Bed Bugs & Fleas

While both require a warm-blooded host to provide blood meals, fleas tend to prefer feeding on hairy or furry animals such as cats and dogs. Bed bugs prefer feeding on your family.
To this end, cats, dogs and other animals (including outdoor wildlife) are generally associated with bringing fleas into the home, as opposed to bed bugs, which are generally brought in by people.
While fleas can live several months without a host in the pupa stage, adult fleas can only live about two weeks. Adult bed bugs can survive up to a year between feedings.
One flea can lay between 150 and 300 eggs every week. One bed bug can lay 200 in a lifetime (approximately 10 months to one year). Bed bugs do not fly or jump. They have to crawl across your bed to feed. Fleas can jump almost 200 times their body length: 13 inches. This helps them transfer between hosts and "hitch rides" to travel to new sources of food (i.e., you and your family).
While bed bugs have not been discovered to pass on human pathogens, fleas have the ability to spread diseases such as typhus, plague and cat-scratch fever.