SPEAKER: The Harvard School of Public Health, last accessed September of 2006, described the bed bug as being about a quarter of an inch, roughly the size of the nail on your little finger, and slightly flattened so it can easily squeeze into cracks and small spaces. It has six legs, antennas, and a short, puncturing beak used to extract blood from its victim.

According to the Institute of Clinical Pathology and Medical Research in Australia, left accessed October of 2006, describes that the growth cycle of the bed bug takes about six to eight weeks, from the nymph stage to adulthood. And on average, a bed bug lives for about a year. During the nymphal stage, it's crucial that each bed bug receives at least one blood meal to achieve development into adulthood, which works out to be about five to 10 minutes of engorgement on human blood. Female bed bugs lay two to three eggs every single day, and over the course of their lives, somewhere in the vicinity of 1,081, as shown in the visual aid, with exactly 1,081 bed bugs.

Now ponder with me for a moment, if you will, if over the course of one year, one bed bug has turned into 1,000, if even half of those are female, by the second year, those thousand bed bugs will have turned into 540,000. And statistically, by the third year, one bed bug will have multiplied into over 292 million, squirming little bloodsuckers. The University of Kentucky Entomology, last updated February of 2006, explains that the most common place to find a bed bug is just where you might expect, in your bed.