Hello. I'm hoping someone can help me identify a bug that I've been seeing in my bed for the last year.

Over this time I have seen only about 6 bugs--perhaps fewer. I started looking because I was sure that I was being bit on the legs at night. When I see them, they are readily visilbe, one at a time, on top of my sheets, but when I lift the linens and scan the mattress, I don't find any evidence of eggs or a colony. I can't find any others. I never see any blood streaks on the sheets, and the shape of the bug isn't flat, as many have described bed bugs (it doesn't looke like the images I see of bed bugs on-line, either). It has 6 legs, 2 antennae, and the body is a tiny globe-like shape, which, when smashed, does not smear red everywhere. I can, however, see what looks like one section that is more reddish than the rest of the body, when I smash it--not like blood, but more like a red part of the shell.

I thought it could be a mite, though it seems too big and too dark to be a clover mite. Also, I live in Brooklyn, where clover mites don't seem so likely. I don't see them in windows or anywhere else in the apartment. I don't see feces in cracks in the wall or anywhere else on the bed. (Maybe they're living inside the eggshell foam on our bed. That seems like an ideal place for such things to breed.) I haven't paid attention to the weather when they come out, but I've seen three in the last 6 months or so, which means spring-summer weather...

I would love any advice. Neither my husband nor I have been sick, and we're not alarmists or fans of advice with an alarmist tone, but if this is something anyone out there can identify, we would love to have your suggestions.

Catch one and take it to the health department. Maybe they can identify it.