Who writes House Bug Guide
Who writes this site, what we're qualified to say about household insects, where the facts come from, and the one question we won't answer no matter how often it's asked.
Most sites about household pests don’t tell you who wrote them. That’s usually because the answer is a content agency, or because the site belongs to a pest control company that would rather you booked a visit than solved the problem yourself. Here’s ours, in full.
Who’s behind it
House Bug Guide is written and edited by Chriss R., and published by NET STUDIO LLC, registered at 1501 South Greeley Hwy, Ste C #1386, Cheyenne, WY 82007. That’s the entire team. There is no newsroom, no panel of reviewers, and no staff entomologist. A site this size pretending otherwise would be the first thing on it worth distrusting.
What we’re qualified to say, and what we aren’t
Nobody here is an entomologist. We hold no pest control license and no certification of any kind, and you won’t find one claimed anywhere on this site.
What we do is narrower than that, and we’d argue it’s more useful. University extension entomology programs have already published careful descriptions of nearly every insect that turns up in a house: size in millimeters, color, scale pattern, life cycle, what the larvae eat, where the adults breed. That material is excellent and almost nobody reads it, because it’s written for growers and pest professionals and it’s scattered across a few dozen university websites. We read it, cross-check it, and rewrite it for the person standing in their kitchen at eleven at night holding a jar with something in it.
So the value here is organization and clarity, not original research. When a page tells you a varied carpet beetle adult runs 2 to 3mm with a mottled black, white and orange scale pattern, that measurement isn’t ours. It comes from published fact sheets, and we cite them at the foot of the page.
Where the facts come from
Identification details, life-cycle timings and feeding behavior on this site are drawn from university extension entomology publications and standard household-pest references. The ones we return to most often:
- University of Kentucky Entomology, ENTFACT series
- Penn State Extension insect fact sheets
- University of California Statewide IPM Program, Pest Notes
- University of Minnesota Extension and University of Maryland Extension
Where a page makes a specific factual claim that a reader might want to check, the source goes at the bottom of that page rather than in a general list here. If a claim has no source and looks like it should, that’s a mistake on our part and we’d like to hear about it.
The line we don’t cross
Two questions get asked constantly about household insects, and only one of them is ours to answer.
“Does this insect bite?” is an entomological question. It has a documented answer, that answer is usually no, and it depends on mouthparts and diet rather than on anything about you. Carpet beetles don’t bite. Silverfish don’t bite. Booklice don’t bite. Refusing to say so out of caution would leave a worried reader worse off than the pest control ad that tells them nothing at all, so we say so, and we cite it.
“What is this rash, and what should I put on it?” is a medical question. We don’t answer it. Not carefully, not with a disclaimer bolted on, not at all. We won’t name a condition you might have, we won’t suggest a treatment, and we won’t tell you whether it’s worth worrying about. If your skin is reacting and you don’t know why, that belongs to a doctor.
Where the two meet, as they do with carpet beetle larvae and their bristles, we describe what is on the insect and where it ends up in your house, then we stop. What happens on skin after that is between you and someone with a license.
The same applies to pesticide regulation. Which products are legal for which use varies by state and changes without warning, so we describe categories of product and what they’re for, and we send you to the label and to a licensed applicator for the rest.
How a guide gets written
Every identification and removal guide is drafted from the references above, then read a second time before publication looking for three specific failures: invented numbers, expertise we don’t have, and any sentence that has drifted out of identification and into medical or regulatory advice. Pages get corrected when that pass finds something.
What you will not see anywhere on this site is an “expert reviewed” badge. No entomologist has read these pages. If that ever changes, it’ll be said on the specific page it applies to, with the reviewer’s name on it, and not one page earlier.
When we get it wrong
We will, at some point. Household insect identification is genuinely difficult. Several of the species covered here are separated by scale patterns you need a hand lens to resolve, and a drugstore beetle and a cigarette beetle are close enough that people who do this professionally slow down to tell them apart.
If you find something wrong, or you have a bug we haven’t covered, use the contact page. Corrections get made to the page itself and dated. We don’t quietly delete a page that turned out to be wrong, because the people who already read it deserve to know it changed.
How the site makes money
Some links are affiliate links, and the site carries display advertising. Neither affects what gets recommended. No product is named in a comparison until it’s actually been used, which is the whole point of how we test, and no company can pay for a mention or a better placement. Our about page covers the rest of the editorial approach.