I sure hope someone can help us figure out what is biting us. Sorry in advance for the long post, but I don't know what information will be helpful to figuring out our problem, so I'd rather tell the whole saga than leave something important out. Thanks in advance for taking the time to read this.
Our family is under siege by some kind of bug that we can't seem to catch or identify.
We live in Southern California. We moved to our house in February 2007. It's a single family detached home and our neighbors are about 30 feet from us on either side and about 100 yards from us at the back (open space between us). Before we moved here, we lived about 3 miles from here as the crow flies, and we never had any problems with getting bitten by bugs.
About 3 months after moving in, around May of 2007, we started getting bitten at night while we slept. It's happened every year since except 2011 (when we tented for termites). It seems to start after the weather gets warmer, and perhaps we have left a window open to let fresh air in overnight. We have screens on the windows, but they aren't necessarily bug proof, especially to small bugs. The bites concentrate in the groin area, back of the knees, waistline and sometimes chest area. With the exception of the backs of the knees, the bites are always under clothing, sometimes at the tightest spot, like under the elastic bands of undergarments, and even if we are covered with blankets or sheets, we get bitten. My baby son has been bitten under his diaper at the elastic leg area and elsewhere. Whatever this bug is, it's tiny and can burrow under clothes.
The period during which we get bitten lasts for around 6-8 weeks, sometimes longer, and eventually stops. Usually, the biting starts a few at a time, slowly increasing until we get a huge surge, then it tapers off, then tapers up again, then we get a surge, then it tapers off again for a couple of weeks, and so on, until it tapers off for good.
The welts have a single hole in the middle (not spiders), are extremely itchy, remain itchy, red and swollen for a couple of weeks, and then leave brown bruise like marks that take a month to disappear. Some nights we get bitten dozens of times, other nights none at all, but average is around 4-5 bites at a time. They are not necessarily clustered -- they are often several inches apart and even on different parts of the body.
We have 2 dogs that are not allowed in the house (except the attached garage). One of the dogs (female) has a lot of bites on her belly, but no evidence fleas or other visible bugs. When I apply Frontline, she gets relief for a while. The other dog (male) doesn't seem to be bothered by the bugs. We also have a parakeet that lives in a room far away from the bedrooms. He doesn't seem to have any mite infestation or other problems. Healthy skin, healthy feathers.
The people sleeping in the rooms facing the back yard (me and my son in one room, mother in law in the other) get the worst of it. My husband, who snores so sometimes sleeps in a room down the hall and facing the side yard so I can sleep, avoided bites for weeks, but has recently been getting bitten. We're not sure if it's because he slept in our room for a couple of nights, or if it's because the bugs have finally reached the furthest room. The room my husband sometimes sleeps in is between the garage and the master bedroom where I sleep, so is sandwiched between 2 rooms that have lots of biting going on.
In 2011 we tented our house for termites just before the normal start time for the bug invasion, hoping we'd kill two bugs with one stone. We didn't have any bug bites that spring at all. I can only guess that the bugs were already here, just not biting yet, and the Vikane killed them. The house was only tented for a few days, so if the bugs are being brought in by an animal, they could have come in after the tent came down.
2012 - bugs were back, so we called in a PCO. They disappeared after about 8 weeks. PCO has been in to investigate three times since 2012 and has never found any bugs that could be causing this. He ruled out bed bugs both because there was no evidence (no fecal matter, no stains on the sheets or mattress, no bugs that he could see), plus he said if they were bed bugs, we'd be bitten year round, not just in the spring.
This year, they started in mid-May and have been worse than ever. If we strip the beds and wash the sheets, we get some relief for a night or two, but they eventually find their way back to us. If I fog the house with a bug fogger (Raid, etc.), we get relief for a few days, but they come back. If I fog, then wait a week, then fog again, they stay away longer, but eventually come back. With a 2-year-old in the house, I am reluctant to keep applying chemicals in the house and don't want to fog anymore.
I suggested to the PCO that it might be bird mites because a couple of times during the years we've had this problem, we did have birds' nests in the eaves of the house (including once a swallows' nest, which is illegal to disturb unless there are no eggs or hatchlings in it). Now we are vigilant about removing any bird nests we can find before any eggs are laid. PCO said that if it were bird mites, especially given the number of bites we are getting, he would have found evidence of them - they would be visible. This year, a bird started building a nest in the eaves off my bedroom and my MIL's bedroom. I scared her away so she abandoned it. When the PCO removed and inspected it, he didn't see any mites. Coincidentally (or not) he removed that nest the Thursday before Memorial Day weekend, and that Saturday night we were all devoured worse than EVER except my husband. My son had over 30 new bites in his armpits, under his diaper, behind his knees and on his belly. Sunday morning, I recalled that he had been thrashing around a lot in his sleep. I wish I had suspected he was getting bitten -- I might have been able to catch some of them if I had turned on the light. That Sunday night, no one got any new bites. Now they are starting to increase in numbers again. It's almost as if they all filled up on blood, then went off to lay eggs and died, and now the new bugs are starting to find us. My son (who's now 2 years and 3 months old) has started saying, "Leave me alone bugs. Don't bite me." and "Bugs are biting me."
Our upstairs crawl space did have some evidence of rats having been there before (fecal matter), but the PCO said it was really old and that he didn't think there was any current rat infestation to bring rat mites in. We have seen rats scurrying around the yard, particularly around our compost bins which are pretty far from the house, and occasionally our male dog will catch a rat (good boy), but there's no recent evidence of rats in the house or crawl space.
My son's doctor prescribed scabies treatment "just to rule it out" even though she didn't think it was scabies. The medication seemed to keep the bites at bay for the night my son wore it, but the next night he was bitten again.
We started wearing a body lotion that has tea tree oil and neem oil in it that seems to repel most of them, but we still get some bites even where we have the lotion (albeit, the reaction we have seems to be less severe; whether it's because the bug injects less of its stuff, or because the bugs that are going for us anyway are younger, or because the tea tree oil helps to minimize the irritation, I don't know).
I also spread diatomacious earth around the feet of the beds for a week to see if that would help. It did seem to reduce the biting (not stop it entirely), but was messy and, again, with a 2-year-old, I am nervous about him getting into it and inhaling it.
Today I put some plastic containers under the legs of my bed with mineral oil in them to see if I can catch some bugs coming or going. We'll see what the morning brings.
Does anyone have any idea what these things might be? The PCO basically says he has inspected 3 times, can't find anything, has no idea what it is, and can't treat for what he can't find. He said he was going to email an entomologist they consult with and would let me know what he heard back, but that was 2 weeks ago and we haven't heard anything.
In the summer of 2007 we did a major remodel of the house -- tore out carpet, wall paper, baseboard, then painted, put in new hardwood flooring and new baseboards throughout the whole house. There is not an inch of carpet in the house (just area rugs that have been sent out for cleaning a couple of times since we purchased them). Part of the reason we got rid of the carpet was to make it easier to keep clean and to minimize pests inside the house.
We have asked our neighbors -- none of them seem to have a problem like this (or maybe won't admit it).
Please, please help. We are at our wits' end. I'm hardly sleeping anymore, wake up frequently to look for bugs in the bed, and can hardly think of anything else but trying to eliminate these bugs!