Of all the disturbing things about bedbugs, their mating habits may be the worst. Cimex lectularius have evolved a breeding technique called “traumatic insemination,” and it’s even more horrible than it sounds.
A male bedbug’s penis is literally a weapon—a sharp, brown hypodermic hook that forgot about the female reproductive canal long ago. Here’s how he uses it: The male pounces on the female, holds her firmly while she struggles, and gouges his hook through her exoskeleton, squirting his sperm directly into her body cavity. The sperm swims through her hemolymph (a bug’s version of blood) and, if the mating wound doesn’t develop a
serious infection and kill her, eventually swims to her ovaries.
Biologists used to believe males and females of a given species evolved together for sexual fitness, the Darwinian version of romance. But bedbugs, scientists have found, have engaged in a millennia-long struggle of “sexually antagonistic coevolution” in which individual males damage individual females for overall reproductive advantage. Female bedbugs have counterevolved “spermalege,” a special sperm-receptacle organ in the abdomen that helps absorb the trauma—if the hypodermic penis hits it. Bedbugs aren’t exactly careful maters. Male bugs sometimes traumatically inseminate each other, though scientists aren’t sure whether this is a function of sexual competition or just carelessness. Regardless, sex is bad for female bedbugs. A 2003 study for the Royal Society of London found that the more sex a female bedbug has, the shorter her life will be.
A bed infested with bedbugs isn’t just a party for bloodsuckers that will make you itch—it’s also a Verdun of buggy sexual warfare.
This past summer, Lauren Hester began to itch. Then she noticed red welts in little rows all over her skin. She was living with her boyfriend, Andrew Lazarow, both of them theater artists and members of Seattle company the Satori Group. But after weeks of hearing his girlfriend complain about the itching, Lazarow still didn’t believe it had anything to do with their First Hill apartment: “I thought it was mosquitoes or something.” Lazarow is a small, earnest man with brown stubble and black-framed glasses, and he has a pained expression as he recalls this part of the story. “I still feel really badly,” he says. “I wasn’t getting bitten and I was dismissive.”
But Hester’s bite patterns were textbook. Bedbugs bite in rows for three reasons. First, they are extremely sensitive to movement. If a sleeper twitches at night, the bugs stop feeding, take a few lateral steps, wait for stillness, and start sucking blood again. Second, the rows can be the result of bedbugs searching for a vein to drill into. Third, according to Bedbugcentral.com, several bugs might be lined up along a fold or overlock on a sheet, “all feeding at the same time, similar to cattle at a trough.” Either Lazarow wasn’t getting bitten or he wasn’t feeling it—people react differently to the bites. (Bedbugs feed by injecting two hollow tubes into their hosts. One tube injects saliva with anesthetics and anticoagulants, the other sucks out the blood. People who get itchy from the bites are having a reaction to the bedbugs’ spit.)
One night, after training with the Satori Group, Hester insisted they check the apartment for bedbugs. (Another company member, Spike Friedman, had experienced a horrible bedbug infestation when he lived in Manhattan.) To make her happy, Lazarow scrutinized the mattress and pillows—and found little black dots, the scat bedbugs leave behind on their postprandial walk home. They lifted the mattress and saw more black dots, plus a few bugs scurrying away. “I freaked out,” Lazarow says. “You could see their feces of our blood. I’m a little OCD and germaphobic: These things are defecating on my pillow! Are there some in my mouth?”
At the height of the six-week ordeal that followed, Lazarow says, “I’d wake up at two in the morning every night, lying there sleepless, knowing they were about to come out.”
Lazarow and Hester ran some clothes through the dryer—heat is one of the few things that can kill bedbugs—and then went directly to the Sorrento Hotel. “They were incredibly gracious,” Lazarow said. The couple explained what was happening, and the hotel cut them a deal. The next day, Hester and Lazarow called the extermination company Paratex (“I can’t recommend them highly enough”). They stuffed everything they owned into a U-Haul to take to Paratex to be put into a big, vacuum-sealed tube for 24 hours of fumigation.
“We loaded everything except for some clothes,” Lazarow says. “Literally everything else. When my friend Spike had his infestation, he saw bedbugs crawling out of his laptop, out of his iPod.” Then back to the apartment to live out of Ziploc bags for six weeks and wash their bedding every day before a second round of fumigation and spraying.
Between the treatment, four nights at the hotel, and the laundry bills, the couple spent over $1,500. Afterward, they weren’t convinced the apartment was fully clean. So they moved out.
Bedbugs hide wherever they can—box springs are good, as are walls, chairs, even suitcases—and, if they go dormant, can survive up to 18 months between meals. Leaving a room and starving them out is not a viable option. Bedbugs tend not to travel more than 100 feet from their host but can migrate easily between apartments if they choose, especially along boards and pipes. Clay Thompson, of Seattle’s Department of Planning and Development (DPD), says the best way to deal with an infested apartment is to treat all the proximal apartments, too: left and right, above and below. But landlords and tenants are reluctant to pay for what they perceive as prophylactic measures. “Bedbugs are,” Thompson says with a note of finality in his voice, “definitely hard to get rid of.”
In Seattle, Thompson says, bedbugs are on their way to becoming a “crisis.” During his first 22 years with the DPD, he had only heard a handful of bedbug complaints. But in the past year, the complaints soared, the majority coming in the past two or three months. “The curve has been very steep,” he says. “When we first started hearing about them, we didn’t even know what to look for. So we had some enterprising inspectors who went to the web and got a photograph to see what they looked like.”
The earliest reports of the bedbugs’ return came out of New York City: In 2004, the city information line 311 received fewer than 100 calls about bedbugs. In 2006, it received over 4,600 calls. In 2008, over 9,000 people called. This year, Bill Clinton and his staff had to vacate their offices in Harlem for a bedbug infestation, which kicked off the predictable
jokes about Clinton keeping a bed in his office. But the bugs are invading other people’s offices. The New York offices of Penguin press had an infestation this year; last year, a bedbug problem at Fox News ended in a lawsuit, when one of its employees claimed she was suffering PTSD after being bitten three times. This past September, advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi—most famous for its campaign for the UK’s conservative party, “Labour isn’t working”—had to fumigate its 17th floor.
And the bedbug invasion has expanded. Toronto Public Health has reported that it handled 1,500 infestations in 2009, up from 46 in 2003. The website Torontoist held a vote for the city’s Supervillain of 2009. Out of 24 contestants, bedbugs won third place.
Blame the bats. Biologists theorize bat caves were the parasites’ original breeding ground; then when early humans moved in, they dropped down and started feasting on us. From the cavemen until the late 20th century, bedbugs—and their big red welts—were just a fact of human existence, one of the unhappy nuisances of being a person. That ended around WWII, when powerful pesticides like DDT knocked bedbugs—in wealthy countries, at least—into oblivion.
DDT also knocked bird populations onto endangered-species lists and was correlated with human cancers. “It all started with the lady named Rachel Carson and her book called Silent Spring,” says Jim Osborn, the no-nonsense but friendly president of Seattle’s 102-year-old Paratex pest control. (Osborn used to get a couple of calls about bedbugs a year. Now he’s getting queries almost every day.) “DDT should have been vastly curtailed, but not banned. It’s a wonderful chemical that should have been restricted to limited circumstances for limited use. But the pendulum always swings from one side to the other. It defies common sense, but that’s how the world works.”
Silent Spring successfully led the charge to dramatically curtail the use of pesticides like DDT.
And bedbugs are back.
It’s been so long since we’ve seen bedbugs, even inspectors have forgotten what they look like. And some people who should know better have forgotten they even exist. “It has shocked me,” says Jeff White, a research entomologist at New Jersey–based business Bedbugcentral.com. “I’ve been on the floor of trade shows of industries where bedbugs should be a major concern—assisted living, for example—and have had people tell me they thought bedbugs were just a nursery rhyme: ‘Sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite.'”
But it’s been decades since the U.S. banned DDT and other potent pesticides. Why are bedbugs only just now staging their comeback?
Nobody knows: not White, not Thompson, not the half-dozen other people I asked while working on this story. But pretty much everyone trots out the same not entirely satisfying theories: increased international travel, cross-contamination from industrial chicken farms (though they prefer people, bedbugs can live off of chickens, which have been the cause of major infestations), and the increase in swapping used furniture thanks to Craigslist. (Get people murdered, put newspaper classified sections out of business, encourage epidemics—is there anything Craigslist can’t do?) And maybe the old poisons were more powerful and prevalent than we thought.
“DDT was a powerful residual pesticide,” says White of Bedbugcentral.com. “You apply DDT to a baseboard and if a bedbug walks across it years later, it’ll die. And just because DDT was banned in the 1970s doesn’t mean people stopped using it in the ’70s. People had old stores of the pesticide they were using up. That takes time.”
If White’s theories are true, we are only just now beginning to live in a DDT-free world. And it looks buggy.
In the absence of DDT, exterminators use a constellation of other methods to kill bedbugs: liquid, gas, earth, and fire. The four elements. It’s like medieval magic.
The liquid and gas methods are about what you’d expect: pesticide sprays and fumigation, either sealing off a building in a plastic tent, E.T.-style (expensive), or removing everything from the building and shoving it into a vacuum-sealed tube for fumigation (not quite as expensive).
The fire method: Bedbugs can’t live at very high temperatures, so exterminators will sometimes bring in high-powered space heaters and push the room temperature up past 120 degrees Fahrenheit for several hours. (A cheaper, slightly less reliable version recommended for travelers returning with plastic bags full of contaminated clothes: seal them up in a car full of summer sunlight for a full day.) But the heat can’t always penetrate to the center of a mattress, where the bedbugs live, and isn’t always effective.
And the earth method: diatomaceous earth, a fine, chalklike dust made of fossilized, hard-shelled algae called diatoms. Diatomaceous earth is abrasive and super-absorbent. People use it for hydroponics, high-drainage soil, cleanup of toxic spills, cat litter, thermal insulation, a blood coagulant, and a mechanical (rather than chemical) insecticide. The fossil dust (33 to 86 percent silica, 5 percent sodium, other percent other stuff) sucks the waxy lipids out of a bedbug’s exoskeleton, turning all that human blood in its guts into a scab and causing it to die of dehydration.
Finding their crispy, desiccated corpses—several people have posted pictures to bedbug internet threads—is very satisfying.
Bedbugs aren’t dangerous. They’re not a vector for disease like mosquitoes and fleas—something of a mystery, as they have all the prerequisites for passing blood-borne disease from one host to another—but they’re annoying and gross and they freak people out. Friends have told me stories about unscrupulous exterminators preying on their hysteria, and bedbug-specific websites are springing up around the world. Maciej Ceglowski runs a civic-minded site based in Romania called Bedbugregistry.com, where people post reports of bedbugs in office buildings, apartment complexes, and hotels. (Some are surprising: the Four
Seasons in San Francisco, Disney’s Old Key West Resort, the unfortunately named “Yosemite Bug Rustic Mountain Resort.”)
Ceglowski started the site after having an unpleasant encounter with bedbugs in San Francisco in 2006. He’d just moved back from Beijing and was staying in “a dingy Travelodge on the corner of Valencia and Market streets. I had a song in my throat, a dream in my heart, and… I was about to discover that I also had a sizable bedbug colony under my mattress.” This discovery led to a lifetime obsession and Bedbugregistry.com, which is not only a place where travelers warn each other about bedbugs but a kind of support group where people post angry rants, pathos-laden cris de coeur, and gallows humor—all the shock, angst, and wry fatalism of the contemporary infested.
Ceglowski’s mother grew up in Lodz, Poland, when bedbugs were just a fact of life. When moving into a new place, Ceglowski wrote, “One of the first things she would do was check behind picture frames and in the cracks in wallpaper for bedbugs. They were quite common but considered a sign of a lower-class place.” In those pre-DDT days, Ceglowski writes, “There were lots of techniques for avoiding bedbugs in infested places. Putting bedstead legs in cans of kerosene or water was common (bedbugs defeat this ploy by climbing onto the ceiling and dropping when they feel the heat of a host below). If things got bad enough, you might sleep in the tub.”
Bedbugregistry.com shows only a few reports in Seattle (including the Green Tortoise Hostel downtown and the Renaissance hotel on Madison, in case you’re wondering—neither of them returned requests for comment), but Ceglowski says he’s getting around 15 reports a day from New York, Toronto, San Francisco, and Vancouver, where people are starting to worry about bedbugs at the Olympics. Canadian newspaper editorials wring their hands about visitors infesting their city—it was a problem for Sydney in 2000—but at the rate Vancouver infestations are going, they should be more concerned about becoming a major export center broadcasting bedbugs across the world.
Bedbugs have been a source of controversy at Seattle Housing Authority (SHA), which provides low-income apartments to over 26,000 Seattle residents. Bedbugs have moved into SHA units—especially the Denny Terrace building and Bell Tower—and some residents feel like the city isn’t responding quickly enough to stanch the infestation. Virginia Felton, who has worked at SHA for 10 years, heard the first reports of bedbugs this year at Denny Terrace. Over a third of its units have been treated for bedbugs so far, with 35 outstanding work orders. The waiting list just to have your apartment inspected is two weeks. (SHA acquired a bedbug-sniffing dog—a young female black lab with the nickname “Bugsy”—to help combat the problem. The dog was adopted by a trainer in Florida about two days before being put down and, according to Felton, cost SHA around $7,000.)
Kenneth Jennings, chair of the resident council for Bell Tower, says the wait is too long—not just for residents, but for the city: “If this problem is not properly addressed soon, Seattle may be in for a wider epidemic of these pests that will impact well beyond the confines of low-income housing.”
Julie Wade, a pro bono attorney for the resident council, thinks those numbers might even be underreported. “People are reluctant to complain,” she says. “They’re worried about losing their housing and worried about retaliation.”
Wade, currently a director of corporate counsel at Starbucks, worked as an attorney for SHA for many years, but now negotiates with SHA on behalf of its clients. “I worked inside the organization for years and have a tremendous amount of respect for what SHA does,” Wade says. “But they make mistakes, and sometimes there’s the attitude that arises—I hate to say it, because it’s not an easy job—but that beggars can’t be choosers. That they should be able to put up with a little inconvenience.”
Wade first came on the bedbug case during a meeting with clients she thought was going to be about some renovations that were disrupting residents. (SHA had been drilling into concrete for three weeks at a time and had cut the water 22 times in the last three months. The construction was, in Wade’s terms, disrupting SHA’s ability to “provide a clean, safe, sanitary environment and provide a quiet enjoyment of the premises.”) She met with residents at Bell Tower to talk about the renovations—she thought—and to get them a break on their rent. But everyone wanted to talk about bedbugs.
“SHA isn’t ignoring the problem, but their response is inadequate,” Wade says. “They send inspectors who don’t seem to know what they’re looking for, and they need to respond quicker than two weeks. There are special challenges with buildings and populations like this, but all I know is people are suffering.”
“If SHA isn’t more aggressive,” Wade says, “these bedbugs may be everywhere.”
That could be. Both Felton at SHA and Thompson of the DPD admit the city doesn’t have the resources to exterminate its bedbugs. “We could spend thousands and thousands of dollars getting rid of the bedbugs in any given place,” Felton says, “and then someone could just bring them back in.”
So what does she propose?
“If we can provide resources for our residents to not be bitten constantly and get a good night’s sleep, then that’s pretty good.”
In other words, bedbugs are now a permanent fact of life for the urban poor in Seattle, just like the old days. And SHA isn’t trying to exterminate the bedbugs, just keep them out of the bed?
“Yes.”
How?
“Provide bed frames for our residents to get their mattresses off the floor, tell them to keep the beds away from the walls and their blankets off the floor,” she says. “And there are these little interceptor disks you put beneath the legs of the bed…”
It seems like I’ve heard about this technology before—the pots of kerosene Ceglowski’s mother used in Soviet-era Poland. 
Have a question about bedbugs? Brendan Kiley and other bug experts will be taking readers’ questions in Questionland!
This article has been updated since its original publication.
What a nightmare.
I lived through a bed bug infestation in Brooklyn (whenever anyone mentions Bushwick, I still shudder). I am, unfortunately, very allergic to their saliva; one bite almost sent me to the hospital because it became so infected (it looked like I had a second kneecap). I tell everyone, regardless of whether they have bedbugs or not, to purchase some plastic mattress protectors. You can get them at any Bed Bath and Beyond for around $19–far cheaper than a new mattress. This prevents the bugs from getting into the seams of your mattress AND (more importantly) prevents them from escaping once you seal them in. We still sleep on our mattress that housed the bed bugs (poor publishing types can’t afford new mattresses) and have yet to get bit again… knock on wood. That said, we did move—I am pretty sure the entire building, let alone all of Bushwick, was infected.
Good luck Seattle.
Sleep tight, Seattle!
Women want me-
Men want to be me…
the Stranger once again scooped: topic first covered by Real Change Oct 29, 2009, Vol: 16, No: 47.
I thought we had bedbugs and used DE to disinfect our new apartment home–we have a cat, dog, young child so it was important for no pesticides to be used. it took too applications but it worked very well.
You can freeze them but it takes several days. Insecticide isn’t always effective because bedbugs live, among other place, inside the walls where the spray won’t get them. It’s also a bad idea to use sprays on or around your bed.
Here’s my suggestion: everybody go right now and caulk every crack and crevice in your bedroom. Caulk around every electrical, phone, cable, smoke detector, light fixture, and any other outlet, and caulk or plug each tiny hole inside each electrical outlet box. Spray diatomaceous earth into each stud space in every wall of the bedroom. That way, if they come, they will only be in the rug, bed, clock, etc. and you might be able to get rid of them on first spray.
that “too” must be in honor of callie lodging the first comment right?
You can’t live anywhere in downtown Vancouver – particularly the east side and the West End – without encountering the talk or threat of bed bugs. It’s referred to here as an epidemic. Most people feel the bedbugs arrived via international (primarily Asian) luggage and clothing, but there are some old, fairly ram-shackled places throughout downtown furnished with used furniture – so, who knows?
I am all itchy now.
What luck to see this on the front page of the stranger today. My girlfriend and I just throw out all the furniture we owned this morning. Getting rid of bedbugs has been one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had to deal with. Get ready for it, because from what read Seattle has a better climate for bed bugs that New York.
Also everyone, please remember that any spray that you might buy at the hardware store or anywhere else for home use is pure bunk.
Please, please call an exterminator (get references and call around) and make sure they use poison, and lots of it. Having lived through a bedbug infestation, USE THE POISON. Make sure they use lots of it, and make sure that they come back two weeks after the first treatement to catch any eggs that may have hatched in the mean time.
Yeah, already been a big problem on the east coast. I live in the Allston neighborhood of Boston and everybody has a story about bedbugs. In fact, I think I have them, but they aren’t giving me bumps. Ha!
I wouldn’t be surprised if the backpacker set played a major role in this epidemic;that would explain why a city of this size – for YEARS – was VERY short on shoestring-budget accomodations(despite the high demand for it!)….Watch out for the couchsurfers!…..DDT,anybody?
YO MAN ITS 311 NOT 331
i am never sleeping anywhere besides my bed ever again. and no one is invited over.
Kray’s girlfriend here (of post 11). The article mentioned one cause of the spread of this infestation being the exchange of used furniture. We are almost POSITIVE this is how we got bedbugs. Almost worse than the actual terror of having bedbugs was knowing that we got them from some b**** who decided at least she’d get $75 out of the deal. Now not only have we broken our lease and have gotten rid of ALL of our furniture, but we are hesitant to buy anything used to re-furnish our new apartment. In short, if you are thinking about buying anything used… I would straight ask the seller if they’ve ever had bedbugs. Either that or just do not buy anything used.
2010 = The year of burning furniture
there are bedbugs in the NP Hotel.
lets not let this happen to all of us, please. bedbugs is not something im ready to except.
accept!
They actually might actually carry a few diseases, including, yikes! leprosy.
My employer operates several homeless shelters and temporary accommodations, and damn but we have been having a hell of a problem with these. They are ridiculously hard to get rid of; we had to abandon one property for a year and a half to starve them out to get rid of them.
I got bit to hell this summer in a hotel room in a not bad hotel. Hotels are dealing with this scourge on a daily basis. They are usually basically cement, which prevents cross room transmission, vacuum incessantly, replace baseboards regularly, and dry the linen at very hot temperatures. And they are still fighting a rearguard action.
Me, I’m ready to whip out the DDT again. Except that they will no doubt eventually acquire immunity to that too. Nasty nasty critters.
Goddamn.
They actually might actually carry a few diseases, including, yikes! leprosy.
My employer operates several homeless shelters and temporary accommodations, and damn but we have been having a hell of a problem with these. They are ridiculously hard to get rid of; we had to abandon one property for a year and a half to starve them out to get rid of them.
I got bit to hell this summer in a hotel room in a not bad hotel. Hotels are dealing with this scourge on a daily basis. They are usually basically cement, which prevents cross room transmission, vacuum incessantly, replace baseboards regularly, and dry the linen at very hot temperatures. And they are still fighting a rearguard action.
Me, I’m ready to whip out the DDT again. Except that they will no doubt eventually acquire immunity to that too. Nasty nasty critters.
Goddamn.
accept
accept
Readers, please try diatomaceous earth. I had bedbugs for a few months, used the d.e., and they were gone within two weeks. That was last April, and I haven’t have one bite since nor seen a single speck of evidence they’re still around. Vanished. (I live in a studio, so if they were anywhere in this apt. they would have found me since then.)
Take apart your bed, make sure it’s clean, sprinkle d.e. in joints and crevices. Sprinkle it on the floor around the legs of your bed. Sprinkle it between your bed and the wall. Sprinkle it around the edges of the room, so even if they have to do that crawl-on-the-ceiling thing, they have to touch it. Make sure they have to cross it to get to you and to get away from you. I used it in conjunction with a spray pesticide I found online that had gotten good reviews, but I have no way of knowing if or how much that made a difference.
Oh, also: How did they get in my apt.? I think it was wicker. At around the same time as the outbreak began, I had bought two wicker chairs (Ikea, I suppose I should mention) and had bought a wicker basket with some items in it from a silent auction. Both the chairs and the basket, I later discovered, had those little black ink-spot feces on them. They could have arrived in one and then moved to the other. At any rate, you may want to be careful about wicker.
Dammit. I shouldn’t have read this while I was wanting to go to bed. Anything about bugs gives me that creepy, crawly, itchy feeling. I hope I’ll be able to sleep.
I worked on both these reports (from Toronto):
http://www.woodgreen.org/Temp/BBresearch…
and
http://www.woodgreen.org/Temp/BB_TenantM…
Hope these are helpful to someone!
Welcome to the new kewl trend.
In my experience, diatomaceous earth (DE) actually works with bedbugs. But it is total war. You have to sprinkle it around your bed like a dust moat, and on your mattress and throughout your bedding. Pay attention to their entry and escape routs.
Don’t use pesticides or exterminators. Bed bugs are social insects that communicate using scents to warn of danger. If they sense pesticides, they will scatter and then return when the threat is over.
The best source of DE is chinchilla dust. It is available at most pet stores. Yes, I know that sounds crazy. But it works. And it is less of a breathing threat than pure DE.
One more reality. You’ll know DE is working when you see dried out dead bugs around your bed. But then the remaining bugs get agitated and start biting even more. Don’t back off. Apply more chinchilla dust.
Don’t think you can move to another location and then return in two weeks. Bed bugs can survive for a year without a bite. They’ll just wait until you return.
The best strategy is to use yourself as bait, and surround yourself with DE. If the bites continue, use even more DE. Create an environment where they have no place to live or to escape.
Felton’s idea that people can avoid being bitten while they sleep does not take into account the fact that bed bugs will bite in the daytime if they need to. A year ago, Bedbugger.com praised the SHA’s efforts to fight bed bugs, when it obtained a bed bug sniffing dog and was exploring the use of cutting-edge thermal treatments. To hear Felton’s latest suggestions is quite horrifying. More detailed response here:
http://bedbugger.com/2010/01/14/seattle-…
I lived in Brooklyn during the bedbug scare of 07. Exterminators did very well.
Any evidence from entomologists or epidemiologists about this supposed outbreak?
When seeking an exterminator, I can highly recommend AGAINST Terminex! They are flaky dopes, who can’t tell a bedbug from a carpet beetle, miss appointments, and inspired zero confidence that they knew what they were doing. I made the mistake of hiring them because I was freaked and they could come out the next day. Not worth it.
@ 22:
I’ve been corresponding with a public-health entomologist at Harvard about this question (Dr. Richard Pollack: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/bedbugs). He says:
“It is certainly odd how fixated folks are to insects that are generally only mildly annoying, but then tend to ignore those that cause the same level of discomfort… but also may transmit things that can kill. People will routinely use insecticides in their homes against the former, but become overly worried about better regulated and measured responses against mosquitoes in their neighborhoods. Go figure. Trying to decipher the priorities of the general public could keep a bevy of psychologists busy for several lives… and beyond.
Bed bugs are not known to transmit any pathogens to people. This includes the agents of leprosy, HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, smallpox, etc. A google search may turn up some archaic (and incorrect) reports and many more misguided statements, however, that claim that bed bugs may serve as vectors. It is a shame (of sorts) that bed bugs don’t seem to be of any significance in the transmission of disease-causing agents. If they were involved, we’d be rolling in grant money. I’m pleased, nonetheless, that bed bugs don’t serve as vectors of real pathogens. With all this said, they do seem quite capable in transmitting hysteria.”
I thought my apartment had bedbugs two years ago, but it turned out to be ‘only’ fleas brought in from outside by my roommate’s dog. At least fleas are easier to exterminate. Flea bites and bedbug bites are very-difficult-to-impossible to distinguish.
Ahem.
IF we had used DDT on bedbugs continuously, it would only have resulted in the faster creation of DDT-immune population. Superbedbugs, if you will. Generally, bedbug populations are already immune to it as it is.
No single chemical can be used effectively for a very long time – so new ones have to be developed. DDT is a myth, spread by disgruntled old school PCOs with minimal understanding of population biology. Strange to see the Stranger contribute to this outdated trope.
BTW did you know that in Norway they still use Penicillin effectively, and have no Superbugs? That is because they are very strict about prescribing antibiotics. More food for thought for the get-out-the-big-guns crowd.
PS
I’d be willing to bet a small sum of money that the ‘recent’ outbreak had been there all along and that what we’re seeing here is a snowball effect due to a rise in awareness. See for example http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazi…, for the story about anorexia in Hong Kong. The relevant bit is that there is ‘suddenly’ much more of it. The reason entomologists can’t explain the sudden rise in bedbug infestations is that it is not sudden.
I solved my bedbug problem by literally blocking them from my mind and forgetting they were even there. Worked like a charm! Now reading this, I realize that they have in fact gone away (I think).
Lyon Building, on 3rd – run by Aids Housing Project for years – the whole building was big time infested three years ago. (sixty units)
Old news. Stay very clean, wash and dry all clothes and linens, bleach- you bet, don’t buy used over stuffed furniture and hope they don’t like your blood.
I quit dating the guy, which was the right move anyway.
The dog was adopted by a trainer in Florida about two days before being put down and, according to Felton, cost SHA around $7,000!!! Should have waited another day, prolly could have gotten it for free. Gotta love the Seattle liberals.
Hey Everyone. I live in Vancouver and consider myself a “survivor” of the bed bug epidemic. Here’s how I got rid of them: We had the pest control come in and spray twice, and washed every article of clothing in the apartment. My room mates and I both threw out our mattresses/boxsprings immediately. I caulked EVERY HOLE AND CRACK in my room. It takes a long time, but I promise you it’s worth it… Give them no where to hide and no way to get in from another suite. After that I used diatomaceous earth on all the ledges and nooks and crannies and of course, everywhere under/around my bed.
Having bed bugs is a very special kind of hell but if you go at it full force right off the bat you should be okay. My attitude was PURE WAR and there’s no way I was gonna let those little suckers live in my home. Fight them to the death. Give them no where to run, no where to hide, and cover everything in poison.
I have not had any problems since then, and I live in the West End of Vancouver which is one of the most infested neighbourhoods in the City.
Don’t stay @ The Georgetown Inn. Very bad problem of bedbugs there.
Don’t go see a movie at AMC I hear there are bedbugs all over that place due to high daytime viewing of the matinees by infectees.
Also, DE works extremely well. #42 is absolutely correct–it is a war but entirely winnable with a few days effort.
Yeah this article spent a leeeetle too much time lamenting the passing of DDT. Stuff’s nasty shit and overall we are better off with it gone.
My parents had a bedbug recently. Luckily it was only one, that they apparently picked up when the visited a house that was for sale. But this one bug nevertheless made quite an impression on them! My mom tells the tale of how they killed it- stopped sleeping in bed to draw it out, then squashed it when it went to the bathroom to find water- like it was a battle with a dragon. And they talk about bedbugs in general as if they were the worst thing to happen to America since George W. Bush.
What a complete and well-researched article. Very informative. Hopefully, I won’t have much use for this information anytime soon…
Dream treatment: Diatomaceous earth combined with a yummy (to them) hormonal treatment that makes female bedbugs sterile…
Wow! These are amazing comments. I too used (and recently reapplied, DE to my baseboards. I want to urge readers to be very very cautious using DE. It is harmful, permanently if inhaled as it is finely ground silica. It should only be used where you don’t sleep, walk or “plop” (the sofa?). You do not want to inhale it. It is part of an integrated plan to get rid of bed bugs. When used in conjunction with caulking, heat or chemical treatment, you can get rid of bed bugs in your home. http://www.bedbugsnorthwest.com
oh god, does this mean that I should avoid the Goodwill Bins?
Last month, I had to move out of the BROADWAY FORTUNE APARTMENTS, at James and Broadway, because of a bedbug/cockroach infestation that had taken over the building, from the bottom floor up.
RP management and the building manager were aware of the problem, and repeatedly waited for tenants to come to them once they had already discovered bugs in their bed before affirming that the building had an infestation. I was told by my neighbor that the tenant that lived in my unit beforehand had moved out because of bedbugs.
When I broke my lease, I was told I would need to find a new tenant – that is, I was asked to induce someone to move in to a bed bug infested apartment. Eventually, they let me go without refunding my deposit, but it was a terrible and expensive process and I lost my mattress, couch, chairs, and most of my clothing.
If you have heard of Broadway Fortune Apartments or know of anyone considering living there, please direct them to this post.
I lived in an apartment in the U-District in Seattle several years ago that I had to leave because of bed bugs….the owners, although cool about it in the end, tried to suggest it was me that had brought them to the apartment. This did not fly, because #1 the bites started immediately after I moved in, which I reported thank God, and #2 I had met (and smelled) the prior tenant of my apartment, a dreadlocked Slovenian hippie type girl who I still blame for my three months of horror. She smelled like BO and patchoili and left some furniture for me to use, which I accepted because I didn’t have some key pieces….looking back I should have made a bonfire and torched it all. I sympathize with the person mentioned in the article, I too used to lay awake at night knowing the filthy insects were going to come out of the cracks and feast on my body while I slept, leaving rows and rings of ugly red bumps along my arms and legs. I “bug-bombed” the place 3 times to absolutely no avail. I got the hell out and hope the owners hired professionals to fix the problem, but I still shudder when I think about that apartment, which sucks because it was a lovely place in a great neighborhood.
Gizmodo recently had a post about a very simple bedbug trap you can build for ~$15.
Probably best to use as a detector to determine if you have a problem, not at a “kill em all” trap.
Ugh brings back memories of early 2006 back east. I rid myself of the bugs (origin unknown – possibly an earlier visitor to the house or tenant, since I hadn’t been anywhere) by washing everything that could be washed and drying on as hot a setting as it could stand. Some items got a wee bit melted. Pillows got dampened down and toasted in the dryer – they emerged yellowed but bug-free. Everything went straight from the dryer into big clear plastic bags. Stuff that was not washable or inspectable was taken outside to freeze for a few weeks, except for the laptop, which was allowed to heat up a few times while resting in a metal tray. There was no filling up all the cracks in my room because this was a very old house. Used a pyrethrin+pyrethroid combo spray pesticide (Raid or equivalent) in the cracks around the baseboards and near the ceiling. Reapplied this every 3-4 days. Took a hot iron to the mattress – no box spring, fortunately and sealed it up in the plastic it had arrived in (it was only a few months old 🙁 ). Moved me + cleaned clothes and bedding downstairs and camped on couch. IMMEDIATELY left ‘bait’ instead of me, so the bugs did not wander in search of my other housemates. Borrowed a small electric space heater, used it as bait in the middle of the floor along with a CO2 source made by letting vinegar drip slowly onto baking soda. Used duct tape upside down around trap. Right after work, run upstairs, turn on space heater start vinegar drip shut light off and leave to lure for 2 hours. Return and KILL KILL KILL every visible bug. Repeat kill cycle just before bed. Spritz walls in suspect areas with ammonia-based glass cleaner (makes ’em twitch so they can be seen and slows them down). Repeat, repeat repeat for weeks until a month has gone by with no bug sightings. The newly hatched ones are tiny and almost invisible. The stuff i had frozen previously was returned to room while the bait system was running after a week had gone by with no sightings. All the bugs were found on the mattress (not many but the mattress was new with few places to hide), in and around the cracks at the floor and ceiling and around the “bait”.
Eventually I moved because there were so many cracks in that room and the paranoia was too much. There’s no signs that I took any bugs with me.
What got to me wasn’t the bites themselves (not allergic, fortunately) but the paranoia and sleeplessness caused by the paranoia. This is a common problem.
All the best to those of you fighting this – it CAN be done. Death to all bedbugs!
On doing more research, I have found that chinchilla dust, which contains DE, should be used selectively. It should not be dusted on everything, as has been advised by sources on the web.
I also found a pretty good resource for effective new products that includes reviews and ratings:
http://www.topbedbugproducts.com/
I am pretty sure my infestation came from my neighbor, who has been regularly blasting her house with commercial exterminators. But all this does it make them scatter, and then they return, which is why she has to have the exterminators there about every 6 months. I am fairly certain the bugs got into my house through a window air conditioner.
Good article. Crappy topic. But eh, at least they are only bed bugs. 😉
Yet another reason to keep New Yorkers and other east coast filth out of the great State of Washington.
We got bedbugs in June. Took SHA over a month to inspect our apartment, even though my then fiancee couldn’t sleep because the bites affected her so much. I of course didn’t even know I was being bitten.
After the inspection, it took them 2 weeks to get someone in to spray us the first time. That didn’t get rid of them, so they came back 2 weeks later to spray again. A week and a half later the inspector came back and we still had them, so he told us to throw out our bed. He sprayed again after the bed was gone, and they were still here. Each time he’d spray, one more piece of furniture got tossed.
Fast forward to mid-December, just before Christmas. After my fiancee had been sleeping in the bathtub since July, we were sitting on bottle-crates to use our computers, and I had been sleeping on the cold hard floor since August, we think they’re finally gone… but I can’t tell because I’m not affected by the bites, I haven’t seen them since the last spraying, but she’s still getting welts.
We live on First Hill in a SHA apartment where they treated about half of our building. It’s a nightmare, and I still feel something crawling on my arm or leg or in my hair sometimes and it creeps me out; even when I don’t see anything where it itches…
Something the article fails to mention is the role that the tenant has to play in getting rid of the bedbugs.
Commonly, people will think that fumigation is all that is needed, when in fact, the bed bugs are in all their stuff as well. *Everything* needs to be cleaned properly.
Apparently, it is not necessary to throw out your soft furniture if you follow the cleaning regimen.
The problem is that, particularly in low-income housing, the tenants don’t have the resources to complete the cleaning–there’s A LOT of laundry that needs to be done. Not to mention the vacuuming.
And when you’re dealing with individuals with mental illness, addiction, and other disabilities, there often isn’t the follow-through required to get rid of the bugs.
Or even in the general population–the idea of me vacuuming my entire apartment twice a day for several weeks is highly unlikely.
A while back my boyfriend and I moved into an apartment that turned out to have a massive flea infestation. Just thinking about what we went through with that nearly gives me a panic attack, and it freaks me out that there’s something even worse out there.
Our chinchilla, however, takes many rigorous dust baths, which usually leaves a fine layer of dust on everything within a five foot radius. I always found it annoying to clean up, but maybe it’s not such a bad thing.
WHY did I read this article? I feel itchy now 🙁
What’s the best way to prevent a bedbug infestation?
With all due respect to Dr. Dr. Richard Pollack (Harvard entomologist who states that bedbugs only transmit hysteria) he and his family have clearly never been victimized by a nocturnal biting vampire. I am the mom to a 6 year old and we live in a small home. Back in October we started getting bites. It got bad enough that I got worried an called Paratex. They (Ray came) were great but were “99% sure” we had no bedbugs. I followed up with Willard’s Pest Control who said the same, “Call us if you find a bug!” All the while my kid is COVERED in bites as am I. I dusted DE around the room which almost choked us out but did greatly reduce the biting, I covered mattresses and pillows in encasings. I cleaned, bought a fancy vacuum, even steam-cleaned using a hand steamer and started caulking like crazy (friend got bit helping caulk). People would come and go as houseguests, some got bit lightly others not at all but my son and I were gnawed on relentlessly. We saw the pediatrician who wondered about scabies, were referred to a dermatologist who thought maybe treating for scabies would help, then an entomologist/dermatologist who noted that getting bit in crack of elbow, behind knees, under breasts is classically a patter for biting mites, usually of avian or rodent source. We do have a rodent problem so are working with yet another pest control company to treat for rodent mites. No one wants to spray without finding a bug and yet no one can find a bug. Itching severely and constantly is more than an irritation, it is a discomfort, a distraction and demoralizing. Our first spraying for mites was with Tempo SC and we went bite-free for a few days and now are starting to get bit again. Spraying number two is Monday. Mites or bedbugs (and we are pretty sure it is mites), getting bit by an unseen enemy is distressing, insomnia-inducing, and just plain uncomfortable. I am stunned an entomologist would not recognize why these bugs cause such consternation among victims. Thanks to the Stranger for brining awareness to this issues. Travelers be advised that storing your luggage in hotel bathtubs can help reduce a bedbug hitching a ride home.
any film maker types wanna work on a bed bug horror movie? I think it could be a hit and I could write some seriously creepy music…get in touch
My Dad says one of his earliest memories in the 1930’s was his first night in New York after traveling from Kansas with his recently widowed Mom, and their first night in some low-rent rooming house, bathroom down the hall, with just a metal-frame bed with mattress, and a chair. After taking the thin mattress off the bed, she lit a candle and slowly moved it under every inch of the wires holding up the mattress to kill any possible bedbugs.
I was a victim of a bedbug infestation in Bozeman, Montana in 1998, (yes NINETEEN). They took over almost all of the graduate student housing. My recollection is that they were turning up in small northwest college towns back in those days (Pullman & Moscow) and my discovery was not all that unexpected. Furnished apts and an especially multi-national graduate student body are the obvious culprits. The college town outbreak seemed like a big deal at the time, wonder why it isn’t mentioned here?
Well the bedbugs literally almost killed me. Caught pneumonia thanks to them. They did eventually eradicate them by spraying the entire 9 story building all at once. I hope they start taking drastic measures like that here, I’m pretty certain the bugs will make sure they finish me off this time.
An additional comment to those who mite be suffering from a yet-treated biting nocturnal bug (bedbugs or biting mites), my experience was that (in my case mites most likely) hate the smell of dryer sheets. So I would use scented dryer sheets and rub them all over my linens before going to bed. This drastically reduced the level of biting intensity and made life livable as we were waiting to eradicate. If anyone needs good Seattle pest control company tips, I feel like an expert on the subject and can be reached by email, same as this login AT gmail.
An additional comment to those who mite be suffering from a yet-treated biting nocturnal bug (bedbugs or biting mites), my experience was that (in my case mites most likely) hate the smell of dryer sheets. So I would use scented dryer sheets and rub them all over my linens before going to bed. This drastically reduced the level of biting intensity and made life livable as we were waiting to eradicate. If anyone needs good Seattle pest control company tips, I feel like an expert on the subject and can be reached by email, same as this login AT gmail.
Once you get rid them, have a few leaves of neem tree and place it beneath the pillow or better place it below the mattress in the bed.Bugs won’t come.
Once you get rid of the bug, place some leaves of Neem tree between the mattress and the cot.No bugs.You may do this to prevent bugs any where.
Along with bedbugs, head lice infestations are also burgeoning in our city — I wonder if the same is true in other urban areas around the country? I can’t imagine that DDT was formerly used to treat head lice … but I do think it’s probably true that stronger pesticides are no longer available; and the lice are resistant to the pesticide treatments that can be purchased over the counter. They’re really, really hard to get rid of. After trying about half a dozen different methods, we’ve finally settled on one that works — but takes three weeks and many hours.
I’m the mother of two kids, aged 13 and 7, and we’ve had head lice at least twice a year for the past 5 years. And it’s not just our family — it’s everywhere: public schools, private schools, daycares, camps, you name it. I can remember exactly one head lice scare from my childhood; why are they so hugely on the upswing now? Is the bedbug resurgence happening for the same reason? I’d love The Stranger to look into the whole ugly head lice situation. It’s grim.
I’ve read that recent advances in cockroach insecticides had the unfortunate effect of allowing bedbugs to proliferate. People used to spray regularly for cockroaches using rather toxic pesticides, knocking out bedbugs in the process. About 20 years ago they came up with more specific chemicals that mimic the hormones that female cockroaches use, so you only had to spray a little and you didn’t have to spray as often. These sprays don’t affect bedbugs in the slightest so they have prospered.
I’ve started recommending this article to people who know about the bedbug problem I have, but I do have some issues with it based on my experience and my research online.
1) Privileging DDT, like if we re-legalised it tomorrow the problem would go away. This is probably not true. American bedbugs were becoming DDT-resistant before it was banned, and current bugs are often resistant; see an experiment reported on p. 50 of the July 2007 issue of Pest Control Technology magazine, available online at
http://pct.texterity.com/pct/200707/?pg=…
There’s a 2001 BBC report – and yeah, journalists often get things wrong, but anyway – that in South Africa, DDT encourages bedbugs:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/167707…
This may be because of some local creature that eats bedbugs but is still vulnerable to DDT; cockroaches eat bedbugs (but not enough to make them useful in controlling the bugs).
Both links courtesy of the footnotes to the Wikipedia article.
2) As several people have already noted, freezing kills bedbugs. They can survive ordinary cold temperatures, though – Seattle winters are no challenge at all. Apparently many refrigerators (including mine, unfortunately) have a single setting for refrigerator and freezer; to get your freezer cold enough, you may have to give up having a refrigerator above 32 degrees.
This is important because it’s the poor person’s way to get rid of bugs on items that can’t be washed. Bedbugs LOVE nesting on paper, so it’s especially relevant to books. Also computers, yes?
The original research on how cold for how long is in Russian (the Pest Control Technology article cites Sokolova as author), and I don’t know yet how much info has been translated. Some people claim ordinary freezers can’t get cold enough. My freezer gets cold enough, but only barely so, and can’t reach the kill-in-15-minutes temperature. Also, eggs won’t hatch below about 60 Fahrenheit, so you have to sequester the item for two weeks or so before freezing it.
3) Water. You didn’t mention that bedbugs drown quite easily. This is why washing stuff often is important. It’s also useful if you see a bug running across a book or some such, where you don’t want to leave a nasty stain by squishing it.
I haven’t told my landlord yet about the infestation where I live – he’s been taking an SHA-ish approach elsewhere in the building, even replacing infested beds with used beds – so am posting anonymously. I’ll come back after doing some library research tonight or tomorrow.
I loved your article! http://animalreport.com/news/my-second-f…
well writing i like it and it is very useful for your blog reader like me
thanks
I wonder how many people lifted up their mattresses after reading this…
I’d like to add that chinchilla dust (essentially DE) does work to kill bed bugs, but there are a few things I’ve leaned about it.
First, it is a breathing hazard. Use a mask when applying or removing it. Don’t use any more than you have to. A thin layer works better than a mound of it.
And it is somewhat forever. The little silica flakes readily attach to surfaces and then sparkle like tiny glitter. That includes clothing, walls, and furniture. Be prepared to glitter. DE is very difficult to get off of surfaces and pretty much impossible to get out of clothing.
But it works. In a couple of weeks, I’ve been able to nearly eliminate the bites. The key word is nearly.
So the next thing I’m going to try is a product called Best Yet, which is a concentrated non-toxic spray made of natural substances. Apparently, it was first developed for military use. It has a lot of good reviews. And it is supposed to also work on lice.
I think the combination of these two approaches should do it.
– Not Me
I had one more thought.
Somehow, if there’s a trend, I usually find myself in the first stages of it. I don’t plan this, it just happens.
This is one trend I would definitely rather not be part of. But at least this will toughen me up for the new world we’re going to be facing.
Bed bugs and lice are obviously back. A return to DDT would eventually create superbugs that would not be controllable. We can’t go back.
The DDT era gave us a respite that is just now beginning to end. Thus, this trend. We will never be entirely safe from these things again.
Instead, it will be increasingly difficult to avoid encounters. These things are in airplanes and hotel rooms and theaters and restaurants. Anywhere human beings congregate.
It looks to me like the next step (trend?) is to figure out a realistic, affordable and effective home protection system. Maybe this is partly working with a pest control service like Paratex, and partly employing a home program that connects with what they do.
So what would a smart home protection system consist of? How would it work as a system? I’m thinking there’s going to be some quality energy put into this now.
Thanks to The Stranger for this timely and informative article!
Any of you posters recall seeing movies or news clips of immigrants coming into the U.S. or prisoner being interred back in the day? They were being “Dusted” with what I have been told was DDT. This was to kill any potential parasites or undesireable critters hitching a ride. I grew up in a apple producing region where DDT was one of the most effective pestcides used at that time. My Dad used to apply most of those pesticides back then in nothing more than a T-shirt. He is now approaching 75 years old and is quite healthy. I can remember as a youth when they banned DDT. I can remember a news story on TV, after the ban, of a couple of older folks who were filling gel caps with DDT and eating one every night. They were doing this to prove that DDT wasn’t a bad thing for humans.
What it was doing was creating soft, fragile egg shells in Bald Eagles. With that, the Bald Eagle was put on the “Endangered Species” list. The Eagle has recovered and been taken off of that list. In Alaska, Eagles are close to as numerous as Seagulls and are basically scavengers. It’s not only bedbugs that have become more prevelent over the course of the years. I have seen spiders, ticks, mosquitos, scorpions, beetles, etc. etc. etc. make huge growth strides and impact human lives.
DDT may not be the answer, but we need to take a more aggressive stance on developing new pesticides and using them in a more conservative
manner. Hell, we can devolop many different substances that can wipe out the human race, but can’t come up with a solution for bedbugs and other pests? What’s up with that?
We have tried a few different methods and are now trying the “Best Yet” Cedarcide fogger with the addition of DE along the baseboards and anywhere else we can apply it without it being obnoxious. I think the DE is a good solution and the Cedarcide certainly kills the ones that are exposed. It said one or two applications at the most would be sufficient. We have done four and will do another come spring time. Good luck to all and “It’s a good thing we don’t get as much government as we pay for”
Nicholas Danger III
It looks to me like Best Yet has an advantage because it is effective long enough to span the reproductive period. And DE is forever.
I think those two, plus the use of mattress and pillow covers, should finish them off. But who knows? The next time I have to travel, I might be faced with them all over again.
I caution that bombing them with chemicals just makes them scatter. And then they return. Plus, now you’ll have their eggs all over your home instead of localized in the bedroom area.
Since these bugs cannot be completely eradicated by search and destroy, my approach is to let them come after me, with all their approaches and escape routes treated with DE and Best Yet.
If anyone has a better system, please share your wisdom.
Thanks for writing this article. I’m staying at a men’s shelter where reporting bedbugs isn’t wise for a resident. It results in abusive search procedures, selective restrictions, and other forms of backlash generally termed ‘case-by-case-basis’ on the victim, designed primarily to reduce the workload of staff.
Thank you, thank you so much. I thought they were fleas. I can now address the problem.
Not that I didn’t fucking panic. I took a day off work and cleaned my entire apartment to an extent that I never have before, and I don’t know if I’m moving or not, but at least I know what’s going on now.
If you’ve been getting bit at night…and sometimes it really doesn’t feel like a bite its more like a sting, its a possibility you GOT BEDBUGS! These insects crawl on any type of cloth like surfaces, but do not climb on slippery surfaces because it is difficult to walk on. People I know what I am talking about, I’ve had them and there’s nothing about it, its become an epidemic here in the Tristate area. I literally got paranoid and thought I would get bit everywhere in my house at anytime, they look like bullseye stings and itch like hell. I hardly slept through the night and had to buy lot of menthol bottles, because the menthol keeps it cool for a bit and it just felt good. I bought all different products such as hydrocortisone, caladryl, zrtec, icy hot, bengay….practically anything to keep from it itching. Yes, the menthol alcohol like I said worked for a bit, but then I just got irritated and thought I had to live forever buying so many bottles so I eventually needed to put a stop to it and soon!! So I was looking in my area for a bed bug company that can advise on what to do and found 2. One of them told me that it wasn’t that serious and that I could buy mattress covers and this would handle the bedbug infestation, it sure did handle it for about a day or 2 and it also emptied some of my pocket. Mind you I have a 2 bedroom house 2 queen size beds and 1 twin size all pillow top! Then, I looked into another of my options which was pest control company in my area MITEBUSTER, I called them and had them come over my house they inspected and sure enough there were eggs within the crevices and folds of my 1 bedroom with a queen and the twin. They treated it with their non-toxic solutions, I didnt even have to leave my house and this wasn’t even harmful for my dogs nor us. They have a wonderful treatment program and a whole bunch of goodies, although they work within the tristate area they also have their own website that delivers throughout the 50 US States, and in this website you can get their solutions yourselves and their mattress covers a perfect prices. (www.mitebuster) Try them out if you feel nothing is working. THIS IS NOT SPAM!!!
There is a good basic information university page on bed bugs at:
http://www.deh.enr.state.nc.us/phpm/Bedb…
@WeakAssCracker: The trainer got the dog two days before being put down, trained it, then sold it to SHA for $7000. No one likes ignorant opinionated jackasses.
@70, bugsymagoo
“why are [bedbugs and head lice] so hugely on the upswing now?”
The largely invisible yet dramatically increasing poverty in this country. Welcome to the “Third World” hidden immediately behind the veneer of the “First World”. Poverty hidden behind ‘credit’. At least that’s my hypothesis. We’re already past 17% unemployment (WSJ link), right up there with the Great Depression, yo.
70% RUBBING ALCOHOL KILLS BEDBUGS!!!
It is cheap and effective, just put in a spray bottle and douse anywhere they hide, put some in a black garbage bag with your clothes/bedding and tie it up for a few days, wash-Bugs are dead! Combine with Diatomacious Earth treatment and eliminate infestations! IT WORKS!!! NO lingering poisons for you or your pets!
There are only 2 Drawbacks I found: 1. It smells bad while you’re using it. (Suck it up, princess.)Ventilation of fumes is a good idea. 2. It is Flammable. VERY flammable. So no smoking, no heaters, be careful around electrical outlets etc.Again, Ventilation of fumes is a good idea.
SPREAD THIS INFO AROUND!!!!
I noticed the author spent a great deal of time looking at factors that could explain the sudden explosion of bedbugs in different cities, but never once mentioned any methods of epidemic transmission. A loss of DDT may have allowed bedbugs to spread again, and Craigslist swaps could explain perhaps a few small outbreaks, but the kind of epidemic results that we’ve been seeing around the country are hardly explained by Craigslist and DDT alone.
I have a suggestion, though. We should be looking for fundamental changes in our environment or behavior that could have led to bedbugs traveling more easily between distant locations, and it’s not just people they might hitch a ride on. There is one new device that now occupies most city homes now, that generates an attractive amount of heat, has lots of little spaces to hide, and which people easily move from one location to another, or between friends: the desktop computer.
These days more than ever, we leave these on all day and all night, and as a source of heat could easily attract bedbugs. One day you want to join a friend’s LAN party, so you switch the thing off during the day while any bugs it caught over the night are sleeping, move it there, switch it on in the company of a host of boxes, and so the idiot bug decides there’s no blood and moves on to the next warm box.
I could easily be wrong, but how about a show of hands from infestees: how often does your computer sleep at a friend’s house?
Thanks for the comment on rubbing alcohol!
I Goggled it, and apparently it is a good option that I had not yet discovered.
Here’s what I was able to find out.
If you can see the bed bugs and spray it directly on them, or the surface is readily accessible, is it is one of the quickest and least expensive direct actions that works.
The only drawback I could find is it quickly evaporates. So it doesn’t work on bed bugs that are hiding in places where they can’t be seen, or anywhere the spray can’t directly reach. That’s what DE and Best Yet are for.
Note that unlike some other pests, bed bugs readily drown, so thorough repeated washing and dry cleaning will also help get rid of what is in there.
I don’t know about rubbing alcohol and plastic bags. Alcohol evaporates rather rapidly.
Rubbing alcohol does sound like a possible solution for treating automobiles and chair seats and so forth.
However, rubbing alcohol can dissolve dyes, so a better option for fabrics could be Lysol. Information on the web suggests Lysol will work in the same direct way that rubbing alcohol does. But neither of them have any residual effect. Test an area that can’t be seen to avoid damaging the surfaces.
Alcohol may also damage wood surfaces finished with lacquer or varnish. Again, test an area that can’t be seen.
I found a web forum on how bedbugs are changing the world:
http://bedbugger.com/forum/forum/cultura…
The page linked below has some useful information from an associate professor in Urban Pest Management at Virginia Tech’s Department of Entomology, but it doesn’t discuss DE or Best Yet:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12133597/ns/…
I have repeatedly encountered the words “recent epidemic” in my bed bug searches, so obviously, the sharing of this information is going to be increasingly important.
Here is a summary of the specific effective applications I’ve found. I think the point is to gather as many killing options as possible, and then devise an approach that uses what each is specifically best at.
Direct contact on bugs and eggs: rubbing alcohol and Lysol.
Residual, for the bugs’ approaches and escapes: food grade DE, chinchilla dust, Best Yet.
Clothing: repeated washing and cleaning.
Small stuff that can withstand freezing: It takes at least two straight weeks at sub-zero temperatures. I’ll probably use that for some small stuff that I don’t want to apply liquids or DE or Best Yet on.
High heat: Steamers sound like a good surface idea. Probably good for surfaces that could be damaged by alcohol or Lysol. I’m getting one.
When an infestation is located, don’t move anything out of that area until everything is treated. Do everything possible to keep them localized to their feeding source, which is mostly you at night. Use yourself as bait while you apply the residual treatments (DE and Best Yet) around your bed.
Mattress and pillow covers partially work, but the bugs can live on these covers as easily as on the mattress or pillow inside. Use the covers to avoid replacing costly bedding by trapping any bugs inside, but don’t rely on them for protection against whatever is hiding in cracks and picture frames and so forth.
Some pest exterminators like Paratex obviously know what they are doing.
But some exterminators don’t. As I have discovered, using a pest exterminator that doesn’t understand bed bugs and uses chemical insecticides could make your problem a whole lot worse when they come back. And they almost certainly will come back. I’m fairly certain I got them from a neighbor who has repeatedly used chemical exterminators for several years now. So this suggests the worst approach to attack them with chemicals that trigger their fear reaction. Once they scatter, the infestation becomes extremely difficult to isolate and eradicate.
Regardless of whether or not an exterminator is used, we still have to figure out how to protect ourselves in this post-DDT world, because the threat is constant. They are back, and that is that.
But don’t phreak out (although I admit I did at first). It can be done. I haven’t had a new bite in about a week now, just using chinchilla dust (DE) and stepping up cleaning and washing. I’m also going to add some of the above methods to help defend myself against these little monsters.
This article, and all the comments here, are pretty much the best source of information out there. Thanks again to the Stranger for having the guts to take on this ugly new reality.
@90 – Thanks much for the excellent summary. Being a former editor, though, I’m still going to make a few comments.
Freezing – You don’t need anywhere near 2 weeks at subzero temps. You need it cold – I think 14 Fahrenheit is the highest temp I’ve heard will kill them – but if your freezer has a temperature that’s reliably subzero, the Department of Defense thinks they’ll die in four days (linked at Wikipedia), I’ve established to my satisfaction (trapping and freezing them) that two days is probably enough (killed about 10) and three almost certainly (killed over 20), and I’m now investigating 1 1/2 days.
Some issues with this, though: a) My freezer’s lowest setting varies between 20 below and zero. Your freezer’s subzero setting (if any) may not get as cold, so may take longer. You pretty much have to do your own experiments. Also, these experiments involved bottles with bugs and air in them. Bugs in stuff are better protected and will take longer to kill.
b) You need a freezer thermometer. Regular hardware stores don’t carry these; I didn’t get as far as a Home Depot, got mine from an appliance store. Don’t special order; some places advertise thermometers that don’t live up to their ads.
c) You need to sequester stuff BEFORE YOU FREEZE IT. I know of no evidence that frozen eggs won’t hatch when thawed. I bet they will. They will not, however, hatch in the freezer. So you need to isolate stuff, allow any eggs to hatch, THEN freeze it.
d) Sequestering. A site out there recommended freezing for two weeks (wrong, as just noted) in a “Space Bag”, for books, so that condensation doesn’t damage them. Space Bags turn out not to get all the air out, at least if there’s more than one book; I’m doing a test now to see how much condensation damage there is. Condensation is also probably an issue for electronics and some other things.
I’m about to go get more precise info on the eggs’ incubation period, but anyway, for me, the bottleneck isn’t freezer size, but Space Bags – if I could afford (or wanted) as many as it took, I could probably bag my entire room and cycle it through the freezer in a few weeks.
Heat – You left out clothes dryers.
Localisation – Damn straight.
Mattress covers – I’ve watched bedbugs deal with books, newspapers, loose papers, and things like DVD cases and remotes on top of my bed for some time now. (Took a while to buy freezer thermometer, Space Bags, vacuum cleaner, etc.) They love newspapers. (Piles of newspapers are bedbugs’ best friends; they like the bigger spaces, especially down the inside fold of the main section when there are smaller sections in the same fold.) They really like books. (Some books on my bed are where I trap the ones I’m freezing.) They’re OK with loose papers, but don’t hang out on them much. I have yet to see one even walk on plastic. I believe the commenter who said one came out of an iPod, but I haven’t seen anything similar. My computer seems to attract no attention from them.
SO. A plastic mattress cover strikes me as pretty good. Yeah, getting to blood is enough incentive, I bet they’ll walk on it – but I’ll bet money they won’t nest on one, or between two. Well, I will be betting money, when I can afford some…
Post-infestation survival. Landlords have a huge incentive to deal with this problem inadequately; I’m not sure how to address that before we adapt to the resurgence, at which point I expect proper bedbug treatment to become a class thing in rentals, as the SHA is already demonstrating.
You can play the odds, or you can be careful. To be careful, sequester everything you buy that could reasonably harbor them (used furniture, books, for ex.) and then freeze it, or dust it with DE, or something. This isn’t perfect, though; Wikipedia confirms the person who reported an infested Ikea store, so you *could* get them *anywhere*. Playing the odds means watching out for their scat, again on things like used furniture and books (mostly on the top and bottom page edges), and making your home less attractive, notably by putting the bed in the middle of the room, away from other furniture, and deploying DE around it. (Of course, being able to devote the middle of one room entirely to a bed is also a class thing…)
All I can think of for now. I’ll report back when I have the incubation period and know condensation’s impact.
Again anonymous.
Just to clarify:
Chinchilla dust is not exactly diatomaceous earth; both are silica-based but not the same compounds. But neither is to be liberally applied in your home (CD not actually labelled for home use anyway, but people are using it). People have come into ERs because they inhaled the dusts, what they believed to be safe dusts, something that won’t bother you because they have read about it on the Internet. Not all people actually go to many sites and read before posting on another site, so the misinformation continues to be disseminated.
The insecticidal action of DDT and certain pyrethroids happens to be the same and affects the sodium channel of the nerves: that’s the reason for some insect populations exhibiting resistance to DDT and also some to certain pyrethroids, such as deltamethrin.
Thanks for improving the knowledge base. Out here in the post-DDT frontier, the misinformation is everywhere, and usable knowledge is hard to find.
In regards to the use of Neem leaves for bed bugs, the following link is to a Neem expert in Australia who provides good information:
http://www.discoverneem.com/bed-bugs-nee…
In regard to sequestering, this is valuable new information. I am thinking that bed bug prevention pillow and mattress covers could also be used for this purpose. Open them in the bedroom, put clothing and books into them, sequester for 2 weeks, and then freeze for at least 4 days at subzero.
The following site has some useful tools, including small covers for luggage and clothing that I have not seen before:
http://www.usbedbugs.com/
But before I try freezing, I am going to try using a steamer, because steam can kill both bugs and eggs on contact. Here’s an excellent information resource on using steam:
http://bedbugger.com/2008/08/03/new-faq-…
Regarding incubation, I found another good information site at:
http://www.bed-bug.org/
Here’s what they say. Bed bugs lay one to five eggs per day. The incubation period is 10 days in warm weather and a little longer when cool. The new bugs require 5 significant blood feedings to get to adult size. They molt between feedings by shedding their exoskeleton. Once they are mature, they start laying new eggs.
Therefore, I would say the overall goal is to eliminate the adults and new bugs through the steps listed below, and then use Best Yet to kill off the new ones before they are able to get 5 blood feedings.
In other words, it looks to me like the main goal is to stay focused on the reproductive cycle and the need for 5 feedings, instead of being distracted by direct kills or fragmented actions.
Thus far in this knowledge sharing process, it looks to me like the steps are:
1. Don’t start moving anything out of the bedroom area until you have a good sequential plan! Keep them as localized as possible. They generally won’t go any further than necessary, unless you move them. Do not bomb them with chemicals! They will scatter and return, and now they are all over the place.
2. Kill off the easy surface targets with 70% rubbing alcohol (90% also works but is probably more destructive to dyes and finishes).
3. Use a steamer on surface targets, cloth, furniture, walls and some hidden targets like cracks.
4. Install a bed bug proof mattress cover and pillow covers.
5. Apply Best Yet strategically for residual protection. Avoid the dusts like DE and Chinchilla dust because they are hard to use.
6. Relentlessly clean and vacuum and steam and strategically apply and re-apply Best Yet.
7. Don’t rely on luck or social station. The upper income group is one of the worse sources for bugs because they travel and send their kids to private schools where the bugs continue to hitchhike and spread. And when the money class gets the bugs, they have the bucks to go straight for chemical exterminators as an immediate solution (that conveniently requires no study or work on their part). But the bugs relentlessly return. So they use more chemicals, and it spreads them like crazy.
BTW, the number of bed bugs in the US and UK and Europe is doubling every year.
I have found a source of comprehensive information in Australia (they’ve had a big bed bug problem ever since they hosted the Olympics in 2007). Here’s the link for the PDF document:
http://medent.usyd.edu.au/bedbug/bedbug_…
Regarding treating books and small objects, here’s a comment I found on the web that might be useful (don’t know if the citation is correct):
“By placing the books in a standard oven at the lowest temperature possible (130° F for 3 hours) and placing wet newspaper or a pan of water in the bottom of the oven to maintain humidity inside the oven chamber, all stages of this insect, and in fact any insect, will be killed.”
Chapter 7, UNESCO Library Protocols
On doing research on steamers, I have found a few important considerations.
1. Get a dry steamer. They are far more effective, and they don’t promote mold growth. Of course, they are more expensive than the cheaper ones.
2. Be careful not to use too much pressure, which will spread them.
3. The use of a respirator is advised.
OK, I have provided as much info as I can. I’m exiting these comments with one more link:
http://waronbedbugs.blogspot.com/2006/10…
This is an informative blog from someone with a scientific background. Some of the info is a little out of date, but even with that qualification, wow, what a resource.
After battling the bugs for 6 months (96 @aurora)being evicted and losing my job because of psycological problems, steam cleaning the 350 sq ft place. Throwing out everything I own. I am still being sued for 1800 in damages and reeling. Dealing with felony hit and run that threw me 40 ft off my bike in west seattle. William Dahl caught but no ins and I am left with 80,000 in hospital bills and no money. I am reeling. Left arm looks like cottage cheese. Bitten 1000’s of times. Slept in mummy bag n bit n eye. called chrisis hotline 3 times. Been hit n run 5 times this year. went on 5 hotsshot! bombing runs to no avail. Went to harborview in shock and low blood pressure with 500 bite marks -told pressure sensitive allergies (BB bits always get prednezone steroid or pills to take home). Hospials know -don’t want liability, web md knows but don’t list diseaases because of corporate liability conspiracy(28 known pathogens+chagas and hep b) look up!. 50 yo freind sent to nw med center with bed bugs -changed and bagged clothes gave prednezone steroid and iv and sent home 3 days later with same bb infested clothes. Hospitals don’t care for sure treat people like scum. I know I was in intensive care with 7 broken ribs, broken scapula, bleeding splean and cut marks and never given shower 4 days I was there. Almost died. Patient next to me had mersa and I almost got it from toilet seat. I was pushed out of hospital on sunday with no chairty care agreement and no social worker help to live homeless in wht center in a toyota dolphin van. Scared and doped up in hos-told by young doc i would get pumonia and die if stayed 1 more day. Struggling. 1500 pages of records at 49 cents a page to much to file for disability. To much fraud Disability for me to get aid at 41 yo. I have contacted seattle solidrity to get help from being sued for 3 apts being spryed at 96th and aurrora. I hope I get approved for their support on vote on sun night. I am fighting for my happyness and well being here and that is all I am good person and I don’t deserve all this. I stood up against these critters and I am being crushed psycologically and physically from all of this and wanted my story out there. Sincerly -John V. vogtjohn@hotmail.com
I work at Penguin in NYC, we did NOT have a bedbug infestation in our offices. Apparently a couple of employees had infestations at home, they informed human resources, and management decided to spray as a prophylactic measure. We appreciated it, the last thing any of us need is to bring bedbugs home from work.
So the couple in the article went DIRECTLY to the Sorrento hotel from their bedbug-infested home? Um… maybe the Sorrento should look under their mattress(es).
Thanks, “not me”, for #93-#97, but I’m going to go ahead and update with the info I mentioned in #91 anyway.
FREEZING: I have not yet found an amount of time bedbugs CAN survive at -10 to -20 Fahrenheit. All bugs at 3, 2, 1 1/2, and 1/2 days died, totalling well over 50 bugs. I was concerned that in the time it took me to collect them some might have suffocated, distorting the results, so I caught three and immediately froze them for half an hour. They all died TOO.
This doesn’t mean you can just freeze stuff for half an hour and you’re home free. Your stuff takes time to cool off, and may include pockets of cold resistance where bugs might shelter. For the time being, I’m going to go with four days, but that’s because my room is cold and incubation times are longer, so I don’t have enough space bags to work any faster. I’ll probably end up at three days.
INCUBATION TIMES – Yes, room temperature matters. A LOT. It’s basically five days in the 90s, but over forty days in the 50s.
Several people did research on this in the 1930s. I’ve only been able to get access to real data from one of them, and those data turn out to have some mild problems too, but here they are. The author is C. G. Johnson; I cite the two source papers (neither of which is online open-access) at the end.
At 98.6 Fahrenheit, Johnson got no eggs to hatch.
At 95 Fahrenheit, 68 eggs hatched, with average time 4.56 days, standard deviation (sd) .73 days.
At 93.2 Fahrenheit, about 80 eggs hatched per humidity level tried, with average time 4.50 days, sd about .5 days.
At 86 Fahrenheit, about 45 eggs per humidity level, average 4.83 days, sd about .5 days.
At 81.5 Fahrenheit, about 92 eggs per humidity level, average 5.94 days, sd about .3 days.
At 73.4 Fahrenheit, about 100 eggs per humidity level (far more at 90% humidity than others), average 9.12 days, sd about 1 day, range 3 to 14 days.
At 64 Fahrenheit, about 100 eggs per humidity level (again, 90% led the pack), average 20.89 days, sd about 1 day.
At 61 Fahrenheit, about 175 eggs at other humidity levels but 341 at 90%, average 28.92 dayss, sd about 2.7 days.
At 57.2 Fahrenheit, 412 eggs at 90% (only humidity tried), average 40.66 days, sd 4.29 days, range 22-52 days.
At 55.6 Fahrenheit, 17 eggs at 90%, average 49.24 days, sd 4.19 days.
At 55.4 Fahrenheit, 1 egg each hatched at 74% and 90% humidity, and the egg at 90% took 39 days.
So. Um. As you can see from the 57.2 numbers, these standard deviations look dodgy. In a real normal curve, only one egg in 741 would take longer than the average plus three sds, and only one in 31,546 would take longer than the average plus four sds. The 57.2 range shows an egg taking longer than ave + 4 sd, and the 73.4 range shows one taking longer than ave + 3 sd. Obviously the curve isn’t normal, and longer incubation times are more common than they should be. Ouch.
Anyway. References:
“The ecology of the bed-bug, Cimex lectularius L., in Britain: Report on research, 1935-40”. C. G. Johnson. Pp. 345-461 (yes, over 100 pages) in Number 4 of Volume 41 of *The Journal of Hygiene*, December 1941. I read it online via JSTOR at a library that subscribes to JSTOR. The averages and ranges are in a chart on page 354. I wanted standard deviations, so I then went to the paper Johnson listed as giving the source data…
“Development, hatching and mortality of the eggs of Cimex lectularius L. (Hemiptera) in relation to climate, with observations on the effects of preconditioning to temperature”. C. G. Johnson. Pp. 127-173 of Number 2 of Volume 32 of *Parasitology*, June 1940. The humidity and standard deviation info I cited comes from a chart on page 132.
I skimmed more of this paper, and found other relevant facts. 1) Eggs can definitely still hatch after being brought as low as 32 Fahrenheit (0 Celsius). SO DON’T FREEZE BEFORE SEQUESTERING!!! 2) Relative humidity normally doesn’t matter. (I’m not sure whether the much higher hatching numbers at 90%, listed above, reflect an exception, or just that Johnson kept a lot more eggs at 90%.) 3) If you switch temperatures partway through incubation, it isn’t a matter of simple arithmetic to figure out when they’ll hatch. (So I’m sequestering my stuff based on the LOWEST temperature I find.)
I’ll go ahead and try the heat method once I locate a book I’m willing to use as a guinea pig, but for now, I’m sticking with freezing.
All for now…
DAMN! @98, it sounds like u have bigger problems then bedbugs…i feel sorry 4 u!
Out of curiousity, how did the bldg. apt. manager handle this situation? I’ve read the reviews, did it take a few days, weeks, is there still an issue? Or do they bear any responsibility at all?
Just curious
Love the bed bugs cartoon. It makes you wonder if that is what you will find when you zoom into any bed in America. Yuck!
Debbie
Bedbug.com
Great cartoon! Scary though.. makes me wonder if bed bugs are really in every mattress across the US if we were just to zoom in. Yuck!
Debbie
Bedbug.com
We’ve been unfortunate enough to have an infestation in our flat. We’ve tried all sorts of products and haven’t managed to eradicate all of them. Has anyone tried one of the fumers, like the ones seen here? Bed bug treatments – I’m curious as to how these work…
This is a fact of life, and they’re not going away. Unless you are very allergic and have a major infestation, trying to eradicate them entirely from your apartment is honestly not worth the effort and expense. Best figure out how to beat them back and live with it. Chances are a couple of your friends have them too.
If you catch it early enough (just a few bites and little other evidence) run to the store and get mattress and pillow covers immediately. Get some diatomaceous earth and some neem oil. The earth kills them and the neem is a strong, natural, and safe repellent. Use those tools to keep them at bay.
My apartment got (or possibly already had) bedbugs shortly after I moved in this past October. I live in a very stately old building with a lot of cracks in the floorboards and small spaces between the baseboards and the floors. This is where they hide. We had the building treated by exterminators twice and still they return, hiding in the floors and walls until the pesticide loses its strength. They are now a fact of life.
We don’t have house guests, because we don’t want to send them home with bugs. Any time we travel, all our luggage gets put through the dryer for two cycles on the highest setting. Our infestation is low-level enough that we’ve decided this is the best we can do without spending thousands of dollars and having nervous breakdowns.
To add to my previous comment, when I say low-level, I mean myself and my roommate have each had less than 10 bites total, ever. So I’m not exaggerating when I say that I think we’re doing pretty good.
My family found low level bed bug infestation only because my teenager was getting welts for a week, after 2 visits to MD,no answers, had to do our own research, found a few tiny bugs in mattress seams. I live in low income housing, with my children. I am disabled, Crohn’s, Celiac disease and many abdominal surgeries. Live in middle of townhouse type building,for many years. I did see recent next door neighbors coming in with all new mattresses few weeks before this. HMMM…I have severe chemical sensitivities, also.I immediately informed office of bugs. Exterminator came out, did not find any, but my son showed him one I had saved. Because of my pesticide allergies, I had to stay at hotels for few days, had to board my cat, and do this every couple of weeks for 3 times.All in all the costs were about $1,500, including mattress covers, laundry, etc.(2 months of income) They refused to treat adjoining apts, outlets, trash bin, etc.I can only hope and pray they will go away. Last time bug guy came we didn’t notice pesticide smell or anything moved, though, nor do we believe they did outlets as we requested. I think they are paranoid because of my allergies, plus they never return phone calls.
Like it isn’t bad enough, running around with no sleep for days trying to do 50 loads of laundry, and prepare for treatment,the apartment manager told me I would have to pay and if anyone else near me had them, I would have to pay for them too, or be in danger of being evicted. We later found out, this is not true, but still have nothing in writing, from owner’s,or HUD,etc. Their thoughtless behavior and arguing with them (they even called police on us)along with incompetent exterminator they hired has put us over the edge, plus with living out of bags for 6 weeks now, worried they are still here, wake up many times at night, with many health and financial problems now. BTW, the maintenance manager said some other tenants had them ,not near us, but we later got a letter from office stating we were the FIRST ones .Now the maintenance guy, who was my friend, won’t talk to me .Any comments?
Anyway, only one of my children showed welts.He has went to Grandmom’s for a month, afraid to come home. We have showed nothing on our skin.
These are the bugs from hell, and they ruin many facets of life. We are afraid to go anywhere, visits friends, or have anyone visit in the future. Think I got them from my friend,who is legally blind,( go figure), while taking care of her cat and bringing home her laundry to wash while she was in hospital (good deeds never go unpunished, I guess). Who knows? Coincidentally, while fleeing our house during extermination to get some rest at HER house, we found out she had them, too! What a nightmare!!- will never visit her house again, have to end relationship because of this, for the time being anyway. We are trying to keep the news from most of neighbors,just not sure how to be socially responsible about it all. This sucks!!!!! If I had money, I would pack us all up in the car and keep on driving….
Please note that the informational sites on bed bugs (and head lice) hosted by the Harvard School of Public Health have been updated and enhanced, but moved to: http://identify.us.com
The information continues to be offered without cost or commercial agenda. Identification resources are available at that site as well.
Please note that the informational sites on bed bugs (and head lice) hosted by the Harvard School of Public Health have been updated and enhanced, but moved to: http://identify.us.com
The information continues to be offered without cost or commercial agenda. Identification resources are available at that site as well.
Oh!bed bugs on my bed are is my nightmare. Bed bugs bites has given me lots of skin irritation and itchiness before. Good things I have read on how to get rid of bed bugs bites from here http://www.gettingridofbedbugs.com/.
I recently found out 1 of our rooms has bed bugs and possibly another.we live in a leased 6 bedroom,2 living room house and cant afford to pay much money out.this really has affected me mentaly and sympathize with anybody who has to go down this road.I unfortunetly got alot of our furniture used and don’t have much options to get different furniture.we opened this house trying to help people having trouble affording their own apt,now this.i feel so powerless and don’t know what to do.where can i get this stuff people mention about:DE and chinchilla?is it cheap.i have a fixed income wich is tiny and don’t know what to do next.i feel as though the people in the house deserve a solution (me too)yet finaces may hinder our progress.any info will help
Bed Bugs Rash and Bed Bug Bites problems are growing. Destronex .. Pls help…
I blame hippies , filthy , filthy hippies!
ROFLMAO … yeah, love how people try to blame the low income with the largest number of incidents are not in those buildings. I guess no matter how much people learn they will always seek to blame someone. Get over it, it’s a bug that likes blood, unless people want to give up the wanna-be green crap and start using real technology again, we’re stuck with them. I’ve been lucky, and I hope I’m lucky to be the last to deal with them.
I’ll bet the couple mentioned in the article lived at OT8 Apts since it’s right next door to the Sorento.
http://www.king5.com/news/local/Apartmen…
I’ll bet the couple that went over to the Sorento lived at the OT8 Apts…
Check out this story: http://www.king5.com/news/local/Apartmen…
Great article and very informative on Bedbugs. However, there is a way to keep from having an infestation in your business or home.
My company provides a 365 year round certification program that keeps your facility bedbug free by using a comprehensive Integrated Pest Solution. http://www.sniffk9s.com has certified hotels to be bedbug free. Because of the etimology of the bug regular monthly checks with a certified best practices dog will catch any infestation before it begins. The dogs have very strict standards to keep accurracy rates between 97% and 98%. Industry experts recently met and agree that highly trained technicians have only 20-30% accuracy of finding the bugs. If they do the infestation is very large and a significant problem of probably 100 bugs and up. The dogs can detect 1 bug. If your interested I am the owner of the Seattle location we will be launching the company here in a week. Please visit http://www.sniffk9s.com to see what others say about our business. We give a 100% gaurantee for eliminating infestations and keeping it that way if you get our 365 bedbug free certification
I agree with rubus Insecticide isn’t always effective because bedbugs live, among other place, inside the walls where the spray won’t get them. It’s also a bad idea to use sprays on or around your bed since it could be harmful to you also. Be careful in choosing your pesticides. – Mon
we got bugs summer 2010 at willowcrest apartrents, sound pest control came in and sprayed, we got them again in March, we moved in April. rAn into neighbor that moved to another apartment in same building August 2011 and they are still getting bit. nine apartments and they sprayed only two the bugs are all over this building and they do nothing
I’ve got them myself. It’s 5 am over here, and I can’t sleep because I’m too itchy and I can feel them crawling on me. Going to try some pesticides tomorrow. What fun.
I have had problems with bugs too. And I have found it difficult to get rid of them. They are a pest.
It took us 6 months to get rid of our bedbugs last year, but perhaps the first two months shouldn’t count because we thought they were mites at first. It was only after I found an actual bug and compared it to google image photos that I knew it was bedbugs. The way you can tell is that their bodies are very flat, unlike beetles, which have more rounded backs. After that, we kept having the apartment complex send over an exterminator every time we saw bugs or had a bite. If you have a couch, you need it sprayed directly on the inside if you can’t afford to junk it entirely.
They were good about that, but it’s necessary to do more. We couldn’t afford new beds or even mattress covers at the time, so I went to Home Depo and bought a giant roll of plastic sheeting and several rolls of duct tape. (I had to go back for more duct tape later – you really need to triple tape everything!) It was a lot of work but worth it!
You have to wash all bedding in hot water and then dry it TWICE every day. Wash all clothes in hot water.
And I also used the diatomaceous earth every place I thought they might be entering the apartment. If your place isn’t well caulked, you should do some caulking as well.
And never, ever get used furniture unless it’s entirely hard wood or metal (with NO soft parts) and you inspect it thoroughly beforehand. I think second hand clothing is also a bad idea.
For anyone looking to get rid of bed bugs here is a resource that you might find useful:
http://r.evie.ws/view-review/eliminate-b…