Unsettling news from Knowable Magazine:
The stories have become horribly familiar. Houses so overrun by bed bugs that the bloodsucking insects pile an inch deep on the floor. An airport shutting down gates for deep cleaning after the parasites were spotted brazenly crawling around. Fear and loathing during Fashion Week 2023 in Paris, with bed bug detection dogs working overtime when the insects turned up in movie theaters and trains.For reasons that almost certainly have to do with global travel and poor pest management, bed bugs have resurfaced with a vengeance in 50 countries since the late 1990s. But recently, the resurgence has brought an added twist. When exterminators swarm out to hunt these pests, they might encounter not just one but two different kinds of bugs.Besides the common bed bug, Cimex lectularius, which has always made its home in the Northern Hemisphere, there are now sightings of its cousin, the tropical bed bug, Cimex hemipterus, in temperate regions. Traditionally, this species didn’t venture that far from the equator, write entomologists Stephen Doggett and Chow-Yang Lee in the 2023 issue of the Annual Review of Entomology. But in recent years, tropical bed bugs have turned up in the United States, Sweden, Italy, Norway, Finland, China, Japan, France, Central Europe, Spain — “even in Russia, which would have once been unthinkable,” says Lee, of the University of California, Riverside.Like the common bed bug, the tropical version has grown resistant to many standard pesticides — to the point that some experts say they wouldn’t bother spraying should their own home become infested. It has been estimated that the fight against bed bugs is costing the United States alone $1 billion annually.
Lots more information at the longread link, including this final recommendation:
If bed bugs do invade a home, “the biggest mistake is to try and get rid of them on one’s own,” says Doggett. “The average person doesn’t appreciate how challenging it is to control bed bugs and will use supermarket insecticides that are labeled for bed bugs but don’t work. The infestation will spread, and the costs escalate.”
Like many things, aspects of this get overhyped. But one take-away, it's not pesticides but heat that will kill all life stages of a bedbug.
ReplyDeleteI had them in my small apartment, and the exterminators came twice. Both times when I came home there were more crawling around than before! I got a large clothes steamer and would go over all places I'd seen them... it took a while, but eventually I won. They can become resistant to chemicals, but they can't survive steam!
ReplyDeleteI had a two year running battle with them a few years back. I'd take great pains and get rid of them, but in a few months they would come back. I think they were roving, like buffalo on the great plains, through the apartment building. Finally got shed of them for good when I moved and had almost all of my stuff in storage for a year.
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