Colour, size, room and species identification guides.
The black carpet beetle is the plain, unpatterned one, and its larva grows two to three times longer than the adult it becomes. How to identify both stages, what they damage in the closet and the pantry, and why the problem takes a year to clear.
A bed bug is flat, wingless and lives beside your bed. A carpet beetle is domed, flies, and eats wool. Five checks you can run yourself, including the one that rules bed bugs out on the spot.
Carpet beetle larvae are the stage that eats fabric, living on keratin from wool, fur, feathers and dead insects. What they look like, where they hide, and how the damage differs from a clothes moth's.
Carpet beetles don't bite, at any life stage. What gets called a carpet beetle bite is a contact reaction to the larvae's barbed bristles and shed skins, and it behaves nothing like a bed bug bite.
Small flies landing on your fruit bowl or trash can in the kitchen are almost always fruit flies. Here's how to confirm the ID fast, plus where to find the full removal guide.
None of the house bugs we've profiled are long and thin. Here's how to tell what you actually found, and where to look next.
Tiny black bugs that appeared all of a sudden, especially near a window, are most often carpet beetle adults emerging in spring and heading for the light. Here's how to confirm it.
Four different bugs turn up in bathrooms for the same damp reasons. Size and behavior are enough to tell a silverfish, a drain fly, a booklouse, and a springtail apart.
Pale bugs that walk, gray ones that jump, or a red speck barely moving on a windowsill: here's how to tell booklice, springtails, and clover mites apart in seconds.
"Bugs in the kitchen" almost always comes down to three sources: dry food, ripe fruit or trash, or standing moisture near a drain or plant. Here's how to tell which of the six culprits you're looking at.