Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [64]
Although Lou’s bed bug colony was a far cry from a beehive, the single-mindedness of their quest for blood was chilling to watch.
“Imagine having this many bed bugs living in your apartment—living behind your headboard, in your mattress, hiding behind your switch plates.”
“And all of them just waiting for the lights to go out,” I chimed in. Admittedly, I was starting to buy into Sorkin’s ghoulish gig.
“Exactly,” Lou said. I noticed that there was nothing that could be interpreted as disgust in his voice, and I wondered how many people this soft-spoken bug-meister had sent home to a night of the creepy-crawlies after they’d checked out his colony.
He went on. “And the more cluttered your home is, the better.”
I shot a quick glance around Lou’s office. “So what you’re saying is that I should not drop this bottle.”
“No…that would be a bad thing,” the bug expert replied.
I passed the jar back to the researcher, but instead of placing it back on his desk, he did something peculiar. He brought the lid of the jar up to his nose and inhaled (rather deeply, I thought).
“Some people say they smell like fresh raspberries or cilantro.” He held the bottle toward me.
I took a small sniff.
“Hmmmm,” I said, not smelling much of anything.
“I always thought they smelled like citronella,” Lou continued. “Nowhere near as strong as those yellow citronella ants, but there’s a definite similarity.”
I leaned over and took a somewhat larger hit, checking first to make certain we hadn’t inhaled a hole in the mesh. They did smell like citronella.
The scientist motioned to my note pad. “This is important,” he said. “There are Web sites and articles out there reporting that bed bugs don’t have a smell. That’s untrue—especially when they get riled up.”
I nodded, as I took some notes. Strangely, rather than the smell of bed bugs or their lack of smell, I’d been struck by the idea that someone other than myself had actually sniffed those citronella ants. Each summer when I was a kid, the quarter-inch-long insects would swarm within the sidewalk cracks in front of my house. They had a distinctive odor, and as soon as I caught wind of it, I’d break out my action figures and start fishing for ants with a piece of straw. The enraged ants would emerge, a dozen or so at a time, clamped by their powerful jaws to the NEST THREAT that appeared like clockwork each year to poke at the entrance to their colony. And just like Lou’s bed bugs, the angrier the citronella ants became, the stronger the scent they produced.
The entomologist’s voice jerked me back into the present. “In all likelihood, bed bugs release many different pheromones.”
Besides chemical messages like the aggression pheromone produced by the citronella ants I’d hassled as a kid, other substances released by the bed bugs functioned to make them less palatable to predators.*96
“Humans can only discern one of these pheromones,” Lou continued, placing his colony down on the table. “Dogs, on the other hand, have a much more sensitive sense of smell, and some are actually being trained to detect bed bug infestations.”*97
At a lecture sponsored by the New York Entomological Society, several nights later, I learned that researchers were working to identify the bed bugs’ aggregational pheromone—the chemical signal that would lead to the formation of loose groups by the bed bugs as they gathered in their nooks and crannies between meals. By isolating the specific chemical that caused bed bugs to aggregate, scientists hoped to learn more about this behavior—information that could be used to develop more effective eradication methods.
There were around seventy-five people present in the audience that night and they seemed to be a mix of pest-control types (there to pick up half a New York State Department of Environmental Conservation credit for their attendance) and city dwellers, either interested in bed bugs or traumatized by them to various degrees of twitchiness.
The lecture was titled “Good Night, Sleep Tight, Don’t Let the Cimex lectularius Bite,” and the first speaker was Dr. Jody