Bug-Affairs
Hugh Pennington

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Bedbugs never went away. DDT gave them a hard time in the 1940s and for years afterwards, until Rachel Carson’s campaigns outlawed it, but resistant strains survived. Other insecticides – synthetic organophosphates and pyrethroids – have come and gone, but none has been a challenge for the bugs’ versatile genomes. Blood is their only food. The bug explores the skin of its victim with its antennae. It grips the skin with its legs for leverage, raises its beak, and plunges it into the tissues. It probes vigorously, tiny teeth at the tip of the beak tearing the tissues to forge a path until it finds a suitable blood vessel. A full meal takes 10 to 15 minutes. A hungry bug is squat and flat like a lentil. When replete, its distension shapes it like a long berry. A bug will feed weekly from any host that is handy.

Bedbugs do not spread disease. Their presence has been taken as an indicator of poor home hygiene, and they can be a precipitant of entomophobia, but beyond that they haven’t had much significance for public health. Nobody counts them or keeps national records of infestation rates. There are hardly any 20th-century baseline measures that might enable us to assess the accuracy of claims that there has been an upsurge in the 21st. Anecdote has driven the perception that the bugs have gone on the rampage, and epidemiologists are reluctant to put much weight on stories. But the recent ones have been very persuasive. In New York in 2010 bedbugs turned up in the Empire State Building, a theatre in the Lincoln Center, and at the Metropolitan Opera House. It is said that they were in attendance at the 2005 Labour Party Conference in Brighton, and in 2006 they were found in a guest room at the five-star Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park Hotel in Knightsbridge. Analyses shows that the number of bedbug calls to pest controllers in London and Australia has increased significantly since 2000.

Why the resurgence? The bugs’ resistance to insecticides has been blamed, along with the increase in international travel and in the sale of second-hand furniture. Genetic fingerprinting of the bugs might shed light on the comparative importance of movement from city to city, travel across national boundaries and purely local spread; but such studies have only just started. In truth our understanding of how bedbugs get about has changed little since 1730, when John Southall published his Treatise of Buggs:

By Shipping they were doubtless first brought to England, so are they now daily brought. This to me is apparent, because not one Sea-Port in England is free; whereas in Inland-Towns, Buggs are hardly known … If you have occasion to change Servants, let their Boxes, Trunks, &c. be well examin’d before carried into your Rooms, lest their coming from infected Houses should prove dangerous to yours … Upholsterers are often blamed in Bugg-Affairs; the only Fault I can lay to their Charge, is their Folly, or rather Inadvertency, in suffering old Furniture, when they have taken it down, because it was buggy, to be brought into their Shops or Houses, among new and free Furniture, to infect them.

Southall’s worries about the role of ships in transporting bedbugs persisted. Robert Usinger, the author of the monumental Monograph of Cimicidae (the family to which the bedbug belongs), saw a thriving colony of the tropical bedbug, Cimex hemipterus, on a liner sailing from Hong Kong to San Francisco. But local transport is just as much of a problem. In 1944, Usinger was bitten by the common bug, Cimex lectularius, on a bus in Atlanta, Georgia. And in the summer of 1947 a number of ladies in Dundee were referred to the local dermatologist because they had developed a red band studded with blisters, some described as being ‘as big as a pigeon’s egg’, on the backs of their calves. All of them had travelled on the lower deck of a tram on the same route. Investigation showed that only one tram was infested. The bugs had settled in a groove in a wooden slat that held a seat in place. They sat in a row on the edge of the wood, the dermatologist said, ‘extracting nourishment from the legs of unsuspecting lady passengers. Men were never affected, their stouter nether garments providing sufficient protection. The tram was disinfected, the grooves were planed out … the epidemic came to an end.’

In 2008, bugs were found on the New York subway, on wooden benches on station platforms at Hoyt-Schermerhorn in Brooklyn, Union Square in Manhattan and Fordham Road in the Bronx, and in 2010 in a booth at Ninth Street Station on the D Line. ‘If you put out your Linnen to wash,’ Southall said, ‘let no Washer-woman’s Basket be brought into your houses; for they often prove as dangerous to those that have no Buggs.’ The Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service has found bedbugs at airports in woven cane baskets and woven straw bags – as well as on roses from Kenya, in baggage from Europe, and on an airport inspection bench.

So it is clear that bedbugs can hitch-hike long distances and ride about town. But how good they are at very local travel remains undetermined. Urban myths have been around for a long time. ‘Bedbugs are popularly credited with an amazing amount of intelligence,’ observed the British Ministry of Health’s ‘Report on the Bedbug’ in 1934. ‘It is stated that they will travel long distances, 50 yards or more, in search of food, will unerringly choose the direction in which their food is to be found, will go by way of windows, eaves and gutters if unable to get through the party wall, and will drop from the ceiling onto their victims. We are not prepared to say how much of this may be due to popular superstition.’ The report was produced because ‘the infestation of new council houses has become a matter of concern to Local Authorities who are responsible for their maintenance and management.’ Whether bugs became common in these council houses is not clear; it is certain, however, that the current upsurge in bedbug numbers cannot be blamed on an increase in social housing stock.

Absorbingly more at: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n01/hugh-pennington/bug-affairs

do they make good pets?

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"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

Roy ( whunter) had a thread about the spread of them back a while ago. Nasty little things!

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Grumpy Old Diesel Owners Club group

I no longer question authority, I annoy authority. More effect, less effort....

1967 230-6 auto parts car. rust bucket.
1980 300D now parts car 800k miles
1984 300D 500k miles
1987 250td 160k miles English import
2001 jeep turbo diesel 130k miles
1998 jeep tdi ~ followed me home. Needs a turbo.
1968 Ford F750 truck. 6-354 diesel conversion.
Other toys ~J.D.,Cat & GM ~ mainly earth moving

Big bedbug conference in Denver this week. Lots of infestations nowadays. I picked some up from a hotel in Atlanta. Took serious vigilance to get rid of them. Their ability to live for a long time without a meal and their rate of reproduction requires a quick response. They're training bedbug sniffing dogs.

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1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

Did they only talk about big bedbugs?

They did have a short session on small bedbugs.

Either heard or read an interview with a bedbug expert recently. He said when he stays in hotels he puts all his clothing in giant ziplock bags and always keeps his luggage in the bathroom with the door shut.

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1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

As someone who spends about 150-200 nights per year in hotels, I'm not that worried. The fact that we actually have "bedbug experts" tells me that we have to much free time on our hands.

Kerry, you ruined my day.

Damn.

????

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1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

When we had them, I noticed a distinctive behavior. We have a cathedral ceiling in our bedroom. Once a bug bit one of us and was full, it would crawl way up the wall and nestle at the line where the ceiling and wall meet. It was about 17 or 18' in the air so I bought a long piece of pvc pipe and hooked it up to the shopvac so I could suck them up. I'd then spray insecticide in the shopvac.

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1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

A true do-it-yourself'er.

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Paul S.

2001 E430, Bourdeaux Red, Oyster interior.
79,200 miles.

1973 280SE 4.5, 170,000 miles. 568 Signal Red, Black MB Tex. "The Red Baron".

Bagging my clothes and storing them in the bathroom! My usual lifestyle is to "store" clothes in a single layer across the floor.

Hey Bot, do you ever smoke any of the plants that you grow?

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For the Saved, this world is the worst it will ever get.
For the unSaved, this world is the best it will ever get.

Clk's Ebay Stuff BUY SOMETHING NOW!!!

Not in nearly 40 years. This past couple of years I have seriously begun to consider growing tobacco and selling tobacco without paying taxes, when I retire. My current job puts me at the mercy of lie detectors and urine and blood tests without warning so I stay away from illegal substances and from people who use them. I haven't yet actually been tested, but it goes with the work I do.

Bottom line: I like the toys and this is the price I pay. No regrets. But when I retire I'm going to be, The Dudester!

With each bedbug, you get the 3 bites in a line known as "breakfast, lunch and dinner".

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01 Ford Excursion Powerstroke
99 E300 Turbodiesel
91 Vette with 383 motor
05 Polaris Sportsman 800 EFI
06 Polaris Sportsman 500 EFI
03 SeaDoo GTX SC Red
03 SeaDoo GTX SC Yellow
04 Tailgator 21 ft Toy Hauler
11 Harley Davidson 883 SuperLow