How long does it take for bed bugs to turn into adult bed bugs?

Answer 1

On average anything from 3 weeks to 16 weeks because the time depends on the temperature of the bedroom and on how often the creature can find food. Its food usually means a human asleep in a bed nearby.

Basically female bedbugs lay up to 12 eggs per day. In many cases the eggs will first get into somebody's home inside their luggage, or perhaps in second hand furniture particularly second hand beds or mattresses brought into the home.

When the eggs first hatch somewhere in the home, the newly born nymph will detect the CO2 breathed out by any person asleep up to a range of 30 or more yards from it. The nymph bedbug will be naturally attracted to the source emitting that CO2 for food it instinctively knows it needs and is there. As soon as it finds the source i.e. the person sleeping in that bed, it will climb on him or her for its first meal of that person's blood.

For the nymph to become an adult it needs to moult through 5 stages, and it needs to have a meal of blood preferably from a person asleep between each moult. After its first meal it will moult in or near the bed where it had that first meal and shed its first skin somewhere near where its source of food (i.e. the person sleeping there) and it will then find a hiding place, which is typically in the fold of the mattress on that bed, or in any cracks or crevices nearby.

After the first meal and moult the slightly larger nymph will have a second meal and moult and then third, fourth and fifth. After its fifth meal and moult it has become an adult which can be within about three weeks of hatching from its egg if temperature is above 85 degrees F. But if temperature is lower or of food is scarce, it will take the nymph longer to mature into an adult though will be longer, especially in colder climates.