartments, laying eggs in trash cans and dust in closets.
But lice - head, pubic and clothes - rarely appear in the apartment. They are constantly present only on the head or body of a person, and on the bed or floor they appear completely by accident. Having found them, it is necessary to immediately check the hair of all family members and, in case of infection, remove parasites as soon as possible.
Sometimes in the apartment you can see very small insects, vaguely similar to cockroaches or bedbugs. These can be their young larvae (nymphs), sometimes with a translucent chitinous cover.
The photo shows a recently faded red cockroach, which looks almost white right after molting:
And this is what a bed bug larva looks like:
Such larvae can penetrate from neighboring apartments along ventilation ducts or through doors, settling or fleeing from persecution. If such insects are found in single specimens, it is enough to simply destroy them. With mass infection of the premises, they are found as often as adult insects, in this case, a thorough disinsection of the entire room should be carried out.
A good example of how small insects in an apartment can seriously ruin life
Cuckoo tails are enemies of domestic plants
The cuckoo is a small white insect that lives in the ground in flower pots in an apartment and feeds on organic matter. During mass reproduction, springtails can severely damage the roots of plants.
Feedback
“I don’t understand in any way what kind of attack this is in flower pots. Some insects are white, tiny, but there are so many of them that you can't see the ground. I transplanted violets and found that they were in all the pots. Tell me, what are these insects, are they dangerous? "
Tamara, Moscow
The photo shows a springtail at high magnification:
And below is a clod of earth contaminated with springtails taken out of the pot:
These insects can be poisoned with the usual means against garden pests - Aktara or Karbofos. You can also lay pieces of potatoes on the surface of the ground and collect insects on it every few days.
