Hi,
I read your article about chigger control. If you get chiggers on your clothing, you can wash your clothing immediately. If you don’t know immediately that you have been into chiggers, once in your house, can the chiggers transfer into your carpet or furniture?
If you have chiggers in the ground around your foundation, I understand that they can find their way into your home. But if you were on an outing, hiking or picnic and you don’t realize for hours that you were “bitten” do chiggers usually survive in your car or house, or do they fall off before you take them home?
Thanks for your information.
Jim
Like most any insect that gets on people or pets, some can fall off and onto carpets or furniture. But like fleas, chiggers prefer to remain on their host as long as possible. As our CHIGGER CONTROL ARTICLE explains, once they feed and mate, they’ll start laying eggs which will most definitely fall of people or pets but this takes time. So to answer your first question, even if you didn’t know you had chiggers on you, they wouldn’t be infesting your home right away. In most cases it will take several days before they’d have a chance to do this and usually people know they have a problem before they can even have a chance to advance this far.
As for your second question; again, they don’t typically “fall off” hosts. Chiggers really want to stay where they find food and in most cases they accomplish this with little effort since they’re designed to affix themselves quite well to people and pets. But if you do find some on yourself or suspect any are active in your home, it’s advisable that you do some of the treatments outlined in our chigger control article.
Here is a direct link to the informational article listed above:
Chigger Control Article: http://www.bugspray.com/articles98/chiggers.html
Dina says
I have been bitten for about a year now. I went on the Internet to see what a chigger bite looks like and that is what my bites look like. I don’t itch or get bitten at work so I know it’s at my home. I don’t have pets but there are lots do ducks around my home. The minute I get home I start itching with bites. What can I do, I have scares all over my body. HELP!
Tech Support says
@Dina: First you need to be sure what you have biting you is in fact chiggers. To do this simply look around or on your skin. Chiggers are easy to spot and if they’re present in or around the home, you’ll be able to see some. It’s important to understand that people don’t react the same way to an insects bite. So for some people, nothing happens when they get bit by a chigger. For others, there are welts and others, small round raised hive like bumps. The list is long but the point is that you should not use the look of a bite to determine what it is that’s causing the bite. The only way to know for sure is to find the culprit and once you do, then you should proceed by treating as explained in our article above. The reason you need to know for sure is that any treatment will surely fail if it’s the wrong one. And unless you know for sure you have chiggers, treating for them would be a mistake.
Susie says
My husband went hunting. Washed clothes immediately but he is covered in chiggr bites. Question is could they infest truck the came home in?
Tech Support says
Susie,
Absolutely. Chiggers are not much different from other insects. We routinely help people who have insects like roaches, ants, stinkbugs, ladybugs, noseeums, mites and more living in their car/truck.
Technical Support
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