I live outside of NYC and assume I got them from the bus. I’ve seen them on the bus, anyway.
It got bad before I realized. I did my research— bought the bed covers, put everything near the bed in clear plastic bags, and bought a steam cleaner.
The bugs infest your bed, reproduce, and spread out. To get rid of them you do the reverse—kill them on the bed with steam. Wait a day or two for the commuters to repopulate the bedding, repeat.
Most important thing is don’t panic. If you panic, throw out your bed, then you will prolly end up dragging your bed through your home and spread the bugs everywhere.
A year later I was volunteering at a community program teaching adults to use computers. The topic of bed bugs came up. A person said the Cedarcide product was absolutely the best product. I’m adverse to using any poison on or near my bed, so I gave it a try—it’s just cedar oil.
Well, I tried it and shared the product with my neighbors. I didn’t see any direct effect on the bugs. What I did realize was the smell of the product is distinct (and pleasant). Living in an apartment building, when you smell the product, you know someone has the problem and you can catch an infestation early. This is key.
Also, once you find and deal with the issue, best to continue to check your bedding twice a week. I found spring through to early summer is the worst. If you can get past that time, and you know your neighbors are clear, then you’re good. But as long as your neighbors have a problem, then you too have a problem.
There is a lot of irrational shame when people have the bugs. They deny and deny, so communication is key—even if it’s coded communication as the smell of whatever spray people use to treat and kill the bugs, or empty bug spray cans.
Bedbugs have no correlation with filth. They're not flies or cockroaches, they don't live off your waste. They live off you.
All it takes to start a bedbug infestation is for a female bedbug to crawl on someone, in their clothes or bag, and then fall off in a new place and start laying eggs. It can happen in the cleanest spaces in the world. They're highly resistant to insecticides and they hide in cracks barely wide enough to slide a strip of paper, so even a thorough washing and vacuuming won't remove them.
Public bus, air plane seats, delivery packages, hotel rooms, even your office chairs. You will be surprised how common they are and how easily you could get them. Often there is only one thing standing between you and them- Luck. One wrong move and it could be over.
Everything has an ecosystem living on it. Are you sure your laptop is any cleaner than the toilet seat? How long has it been since you disinfected its surface with alcohol, bleach, or citric acid?
The toilet always gets brought up in these conversations. For example, the toilet in almost every restaurant is substantially cleaner than any surface you eat on. It's made of ceramic and doused in bleach (and other cleaners) on a regular basis, so it comes as no surprise that it is cleaner.
Comparing to the toilet is a fallacy because of this and the fact that no one I know defecates on their laptop.
The toilet is actually a very good example that illustrates the importance of easily cleanable surfaces. It doesn't matter if you poop on it every day as long as it can be doused in bleach from time to time! Can't say the same for a MacBook Pro. (By the way, one usually poops in the toilet bowl, not on the toilet seat...)
We won't get cleaner buses by magically wishing all the passengers to have better hygiene. The answer is to cover all internal surfaces with non-porous, corrosion-resistant, easily cleanable materials and to eliminate nooks and crannies where dirt can accumulate. Ideally, you should be able to hose down all the seats of a bus after a day's service.
> We won't get cleaner buses by magically wishing all the passengers to have better hygiene.
Isn't wearing different clothes indoor and outdoor the actual solution? We can't expect public spaces leave alone the public transport to be sterile or sparkling clean even in paragons of hygiene such as Singapore. Getting changed into something that one wears at home and at home only and putting outdoor clothes away seems like a simple thing to do and eradicates a whole class of hygiene related issues.
Yes but also stop using plastic bevause it requires oil extraction which causes climate change that will doom us all within a generation or three, and also don't use metal because that feeds the military industrial complex and/or supports child labor or slavery or other exploitative conditions.
Yep, washable vehicles are perfectly feasible. All police cars in my city have washable rear seats and a drain hole on the floor. If whoever they detain in the rear seat contaminates it with blood, vomit or covid-laden drivel, they can just hose down the whole area.
It’s cleaner on average. But boy is it extremely variable whereas my table is dirtier on average but never has spikes drastically worse than average. Not to mention people eat off plates, not off the table itself directly.
Fly paper on bed posts and pull the bed away from the wall. This’ll let you get a good nights sleep while you engage all the additional preemptive measures you point out.
Its a precaution for when you turn the bed into a safe zone, they don't re-infest the bed (provided you are being super careful about what you're putting on your bed).
I'd imagine the vast majority of most people on HN already watch Mark Rober, never the less- in case you missed it, he did a fun video on bed bugs last month:
The package thief videos are great from the engineering perspective, but always make me feel kind of bad. One of the things I find most distressing in that series is the kids who show up in the videos, participating in theft at the behest of their parents. Some of the conversations between those kids and their parents are extremely sad.
And look - steal a package off a porch, you deserve the ultimately harmless annoyance for sure. But even with that in mind, there's something kind of cruel about the level of effort that's put into the package traps. Once you've found a target that no one will defend, it's just fine to douse them in fart spray and glitter. People cheer because, well, fuck thieves, right?
I get it - I really do. But ultimately, it's fun at the expense of other humans and those videos have always left me feeling a bit gross.
I agree that it's ultimately harmless, and well-deserved, for the thief in question. I find it sad that there are often children involved, but if any good comes of that, it may be that some kids will learn a lifelong lesson about the results of the behavior their parents are encouraging.
Still, as I said - it's the level of effort put into the punishment machines, and the extraction of entertainment value from the punishments, that gives me the odd feeling that something about these videos might cross a moral line.
To each their own, I'm not trying to discourage anyone from watching and enjoying the videos. For me personally, they give me more heartache than joy, so I stick to his other videos - despite the rampant exploitation of innocent squirrels ;)
If there's any good that's coming from these videos and traps, I would hope that it's teaching the children involved a valuable lesson about the results of being a shitheel thief.
However, I am somewhat skeptical that this is the case. The odds of encountering a stunningly well engineered annoyance device when stealing are still pretty low, and while thieves aren't known for their competence with statistics, I think that logic is fairly low-hanging fruit.
With sadness, I have to imagine that for every case of a kid or thief being converted to the path of goodness by these boxes, there are just as many who will angrily continue what they're doing as a "fuck you" to those who would impose punishment on them - which seems to be a large part of the ethos that drives these kinds of thefts in the first place.
Maybe I'm not in the vast majority of readers here, but I absolutely cannot stand YouTube videos where the creator goes out of their way to be extra corny and silly. Just make the damn video without trying to be funny. Interesting topic, but I couldn't make it more than a minute in the video without being annoyed. Id much prefer a dry scientific paper about bed bugs than sitting thru that.
Mark Rober is easily one of the most popular science/engineering channels on Youtube. I find the corniness a bit irritating and lacking in detail, but he gets tens of millions of views so he’s doing something right. I get the impression that his audience skews young, so that probably explains why it’s not as interesting to technically inclined adults.
I try not to complain about the content because much of it is genuinely pretty impressive from a technical perspective. I would be unsurprised to see technical leaders ten years from now citing him as an inspiration though
I watched a video where he made a robotic football punter, which was interesting. But then he trash talked a real-life football punter, which offended me. I get that it was a joke, but I saw something there I cannot unsee and I generally skip his content.
I do make time to watch his anti porch pirate videos though. Those are really interesting, despite all of the insecure shouting energy.
His Indian scam center sting videos were honestly some of the most impressive content I've seen on the platform.
Definitely worth a watch if you're interested in seeing scammers who ruin people's lives getting tracked across continents for a bold counteroffensive campaign.
It was like a real life version of the movie Taken, but with believable action.
I like Mark's content but it's not going to appeal to everyone. I'm glad we live in a time when we have so many options for entertainment and can so easily pick and choose.
Using popularity as an argument for the quality of content isn't so useful. Quantity is often antithetical to quality. Look at YouTube front page when signed out, most of it is garbage.
The dude is genuinely smart. When it comes time to dive deeply into a technical topic, though, he never really puts in the main channel videos because he knows he's going to lose 90% of his audience at that point.
No it means he knows his audience. He does broadly interesting projects, but doesn’t lose them in technical detail. For many people it’s mindless entertainment, but for some it will inspire them to look more deeply. Then, as you know, there are other info sources with more detail.
There many axes to quality. Technical detail is just one.
Well, quantity vs. quality I guess. "Mostpopular", "tens of millions of views", "audience skews young". Thanks for sparing me the time of trying to sub him...
I watched this one. The content seems solid and he’s clearly talking to bed bug experts. I thought it was pretty well done. I guess for my tastes not that annoying (though his videos could be a tad shorter)
The fact he gets bugs hiding in his shoe soles was pretty interesting.
Fair enough! Like the other comment said, I think his stuff is aimed at teens and kids. Personally I'm happy to look past his pop style as his content quality is usually really high.
Then he's not the channel for you. There's plenty of fun science/engineering channels, and there's plenty of dry channels. Just take your pick what you like
FWIW, diatomaceous earth works just fine against bed bugs. Cover the surface of basically everything in your home (the mattress, the floor, under the bed, the bed frame, headboard, box spring, baseboards, on top of and under carpets, drapes, whatever) in diatomaceous earth powder. Leave for 12-24 hours. Vaccum it up. That's it! You'll want to wear a respirator to keep from breathing it in (it's non-toxic but may irritate your lungs).
Borax is also effective, though it may need to be wet first and may take longer to work. Diatomaceous earth doesn't work if wet.
If you leave, the bugs will stay safe wherever they are since there won't be any host to attract them. And the eggs are most likely in tiny hole and won't be affected by the diatomaceous earth. Maybe it'll help to reduce the colony, but I'm skeptical it'll solve the problem.
Yeah, I was always worried about getting some kind of silicosis.
From[1]:
> A very small amount of crystalline diatomaceous earth may be found in pesticide products. Long-term inhalation of the crystalline form is associated with silicosis, chronic bronchitis, and other respiratory problems. The bulk of diatomaceous earth is amorphous, not crystalline. The amorphous form is only associated with mild, reversible lung inflammation.
>>Do you really want a respiratory irritant on your mattress?
Once you have a bed bug infestation, your mattress is pretty much gone anyway. You have to replace it, or risk living through the nightmare in only weeks after this.
You can buy anti-allergy zippered mattress enclosures that are supposedly impermeable to bedbugs. If they’re made well, they will be permeable to air and a lot more comfortable than a plastic bag.
One thing to note with diatomaceous earth is it works best with an even dusting. You don't want to just spread clumps. Many but not all bags come with a little device for spraying it as a nice fine dust.
Give the bugs another dose of poison next week, after they've begun crawling out of their eggs but before they've had a chance to reproduce. Repeat a few times and you'll definitely begin to see progress.
It's a long game. We're in the middle of it. Daily vacuuming, steam treatments, diatomaceous earth spray, and commercial exterminators have all been used. I think we're starting to see progress.
Perhaps that is true. We've not been on vacation since the trip that brought them home with us. We're not going to stay in anymore small town hotels anymore.
The funny thing is Ed Sheeran was at the same place a few weeks after our visit.
I believe they take 2 weeks to reach maturity (when they can lay eggs), so if you treat every week you should get them all after a few cycles. Not easy, but doable.
Borax also works really well against ants. I had a terrible infestation, and put it all around where they were coming inside. It must have wiped them out at the source when they brought it back to the nest, because I never saw them again, even outside.
I actually wonder how people manage to get rid of these bugs, and why they aren't more spread considering how resilient they are. It's so hard to get rid of them that they should be literally everywhere.
I moved to an apt in NYC that had bedbugs. Probably not that many because I cleaned the place inside out so many times and I could rarely spot one. Eventually, I called an exterminator but the bugs were back a couple of months later. I eventually left this place. I'm super paranoid since then.
My brother, ever the cheapskate, decided to buy a used couch. I guess you know where this is going...
The $500 or so he saved didn't come close to the cost of full apartment treatments, the headaches, and being basically outcast by the family for a month.
Protip: Unless you're really hard up, don't buy a used couch or mattress. And if you have to, figure out a way to deep cleanse it first.
The bugs themselves are really easy to kill! Spray them with rubbing alcohol and they're dead. They walk over diatomaceous earth and they're toast. Reach 115 degrees for 30 seconds and they're done. But yes, infestations can be resilient because they scram at the first sign of trouble and hide really well if they're forced to live somewhere other than your mattress/box spring/bed frame. They will hide in electrical outlets, clothes, cracks in trim, in furniture, under carpets, move to different apartments, etc. However, they need a reason to leave your bed-- e.g. the mattress is too crowded with other bugs, has been treated with insecticide, etc.
The situation you had in your apartment would never have gotten better. Without treating the whole building, spraying insecticide will just push them into adjacent apartments. Many jurisdictions distinguish between infestations local to one dwelling to be handled by the tenant and infestations that are building-wide which landlords have to treat. If they just keep pushing them around, they never have to shell out for a building-wide treatment and they always look like a hero because technically they didn't even have to pay to get your apartment treated.
Step 1 is to clean every tiny little crevice of your bed frame, bedding, box spring, and mattress and if possible, get a mattress bag.
Step 2 is to put bed bug traps under each leg of your bed-- they can't jump or fly, only climb.
Step 3 is to make sure no part of your bed or bedding is touching the wall or floor.
Step 4 sprinkle diatomaceous earth around the base of your bed and the edges of your room.
That's actually enough to stop you from getting bit right there and if your infestation is really minor, is probably enough to entirely eradicate it. Unfortunately, they can go 70 days without feeding, so you'd need to keep that diligence up for quite some time. That's why a proper extermination will be building-wide and happen at least twice with the second treatment being after the eggs should have hatched. The best method, IMO, is tenting the building and heating it to 115 degrees for a few days. Not cheap, though, and obviously very disruptive.
Diatomaceous earth seems to bother/deter them, but it really doesn't kill them very quickly.
During an infestation about five years ago, I was curious if what I'd bought and sprinkled everywhere was any use at all, so I captured a bug in a glass and absolutely covered it.
It continued wandering around in there for 4 more days.
But I agree with a lot of the rest of what you're saying :)
Also:
- double sided carpet tape is difficult, if not impossible for them to cross, so wrapping it around the leg of a chair or bed in addition to a trap can be a big help
- you can measure the heat of a dryer with an instant thermometer by putting a few towels in the dryer and pulling them out right at the peak, before the cool cycle at the end, and tossing the thermometer right into the middle of them. Most dryers are suitably hot, but you should check before relying on it -- you should look up the temperature needed to ensure the eggs are destroyed, and always do a dryer run without washing first, so the heat applies directly and isn't just evaporating water! But after all that: lots and lots of stuff can be put in the dryer, and tied off safely afterwards in bags / taken away from a place it can be reinfested.
- putting books or electronics in an oven, even set very low, is usually a bad idea.
> It continued wandering around in there for 4 more days.
For a bedbug, dying in 4 days is quick! They can live for up to a year or more normally. I think you'd normally want to combine a steam treatment to kill the bulk of them with diatomaceous earth to mop up the stragglers
The big idea with the diatomaceous earth is that newcomers will hopefully die before they reproduce. They live quite a long time otherwise. For a nontoxic treatment it's not bad.
> Step 1 is to clean every tiny little crevice of your bed frame, bedding, box spring, and mattress and if possible, get a mattress bag. Step 2 is to put bed bug traps under each leg of your bed-- they can't jump or fly, only climb. Step 3 is to make sure no part of your bed or bedding is touching the wall or floor. Step 4 sprinkle diatomaceous earth around the base of your bed and the edges of your room.
I can confirm this through personal experience. I had a bad bedbug infestation two years ago, did the first three steps and haven't had a problem since (I didn't use the diatomaceous earth in Step 4).
You basically turn your bed into a castle. No bedbugs currently in your bed + defenses so they can't get onto your bed = no future bedbug problem in bed.
One good trick I used is that you can make "bed bug traps under each leg of your bed" yourself by putting little plastic containers under each leg that you fill with an inch of baby oil. The bedbugs can't get passed it.
Nice. Good call with the oil. I immediately thought "hmm I hate the smell of baby oil-- wonder if you could use vegetable oil instead of baby oil" but then you'd attract cockroaches. Unscented mineral oil it is.
>Eventually, I called an exterminator but the bugs were back a couple of months later. I eventually left this place.
I am very glad that the exterminator I called was honest with me despite my desperation and told me bluntly that no one could permanently solve the issue without treating the whole structure.
There are horror stories about bedbugs in luggage making it into your home but from researching when I thought I might have them its a pretty low probability. There seems to be a critical mass needed and most infestations where people are getting bites every night there is actually a huge disgusting colony somewhere around the bed that is never cleaned. With your apartment I bet there was a pretty unsanitary tenant before you.
I had an experience where I believe a single bed bug somehow made its home in my home. I was getting occasional bumps on my skin that looked like bites. At first I got worried and threw a bunch of my possessions out and inspected my bed area but then I just wrote it off to mosquitos.
A few months later I was outside my house and felt something on my neck. After slapping it I came to the conclusion it was most likely a lone bed bug.
Not everyone reacts to the bites severely so some just write it off as mosquito bites or a rash like me. Also in order to get an infestation from a hitch hiking bedbug one of the following conditions must be met:
1. A male and female bedbug must both hitch a ride together and later successfully reproduce. OR
2. A pregnant female must hitch a ride. OR
3. There must already be a single bedbug present at your address and the hitchhiking bedbug must be of the opposite sex. These two bedbugs must go on to successfully reproduce.
Keep in mind also that the hitchhiker must make it all the way home to the residence and not wander off somewhere before hand.
Hotels and people who travel to decent hotels are quite aware of bedbugs too so the chance of encountering bedbugs and taking them home from there is quite low. e.g doing simple stuff like not leaving your luggage on or near your bed mitigates a lot of risk.
> Not everyone reacts to the bites severely so some just write it off as mosquito bites or a rash like me
Some people don't react to the bites at all. Which is one reason why it can be hard to get rid of them. It's hard to even tell if they're there if you don't react to the bites.
Yeah, despite how hard bed bugs are to get rid of once you have them, that Airbnbs aren't constantly plagued with bed bugs shows that spreading them probably isn't as simple as just moving luggage through a place that has them.
You probably have to not just get some passengers in your luggage but also park the luggage in a place in the infected location where they actual fester, sleep, and lay eggs.
I moved from a bedbug infested apartment to a cockroach infested apartment once. When I left, I made sure to do it during the summer. Anything I kept (clothes, etc) went into black plastic bags and then into my car during the 105F+ degree summer heat. All the furniture made it into the trash bin.
I'd take the cockroach any day above the beg bugs. Cockroaches can be controlled to a point they could either be entirely harmless or at least live in some sort of symbiosis with you.
Bed bugs are the absolute worst of the lot. Mosquitoes feel like welcome guests compared to them.
Short of nothing less than setting everything you know on fire, there are 0 ways to get rid of them.
I only lived in a mice infested apartment and as gross as it was, at least mice are easy to see, satisfying to kill and don't follow you anywhere or lay eggs.
I've had some in my van and had the opportunity to try a large variety of things, including essential oils, various pesticides, cleaning, etc.
What worked for me and was quite radical was steam cleaning. It takes a lot of time to be thorough, but it kills them very quickly, includes the eggs, and can safely go almost anywhere (except on my poor books)
I'm somewhat anxious at times, and definitely one of the things I'm paranoid about is getting bedbugs (hasn't happened yet!)
One day our daughter had some small bites on her arms, and then we found small creatures in her bed... my brain went straight to "*k we have bedbugs, burn the house down and start again, but fortunately* my friend is an entomologist and his partner was visiting and she took one back for him to look at.
The answer came back that it was a definitely a carpet beetle and not to worry (simpler to get rid of, which we did).
I recommend having a friend who's an entomologist. Definite life hack ;)
Hilarious story. And definitely relate to an unusual anxiety about getting a bed bug infection (for me this is a type of catastrophic thinking - CBT works quite well). I have a routine that I follow when I check into a hotel consisting of examining mattress seams for bedbugs and hunting for hidden cameras (smoke detectors, outlets, lamps, etc.)
Surprisingly, I've never found a bedbug or hidden camera.
I did once find a 6-inch centipede in my kids' bathroom on the 10th floor of a hotel property on Maui.
> By the 1940s this age-old parasite was mostly eradicated from homes and hotels in the developing world. But around 1995, the bedbug tides again turned. Infestations began flaring up with a vengeance. Pest managers and scientists aren’t sure what happened, exactly, but it may have been a combination of people traveling more and thus increasing their chances of encountering bedbugs in run down motels or infested apartments; of bedbugs bolstering their resistance to common pesticides; and of people simply letting their guard down against the now unfamiliar parasites.
I can’t help thinking that the housing crisis may have contributed to this. I can’t speak for the US, but in the UK rental apartments are not maintained and people are systematically evicted for asking repairs. Mattresses are used by tenant after tenant, with some Airbnb in the middle. People often are not allowed to replace mattresses and landlords can’t bother. Carpet stays there for generations, usually covered with another carpet when it becomes a health hazard.
There's something I really, really don't understand.
> The fabricated leaves did snag the bugs, but they didn’t hinder the insects’ movements quite as effectively as the living plants. But the researchers are not deterred by these initial results. They plan to continue working on the problem and improving their product by more precisely incorporating the mechanical properties of the living trichomes.
Why not grow leaves and use those? Why do we need to make artificial replicas of the real thing, when we could grow the plant and A) get rid of bugs, B) Enjoy the beans and C) benefit from the nitrogen-fixing properties of the plant.
This obsession with creating artificial replicas of things that we know, because we want to have perfect, lab-conditions control of everything, is just crazy.
Leaves need to be replaced regularly. You'd have to transport them to places where you can't grow them. I'm not even sure it would be a benefit for the environment.
The market for fresh kidney bean leaves wouldn't be big enough to justify shops keeping them in stock, growing bean plants would take weeks and typically be impractical otherwise due to space and seasonality constraints, bean leaves dry out quickly so you would need a constant supply to fight an infestation, and given they are a discrete size and you have limited options for how and where place them versus a synthetic tape...
b) Artificial leaves can be "painted" on continuous surfaces anywhere. E.g. on the foots of beds, inside the walls, doorstep, perhaps even luggage…
Mmmmhmmm.
It's basically like flypaper and they get stuck and die. Who would want products with the ability to kill bugs in a manner such that now they are permanently covered in dead bugs?
that's a good problem to have, if you have bed bugs at all. Its like saying why would you have a crumpling car bumper that would be destroyed in a wreck and then he unsightly or need an expensive replacement.
I would happily have this stuff permanently painted on bed feet. If you have bed bugs to get attached id much rather have them impaled even if I had to refinish my beds legs (in reality you would just clean them off or replace the temporary flypaper)
It is, you would usually want to have this user replacable/washable (that's why I said less maintenance than plants, not no maintenance). Although e.g. during construction it might make sense to install it even permanently.
Anyway, my only point is that there might be possible applications where this technology fits better than the bean plants suggested by seu.
seu still has a good point. That there are mechanisms (like companies making more money via cheaper production/handling when scaling, or catering to careless customers) that lead us to use artificial products doesn't always (or even often?) mean that it's the better solution for us as a whole, long term. Because the drawbacks of artificial solutions may show up in places that the producers or consumers don't feel.
That's sometimes a good point. Doesn't seem to be a good point here unless you live next to a bean farmer. Coming up with a biomimicking synthetic makes plenty of sense in this instance.
I've been dealing not with bedbugs, but clothesmoths. Similarly persistent and difficult to entirely eliminate. Not going to use the classic mothballs because toxicity. They activate in larger numbers when there is more keratin around, which mostly happens when hair is long enough to shed all over clothing(hence "clothes" moths). Using more synthetic fabrics and keeping hair short does a lot to hold them back.
The pheromone traps for them do work, but I've gradually come to realize that their numbers can be reduced just by exploiting their stupidity: those traps kill by being sticky, and this is something you can add to by adding double-sided tape over anything you've seen them crawl on - like many bugs, they love to fly near lights and this can be made deadly even with low power LEDs. The larvae in particular HAVE to crawl and they usually fall down to the floor at some point. So if you add barriers all around and keep vacuuming the floor, they lose a lot of traction.
This is something I've also seen recommended with bedbugs, even getting the ceiling "airdrop" bugs. I think the long term apartment infestations are a matter of the building as a whole not really pulling itself together to combat the problem, and not so much the existing techniques failing.
It's possible that a paper from last year from Catherine Loudon (one of the authors of the 2013 paper that this article is based on) might have some answers. From the abstract:
> In this paper, I briefly summarize some of what I have learned over the last 10 years about commercialization from a variety of different sources, related to a bioinspired project in which I am involved.
I was wondering the same as OP.
Thanks for your link - here's some more info from it:
The technology/invention uses a microfabricated surface to entrap insect pests, inspired by the action of microstructures on leaves of plants. The first pest to be targeted is bed bugs, because of their commercial importance and proof of concept using this method.
Earlier, we were able to generate synthetic (plastic) materials that exactly matched the natural leaf surface geometry including the sharp microscopic hooks, using a double molding fabrication technique (Szyndler et al. 2013). However, those synthetics did not permanently entrap bed bugs. We have recently had very promising results using a variety of different materials and alternative microfabrication methods. We have been able to generate arrays of microscopic hooks, producing modifications of shapes beyond those found in nature (Fig. 1). This exciting result means that we have a greater ability to vary the material and mechanical properties of these new surfaces, thereby increasing the probability of better performance in entrapment by these synthetic materials. We are currently at the stage of generation of prototypes and evaluation, and characterization of these different microfabricated surfaces.
it took 3 years between the submission of our first patent application and the granting of the patent. Two additional related patents have been granted subsequently.
Apart from that there is no concrete info on when a product might be avaiable.
For anyone who needs help with this: last time I had to battle the bugs, my research led me to CimeXa, a brand of "silicon aerogel". I understand it's both much safer and much more effective than diatomaceous earth.
I'm not sure how well it did in our infestation because we caught it very early, possibly with only a single bug. But I was impressed by the research.
I'm currently fighting bed bugs and am using diatomaceous earth spray to make my bedroom toxic to the bugs. It seems to be working but I'm worried about the effects of the spray on me.
What I would do if I had bugs again
1. clean and remove everything from the bedroom, find a bed frame that is easy to clean
2. get a special cover for the mattress
3. vacuum the room and clean the sheets at high temperature as often as possible
There is food-grade diatomaceous earth (an anti-caking agent) which is completely safe for humans. But the whole idea of it is it's very jagged little dead sea creatures that tear insects to shreds, so breathing it is not advised.
My bed bug experience was utterly traumatic. It was about 7 years ago. I lived in a small studio apartment where the landlord didn't care about anything. I've come to understand that landlords are utterly incapable of treating resilient infestations due to many factors.
I finally solved it (just before moving the hell out of there) by contracting with a professional, reputable exterminator who did a thorough job, and signed me to a subscription service that promised followup treatments which I did indeed require.
Come to find out that this was a fluke, and reputable exterminators will not enter or deal with apartment tenants because of professional courtesy for the disreputable ones who are contracted with the landlords.
I suffer from C-PTSD and any bugs crawling on me trigger utter trauma and emotional flashbacks. Now I love insects, don't mind them in the wild, but I can't abide pests.
I was sleeping on the kitchen floor, I had to stop volunteering at church so they wouldn't spread, I couldn't move until they were eradicated, my life was in tatters.
Thank god for $EXTERMINATOR who saved my life and my bacon.
I had to sleep on a plastic blowup mattress for 6 months simply because they couldn't crawl up it. I had to starve them of their food source, which was me, for long enough that they would exhaust their reserves of my own blood and their children would starve. It was one of the worst periods of my life.
It was years back, yet- as little as watching anything crawl on a wall gives me anxiety, I have to often go closer to take a look at what it is, I generally breathe a sigh of relief if it flies(rules them out entirely). A mosquito bite, feels nice after you see it fly away, knowing at least its not those cursed days all over again.
Sleepless nights, helpless days. Had it all during those days. I'd rather leave this earth to the heavenly abode as an option than relive those dreadful days.
Every once in a while, I smell that musty bed bug scent and start panicking. Being threatened with the presence of bed bugs is equivalent to being threatened with grave bodily harm or torture in my subconscious mind, and I'd go to great lengths to ensure I never went through that again.
I hate to admit it, but I agree with your last sentiment. They are a hell like no other.
When I was renting a flat with a couple of other guys, one of them called me one day on the way home from work and said they had discovered bedbugs (this is in the UK).
I'd never really heard of them aside from the old "night night, don't let the bedbugs bite" saying.
It turns out they are a psychological terror! Every night you know that you're going to fall asleep and have your blood sucked out by loads of little bugs. The council pest control guy who came out made us empty all the rooms, heat treat all of our clothes and then keep them double bagged in sealed plastic bags and once a week he would come round and spray the flat in chemicals and then we would need to put the beds back together and go to sleep as the only way to get the bedbugs to come out and encounter the poison was to lure them out to feed on us.
It affected me mentally for months and months and I'm always paranoid now whenever I go anywhere new like a bus, train, cinema, someone elses house, etc that I'm going to bring them back home with me.
My pest control guy told me that I had to keep living in my apartment and sleeping in the same sport otherwise they would just spread throughout the apartment and take longer to kill.
I still get the feeling every now and then one of the fuckers are climbing on me.
Yeah, when we were told we needed to just keep sleeping in our beds, it was so unsettling.
For months I just didn't sleep under any covers because I couldn't handle the thought of them creeping around under there and I would wake up constantly throughout the night to the fear that I was being bitten... months after we'd seen the last one too.
Whenever I'd vist my parents, I'd have a double bagged load of clothes that I'd keep in the boot of my car and I'd run them through high heat dryer cycles daily and change into them in outside the house after thoroughly checking myself for bedbugs. It took me years after moving out of the flat to get my head back to normal.
The horror stories I've heard have been people finding bugs at home after a hotel stay.
You can't always know if the hotel you're staying at has bed bugs.
But you could reduce the risk of taking them home with you by always keeping your bags a distance away from the hotel bed, so the bugs won't be likely to hide there. I've never encountered signs of bed bugs when travelling but it is a simple rule I follow, just in case.
I got bed bugs last year in Germany. I was soo wtf that I originally thought they were fleas from my dog so just got him treated for fleas. A month or so later I found one and identified it as a bed bug. I tried for a month to get rid of them, that didn't work at all. It took about 4 months once I got pest control out. It seemed like a standard job for him.
I travel quite a lot and I've occasionally seen bed bugs in hotels in France, Indonesia, Thailand. But it's true that I never heard of bed bugs infestation until I lived in NYC in 2009 (and my whole building had issues with them), there was a peak of infestations at that time.
You should check that famous youtuber’s video on the bug. It looks like they’re hard to notice as they only come out for 10min every night and you can’t feel them.
Strangely I am from europe and traveled extensivly here in europe, but so far I only encountered them in australia, in a backpackers hostel.
But that might have been a reason, why I prefer my own tent now, instead of hostels when backpacking .. you never know who slept before you in that room and like others said, getting rid of bedbugs is not easy.
I always wondered whether bedbug == flea (which jumps). You squash flea and they are no more... I suspect its a different thing, as it appears bedbug swarms.
If you have bedbugs (and if you do then I’m so sorry) then I recommend not using the chemical treatments. These supposedly just scatter them everywhere, causing them to spread. The two treatments that work reliably seem to be:
- Whole building heat treatment, but this is the nuclear option as it involves heating the entire building (including cracks and crevices) to 60c
- Repeated steam treatments. Superheated steam kills them on contact, but doesn’t scare them away. Any remaining bugs will gravitate towards sleeping areas and can be got by repeating the steam treatment within a 2 week window which is how long their reproduction cycle takes.
I had to live through a bedbug infestation about five years ago; the neighbours had a "sweep up and don't tell the management" approach, which I did not adopt.
After two rounds of standard chemical treatments, my apartment was empty of them -- it can be quite effective.
Despite that, I still constantly found reasons to believe that it might not yet be resolved, and lived a horrible shell of a normal life for months until I had served out my lease and (still amazingly bug free), could move. Even months after moving, I feared having somehow brought them along.
In retrospect, it's hard to believe: but they were gone after those two treatments. The greatest toll was the mental toll and the uncertainty of whether it could ever even be resolved. If anyone reading is going through it, just follow the instructions of a professional, and know that one day, you _will_ be past it.
There’s very different bedbug populations in different areas with wildly different levels of resistance to these chemicals. NYC and a few other major metropolitan areas have in practice spent decades maximizing how resistant these bugs are.
It might sound preposterous but even within NYC there’s very different lineages where wealthy areas tend to be much harder to deal with because people don’t want the stigma and so don’t tell anyone when they fumigate and they also travel more which means constantly risking exposure in hotels etc.
I guess chemical treatment or the suggested "heat to 60 degrees celsius" might work. But the f*** are pretty mobile and escape or call security / police.
I can confirm in my anecdotal experience that poison is not effective. The poison also made me itchy more so than the bugs. It is really difficult in large houses or multi-unit apartments because they can hide in walls or behind things. Pretty much have to do heat treatment but that can be rough on the structure.
When reading about this I've heard exterminators say that heat treatment alone isn't always effective because there are some areas that don't reach those temperatures, and it might not kill the eggs that tend to be more durable.
In case of a "mild" infestation, isn't it a feasible solution to have some plants, how about every week collect some leaves and tape around tightly the feet of the bed?
Beans are very easy to grow (the easiest plant I've grown at least).
I've actually did it in the past, it's an option for sure but the very nature of only working as a dry powder is quite limiting and makes the beddings dirty when they inevitably touch the floor.
I don't know if the product has the same name in the US but here we have this spot-on products against parasites for pets called "Frontline". It's pretty effective against ticks, fleas etc. and so far my cats and dogs still seem OK.
I fought with bedbugs once. Poisons did not work. Just putting your bed away from walls does not help, because they climb up the walls and drop precisely on you from ceiling (I actually observed it myself). What solved it is diatomaceous earth, it actually works but you need to use it correctly. Specifically, in my case spreading this powder everywhere along the walls, floor, cracks, around the bed, etc did not help one bit. What helped is putting the powder on their nests (places with the eggs). I literally had to dismantle my couch, find every place and gap which contained their eggs and spread the powder on it. When I did that, the bugs disappeared in a matter of one or two days. So apparently the trick is you need to find and kill all the nests. I lived in that apartment for one more year, and they did not come back. I suppose I may have had a "moderate" infestation, because it seems I got rid of them relatively easy, the battle lasted for one month since I discovered them, including time for failed attempts with poisons and the powder.
I had em, powder didn’t work. Don’t remember if I was using diatomaceous earth, poison or both.
It got to the point where I didn’t know if I was itching because of the powder, the bugs or my head. Eventually I washed all my clothes in the bathtub in really hot water - and that’s the first time I saw them. I realized they were prob living in a bag of mine that I had at the hotel I was at when I got them. Threw that in a hot bathtub. Washed all my clothes - left the bag outside for 1 Wisconsin winter. Problem eventually resolved. Didn’t need to get a heat treatment - just very thoroughly “boiled” them myself.
But fast forward a few months, I had to go on another trip. When I reached my hotel and unpacked, I saw that I had a lot of slow moving bugs in the bag. Idk if they were eggs initially or what, but they survived an entire winter of very cold weather. Needless to say, I immediately gave the bag a hot bath and there were pretty heavy casualties. I think it was contained bc I think they were still coming out of some sort of dormant state and unable to scurry away.
We don't have bedbugs, cockroaches or ants because of what we do have: house centipedes. They eat everything. Given that they bite (I've never been bitten) they're not exactly great to have around, but cockroaches and bedbugs are truly disgusting.
Centipedes are very common in Toronto basement apartments. They look absolutely ghastly and their bite is somewhat painful and itchy, but yeah they are ravenous and great at controlling other insects. If you get way too many of them though... usually means you have another problematic arthropod invasion.
We had issues in an infested building for a year or more, on and off. When we moved, we got our UHaul gased with vikane and it kills anything living. We even found some dead cockroaches in a couple boxes.
I think they can climb the wall and the ceiling
then walk over your bed and drop onto it. I
can not prove this happens but I have seen bedbugs in the
ceiling. Anybody else know if this happens in practice?
From curiosity: any self reported correlation between smoking tobacco at home and no bedbugs among people here? Tobacco has some insecticide compounds iirc.
Wow talk about the grad student project from hell. I hope their lab is well equipped in terms of safety and PPE! I wouldn't want to carry some of this research back into my apartment!
still managed to ignore some points like why do the bean leaves develop these mechanisms in the first place, and are the bugs just randomly stumbling into the leaves or something attracts them?
Bedbugs invaded my apartment after a new tenant moved in above fall 2020. Infestations were discovered in apartments above and next to me in the summer and fall of 2021 but not sprayed until then.
I captured over 300 bed bugs and documented them to the landlord, who had to get exterminators to eliminate them. They sprayed the apartment 11 times from 2021 to early 2022, but nothing reduced the numbers until they attacked the source infestations.
What worked:
Buying white box spring and mattress covers that bugs cannot get through and make them easy to see. Steaming and vacuuming the bed.
Putting glass and plastic traps on the floor under the bed legs. Bugs can't climb (some/all?) smooth, vertical metal, plastic and glass surfaces. Test for yourself. Large numbers of bugs could fill the traps so they have to be checked.
Tucking in bedding so that covers and sheets never slide onto the floor during the night.
Vacuuming floors every day to pick up bugs in the carpet or hidden under the baseboards.
Sealing pipes, lights, electrical plugs and switches with clear tape so the bugs cannot enter that way. I found two dead bugs trapped in a hallway light and then two more crawled out while applying the tape.
Completely sealing the vent above the stove after several crawled down, followed by more that were trapped in the clear plastic.
Sealing the bathroom vent with clear plastic packing tape around all edges of the wall, which bugs cannot climb, then sealing the fan cover onto the wall on all sides except the top so air could still escape. Every surface inside the cover and outside had smooth tape.
Some appeared on the floor near the front door into the common hallway, so I covered the first 60 cm / 2 feet of floor in bleach. This seemed to kill smaller bugs but a few larger ones made it through alive. The exterminator said they follow the smell of each other.
My freezer is -20 C. I put every bug in there for at least 2 hours, in a plastic bag, and none came back to life after they were removed and thawed.
Almost everything I have was put in either clear plastic bags or dozens of 60L clear plastic storage bins. I only found one bug in a clear bin that was right under a fire sensor I could not cover. It appeared to have crawled inside through the sideways U shaped top seals on the ends and died.
The plastic traps on the bed were in this form:
TTT Window
TDT
TDT Put these letters in 3 rows with the TTT at the top and window to the right of TTT in your mind.
The darkest traps labeled D had most of the bugs I found in the bedroom (~20 total), which led me to think they avoided light even though I slept head near the window where they would smell CO2. So, I started leaving all the lights on every day. I also turned down the heat but don't know if either helped.
Before I knew they were bed bugs, I killed about 12 in the bathroom over 3 months. Most would burst in a strange gray cloud.
Secure your bed, clothing and furniture. Then it is easier to deal with the stress and sleep in comfort. If you have to move, everything in plastic is safe and can be checked at the new home.
If it is really bad, make sure you and movers have covers on your feet. The first exterminator tracked them back to his house because he didn't cover his feet, but the government inspector always wore them when inspecting the building.
It got bad before I realized. I did my research— bought the bed covers, put everything near the bed in clear plastic bags, and bought a steam cleaner.
The bugs infest your bed, reproduce, and spread out. To get rid of them you do the reverse—kill them on the bed with steam. Wait a day or two for the commuters to repopulate the bedding, repeat.
Most important thing is don’t panic. If you panic, throw out your bed, then you will prolly end up dragging your bed through your home and spread the bugs everywhere.
A year later I was volunteering at a community program teaching adults to use computers. The topic of bed bugs came up. A person said the Cedarcide product was absolutely the best product. I’m adverse to using any poison on or near my bed, so I gave it a try—it’s just cedar oil.
Well, I tried it and shared the product with my neighbors. I didn’t see any direct effect on the bugs. What I did realize was the smell of the product is distinct (and pleasant). Living in an apartment building, when you smell the product, you know someone has the problem and you can catch an infestation early. This is key.
Also, once you find and deal with the issue, best to continue to check your bedding twice a week. I found spring through to early summer is the worst. If you can get past that time, and you know your neighbors are clear, then you’re good. But as long as your neighbors have a problem, then you too have a problem.
There is a lot of irrational shame when people have the bugs. They deny and deny, so communication is key—even if it’s coded communication as the smell of whatever spray people use to treat and kill the bugs, or empty bug spray cans.