Bed bugs are taking over

POET not “port” ! 🍷

Meryl your post reminds me of my favourite Pam Ayres poem -

My mother had a Flit Gun
It was not devoid of charm
A bit of Flit shot out of it
The rest shot up 'er arm

Boom Boom

karmalady

I expect they are a lot smaller before they have a meal

This is really horrible but that did make me laugh, karmalady.

My friend said years ago that she used to spray their bed with insecticide every few months and was surprised that I'd never heard of this.

But if they've become resistant to insecticides what now?

Just in case some people think that bedbugs are caused by dirty homes, they’re not. They just love human blood.
I suppose you could call the the insect community vampire 😂

www.bedbugsinsider.com/are-bed-bugs-caused-by-poor-hygiene-and-uncleanliness/

RosiesMaw Of course the DM love to whip up a panic about anything, but they haven't made up the panic about bed bugs. These are pictures, videos and comments that London travellers have posted.

I agree their main page is usually awful, but if you scratch beneath the surface there are some fascinating and beautiful articles about people and places (in their Science or Travel sections). They have also run some very worthwhile campaigns (i.e. pornography campaign) so they're not all bad.

Is it to do with the weather getting warmer accompanied by the humidity of rain... might be a perfect breeding ground?

RosiesMaw

Trust the DM to help whip up a panic.
Keeping what other news off the front pages I wonder? The Labour Party conference perhaps ?
( Unworthy thought Maw )

I recently heard the port Brian Bilston read this one of his poems

I would rather
eat Quavers that are six week’s stale,
blow dry the hair of Gareth Bale,
listen to the songs of Jimmy Nail,
than read one page of the Daily Mail.

If I were bored
in a waiting room in Perivale,
on a twelve hour trip on British rail
or a world circumnavigational sail,
I would not read the Daily Mail.

I would happily read
the complete works of Peter Mayle,
the autobiography of Dan Quayle,
selected scripts from Emmerdale,
but I couldn’t ever read the Daily Mail.

Far better to
stand outside in a storm of hail,
be blown out to sea in a powerful gale
then swallowed by a humpback whale
than have to read the Daily Mail.

Even if
I were blind
and it was the only thing
in Braille,
I still would not read
the Daily Mail.

Not a fan then? 😂😂😂

In 2016, the National Institute for Health was reporting that the global population of bed bugs was increasing by 100%-500% a year, largely driven by the global travel industry.

Bed bugs neither fly not jump. They can only crawl from one source of blood to another. Females need a supply of blood before they lay eggs.

One of the most common hiding places is said to be behind the fixed headboards in hotel rooms.

NIH report that bed bugs carry 45 or more disease pathogens but that no published study has demonstrated a causal relationship between bed bugs and infectious disease transmission in humans.

Bed bugs are thought to date back millenia when man shared caves with bats. We know that some of the most dangerous viruses in recent years have transmitted from bats into the human food chain possibly through cross pathogens so it doesn’t seem out of the question that bed bugs might, one day, be responsible for something similar.

I suspect this currently plague is a result of the period of lockdown followed by a subsequent surge in travel. Bed bugs go into full or semi hibernation, allowing them to survive even without a blood feed for more than 6 months. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that they are capable of increasing their egg-laying after a period of “drought” so that two years on from when travel restrictions were lifted, this is the result, aided by very warm weather conditions.

10 yrs ago the first night of an Africa trip l saw 2 women near the pool, their legs were covered in bites. Expecting insect problem I had taken a large can of insecticide, and sprayed the bed thoroughly before dinner. It was fine afterwards, I did need it later in the trip for flying insects.

Caravansera We also have millions of people arriving from all sorts of places across the world, both legally and illegally, carrying goodness knows what with them. In London some of them are living in very cramped conditions, working day and night and sleeping in shifts in the same beds. The bed bugs can move around quite freely.

Wash anything that can stand it at 90 degrees rather than 60, as I suspect bed-bugs like body and hair lice can survive a 60 degree wash cycle quite happily.

The real problem here is what to do with your mattresses!

I don't think hoovering them will be enough and honestly we cannot afford to buy new mattresses all the time, can we?

Fitted carpets probably habour these beasts too and upholstered furniture certainly does.

So prevention is better than a cure here. I think the only thing that works is a return to our grandmothers' standards of house-cleaning.

All floors washed in hot soapy water regúlarly, Clothes and bed linen washed in as hot water as possible. Anything that cannot be washed, sent to the dry cleaners regularly or discarded and furniture and mattresses hoovered and the mattress turned if possible once a month.

Taking a bath or shower as soon as you come home from a journey is a sensible precaution as is unpacking and washing clothes as soon as possible.

I read that the smell of lavender helps to deter them. That scent disrupts something in their senses( can't remember exactly what, sorry) and so they can't find each other. I will be looking for lavender sachets for the bedroom and wardrobes.

Bed bugs , fleas and other parasites have been with us since time immemorial.
We managed to get on top of infestations using DDT. This has now been banned ( quite rightly) so all the nasty little critters are on the rise.
Their presence is often nothing to do with dirt. Bed bugs are very good at finding human hosts. They don't jump though.
They are about the size of a grain of rice so can easily be seen and you can also see the blood spots they leave behind.
They don't usually spread disease but the bites , for those unfortunates like me who react badly, are intensly itchy . Not everyone reacts though.
I think it's probably something we are going to have to learn to live with again, just like all our forefathers.
An unpleasant thought but I think it's our future.

I remember staying at my boyfriends house in the 70s, I woke in the morning covered in red raised lumps with a red spot in the middle, it was agony and itched like crazy, my boyfriend took me to A & E and I was told they were bed bug bites!!!! talk about being horrified. We checked the bed in the dark and using torches and the bed was crawling with them
We got rid of all his bedding and burnt the mattress and washed the base and bed legs with Parrafin , which my nan recommended.

I never slept there again and got no more bites..yuck yuck...

Chestnut

Caravansera We also have millions of people arriving from all sorts of places across the world, both legally and illegally, carrying goodness knows what with them. In London some of them are living in very cramped conditions, working day and night and sleeping in shifts in the same beds. The bed bugs can move around quite freely.

The Latin name is Cimicidae Lectularis.

Cimicidae is a parasitic bug that feeds on the blood of animals. Lectularis means of the bed or couch. It’s a bit of a misnomer. It just means that they are nocturnal creatures and prefer to feed in the dark when the host is more likely to be sleeping. That could be any animal not just humans and could just as easily happen in a cave or a stable or a sleeping car on a train or when the lights are turned down on a plane.

So long as they have one host to drink blood from, the females will keep laying eggs until they hibernate and eventually die. Close living conditions and shared bedding have little to do with it.

As I said upthread, the most common place to hide is behind the headboard of a bed. A bug will come out in the dark, feed and find cover. It could be in a travel bag, up the sleeve of a jacket or the leg of a pair of trousers where it will hitch a ride to a new location.

Mass tourism is the main culprit so that the bugs can travel from place to place just as mass tourism was partially responsible for the initial spread of Covid from country to country.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_on_cruise_ships

@WhitewaveMark2

The L-Shaped Room

Mirran
I’m not a forefather but I live with them on and off for 16 years. That ended in 1962 when we moved into a new house.
If anyone does get an infestation check your clothes and bag before you leave the house. You get used to it 😉

Yes, WWM, I’ve always remembered that scene from the L-Shaped Room. Keep a torch & a wet bar of soap near the bed, it might work as well as anything else?

I watched some videos on YouTube, said to steam clean beds & carpets, plus spray with diatomaceous earth, especially around skirtings & bed legs is best. They are becoming immune to insecticides. I would die if I ever got those in my home! Bad enough seeing carpet beetles every now & then (diatomaceous earth good for those critters as well). First thing I do on holiday is put my case in the bathroom & check the corners of the mattress.. luckily never seen any so far.. off to London next month & already nervous in case we pick any up 😩

Oh & the video did show those trays that are supposed to attract them don’t work, all the bugs were in the opposite corner 😩so I wouldn’t waste your money.. good old fashioned cleaning is the way to notice if you have them or not.

Message deleted by Gransnet. Here's a link to our Talk guidelines.

There has been advice to boil your bed linen,

If the bugs are in your mattress surely they will just climb back onto your just boiled sheets,
so is there any point to boil your bed linen?

Just been reading about dust mites, and apparently there are about a million of those in your mattress. I wonder how they get on with the bed bugs. It says high frequency sound can disrupt the reproductive cycles, using an ultrasonic dust mite controller which is inaudible to humans and make them move out!

London is NOT “crawling with bedbugs”
They are NOT “taking over”
Could we have a little less hysteria and a little more perspective?
If “panic is spreading” I haven’t been aware of it. And how does panic spread anyway ? Social media, gutter press, word of mouth have a lot to answer for.
Remember Henny Penny?

One day Henny Penny is pecking corn in the farmyard when – whack! An acorn falls on her head. She believes that the sky is falling and decides to go and tell the King. On her way to the King she meets many animal friends like Cocky-Locky, Ducky-Lucky, Goosey-Loosey and Turkey-Lurkey. Then Foxy-Loxy offers to show them a short route to the King and one-by-one they head underground
This English version of the famous story started as an oral folktale. The earliest example of the basic story is twenty-five centuries old and found in India in the Jataka Tales where a hare spreads panic after a fruit falls on him, teaching that everyone needs to think for themselves

I agree. One bug spotted on a man's trouser leg on the Tube extrapolated into London is crawling with them.