The Man Who Lets the Bedbugs Bite
Around 1989, someone brought in our first bed bug. Most entomologists had never seen a live infestation before. Now, infestations may be approaching the levels of 50 years ago, before DDT was used.
Some of the chemicals used now appear to have similarities to DDT, but bed bugs have developed ways of bypassing the toxicity. Some bugs were recently collected here in New York, and a journal article reported that they were 300 times more resistant than other bed bugs to one of the common insecticides.
That’s why pest control companies do all sorts of things besides using chemicals: heating, freezing, steaming, vacuuming. The hardest part of controlling bed bugs is finding them. Most of the literature out there talks about a quarter-inch-long reddish-brown insect, but a bed bug is a millimeter long when it’s born, about the thickness of a credit card.
I now have two bed bug colonies. They both come from a population that was collected in 1971 in Fort Dix, N.J. The collector, an Army entomologist, was supplying them to researchers. The colonies live in jars. I feed them about once a month. I invert the jars on my arm and the bugs feed through the screening. It doesn’t hurt. The swelling goes down in an hour or two.
Read full article here: The Voice – The Man Who Lets the Bedbugs Bite – NYTimes.com.
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