Sometimes a bird’s nest outside the window can cause trouble with several parasites at once! For example, in this apartment, a girl noticed typical bed bug bites on herself and found out that these bites were left not by common bed bugs, but by swallow bugs that crawl out of a nest outside the window. But in the photos that she sent, in addition to bed bugs, I also found typical blood-sucking bird mites, which could bite her too.
In the end, it became unclear what exactly she found on herself: either bed bug bites, or bird mite bites, or both at the same time. But it was absolutely clear that the source of the parasites was a nest of swallows outside her bedroom window.
Anyway, it is worth looking at what the bites of parasites from swallow nests look like in her pictures, and what are the bed bugs and bird mites, which breed in such nests and then crawl out of them into living apartments.
Swallow bugs bites and the nest outside the bedroom window
For three years a family from Hungary – a young couple with a small child – lived in an apartment and watched swallows, which annually built nests on the bedroom window. And in July of the third year, just after the swallow chicks flew out of the nest, the young woman began to find obvious bite marks on herself. Here is her hand with such bites in the photo:
As soon as she started looking for parasites, she immediately found typical bed bugs. Here is one specimen in the photo:
After watching my video, she suspected that these bed bugs might be crawling into the apartment from that very swallow nest. Especially since the time that she observed the swallows with her baby girl and husband, they noticed some insects on the wall below the nest, but never paid much attention to it.
Now everything became clear: the insects on the wall were exactly the same as those caught in the apartment, and those caught in the apartment looked like typical bed bugs. And almost certainly these were the same swallow bugs, Oeciacus hirundinis, which I showed in the video:
Just a reminder: swallow bugs Oeciacus hirundinis are one of the species of bed bug family, outwardly almost indistinguishable from common bed bugs. Representatives of this species live in the nests of various birds, mainly passerines, and often get into human dwellings when the chicks fly out of the nest and the insects are left without feeders – they simply have to look for new hosts outside the nest. And if such a nest is located near an apartment, they are very likely to come here in their search.
Swallow bugs bite people in the same way as common bed bugs, but in apartments, feeding only on human blood, they do not reproduce.
In my viewer’s apartment, it was the same: a few relatively small bed bugs, mainly adults and nymphs of older ages, were regularly biting her sleeping on the bed right under the window, outside of which there was a nest.
She was a little confused by the fact that neither her husband nor her child were bitten. It seemed like she was the only one being bitten. This is a typical situation: in one of my videos I explained that all people have different sensitivities to bedbug bites and many people have no skin marks at all after such bites:
It is possible that in her family she is the only one who feels these bites, and her husband and child do not feel them and it seems that the bugs do not bite them at all.
And the situation seems to be simple, if not for one “but”: the girl writes that she did not find adult bugs in the bed, but saw them only on the windowsill and on the outer wall of the house. But in the bed she saw small parasites, which she mistook for “baby bugs”.
The only problem is that tiny nymphs of swallow bugs do not crawl out of bird nests and do not get into apartments…
Who bites: mites or bed bugs?
Here is a photo of the very arthropod which the girl mistook for a “baby” bug, still hungry, not yet sucked blood:
And here is the same parasite, but filled with blood:
My viewers have probably already realized that these are bird mites – I made a separate video about them:
There are several species of such mites that parasitize swallow nests, and it is not surprising that representatives of one or several of these species settled in this nest. And when the chicks flew out of the nest, the parasites lost their food source, got hungry and went into the apartment to look for new hosts.
As a result, it turned out that the parasites of two different species – swallow bugs and some gamasid mites – got into the girl’s apartment from the same nest.
Moreover, the bugs here were clearly swallow bugs: if they were common bed bugs, there would have been more of them and the girl would have certainly found both adult individuals and little nymphs, and the products of their activity – the remains of chitinous shells, for example. Here, in the apartment, only adult individuals and older nymphs were found – the most prone to migration in search of food and new bird nests.
It is impossible to identify the exact species of mites – they are too small in the photo. But it is enough to determine that these are bird mites from the Gamasina group – perhaps some species from the genera Dermanyssus or Ornithonyssus. It is to these genera that the most common and numerous parasites of birds belong – the northern bird mite Ornithonyssus sylviarum, the swallow mite Dermanyssus hirundinis, the red mite Dermanyssus gallinae and some others.
It is scary to even imagine how the unfortunate swallow chicks grew up, bitten day and night by a whole swarm of bed bugs and mites in a hot, cramped nest!
How to get rid of all these parasites?
Obviously, the most obvious step to get rid of swallow bugs and mites in such a situation is to remove the nest outside the window and treat the wall on which it hangs with a powerful insecticide. Most modern insecticides have an acaricidal effect, that is, they kill mites as well as bed bugs. And after treating the wall and cracks around the windows with them, all the parasites will die.
One question remains: which parasite bit the girl and whose bites are shown in the photo? According to her, these are bites of “tiny” parasites, that is, mites, since they are the ones she found in the bed. But swallow bugs could very well bite her and then get back to the window, or under the windowsill, since the distance here is small – the bed was located right under the window. Therefore, with some probability, both bed bugs and mites bit her.
So keep in mind: if birds settle in your apartment outside the window, and you start to have strange bites on your skin, then perhaps the birds and these bites are related by common parasites. In this case, you do not need to panic, but have to inspect the bed, walls and windows, looking for the arthropods, and if you find them, identify them, or send me photos and videos of them for identification.
And if you have already identified your arthropods and figured out how to get rid of them, then you can treat me to a cup of coffee, and I will prepare a new useful report for you with the identification of household pests and parasites. Let’s help each other!
