Bugging Out
Good night. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed bugs bite.
Did we ever think that would actually be good advice?
The talk of the town this summer has been bed bugs. We’ve heard the stories… people forced out of their homes because of infestations, others refusing to go to public places for fear of getting them, and public facilities closing while they eradicate the pesky creatures. Unfortunately, the stories are not urban myths. Bed bugs are back.
Here are some facts:
Bedbugs (the scientific name is Cimex lectularius) are tiny, reddish-brown wingless insects that feed (get ready for this…) on human blood. They are attracted to warm places and are most active at night, which is why they are so drawn to us as we lie sleeping in our nice warm beds. A bedbug pierces human skin with two hollow tubes – it injects its saliva into its victim with one tube and sucks a tiny bit of blood from the other.
The bite is painless. It often causes the victim’s skin to become irritated and inflamed, or to develop a small welt. And then there’s the itching, which can last from several hours to days. Scratching may cause the welts to become infected. Then, as if they haven’t done enough to upset us, they leave behind their “droppings” on our walls and furniture.
Bedbugs quickly spread from person to person and home to home in a number of ways: they cling to clothing or get carried into our homes on packages, furniture, or other items we bring in. They can easily move from one area to another, and are brought inside on pets or animals. Female bed bugs lay up to 12 eggs per day. The eggs are sticky so they attach to whatever they can grab, where they hatch in 6 to 17 days.
Bed bugs are not new. They have been detected in the US since colonial days. They haven’t been very prevalent since the 1940s when the use of insecticides and stronger household cleaning products increased. But…
They’re back. Entomologists (people who study insects) think that the re-emergence is due to Americans’ increasing travel to less developed foreign countries, where there pest control chemicals aren’t used.
Here are a couple of interesting pages that further explain bed bugs and offer some suggestions for how to get rid of them:
Bed Bugs (Ohio State University)
Bed Bugs: Biology and Control (North Carolina State)
The Return of Bed Bugs: Smart Ones (Weird Science)
