Lice and Furniture

Head lice live on human hair.   Lice crawl down to the scalp and must feed every 2-3 hours or so on human blood and their eggs must nest on the scalp in order to survive.  They don’t live anywhere else. They like warm, humid environments like they find underneath layers of hair. They are not inclined to come off and crawl down onto the furniture, crawl under a pillow, or get on to a stuffed animal and hang out there because they cannot feed and it is not warm and humid for them. They don’t like to lay their eggs in those locations either. They must be on human host and they need to feed every couple of hours for their food and for their eggs to nest on. It is possible to knock them off and maybe they fall off from time to time and maybe they get on your furniture. It is really not common and it is not necessary to fumigate your whole house and go to really extreme measures to kill lice that might be in your environment because almost all the time they are on a human head. They do not hop, jump, or fly. If they do come off the host scalp, it is really hard for them to get them back on. If they have been off the host for any period of time they start to dry out and die and it is a little difficult for them to have the energy to get back on the host.