Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [67]
During my visit with entomologist Lou Sorkin, I asked him about the old perception that bed bugs were found only in association with hobos, seedy motels, and filthy conditions.
He shook his head. “That’s been the mind-set for quite some time, but in the old days, only people who had money could heat their homes, so that’s where you’d find the infestations. And once central heating took off, so did the bed bugs.”
I glanced over at the colony. The jar was sitting on Lou’s worktable, and now that the creatures within it weren’t being warmed, breathed on, or sniffed, most of the miniature horde had retreated back into the shadows of their cardboard harborage.
The bug man went on to explain how increased temperatures not only attracted bed bugs and amped up their activity, but it also sped up their life cycle. “Higher temperatures lead to faster maturation to the adult, reproductive stage.”
I would later learn from Dr. Gangloff-Kaufmann’s presentation that a combination of high temperature (85°F) and high humidity could condense the bed bugs’ entire life cycle into a period of three to four weeks. She explained that initially this might sound like a good thing, because the pests died more quickly, but they could also crank out a new generation in less time—leading to an overall increase in population size.
“So can cooling down an infested home get rid of bed bugs?”
“Not really,” Lou said, shaking his head. “Lower temperatures can slow down their maturation process but it also increases their life span.”
Like other insects, when bed bugs are chilled their metabolic rates decrease.
“Nymphs can go for months and months without feeding and adults can live without a blood meal for a year or longer.”
Well, here was a clue I hadn’t read about on Web sites or in the rash of recent newspaper and magazine articles on bed bugs. Rather than becoming a plus in the war against them, the creatures’ adaptive response to low temperatures presented a significant problem: bed bugs could survive for months with no food, in empty (and presumably unheated) apartments. Harkening back to the enormous amount of misinformation on bats, the ability of bed bugs to survive prolonged periods without their human hosts apparently led to a fairly common belief that they could feed on juices extracted from wood and paper, or even digest wallpaper glue. “Paste they love much,” declared self-proclaimed genius John Southall in his Treatise on Buggs.
I guess it might have been almost comforting to think that these tiny home invaders were munching glue or savoring newspaper ink. Comforting that is, compared to a pair of grim realizations that not only did bed bugs maintain a strict diet of blood, but unlike exotic vampires like bats and leeches, these hardened city dwellers were living (and feeding) right here among us.
Okay, so we already know that bed bugs are arthropods, like crabs and spiders, but let’s get a bit more specific, starting with the question, what are “bugs”?
Bed bugs and their fellow cimicids belong to a large suborder of insects known as Heteroptera. These, in turn, belong to an even more inclusive grouping, the order Hemiptera. Although some hemipterans do feed on blood, many don’t. Aphids, for example, the enemy of farmers and gardeners everywhere, feed on plant sap and cause serious damage in the process.
But no matter what they feed on, to be a card-carrying hemipteran, you need to have a needle-sharp, dual-channeled proboscis. After piercing the skin (or rind) of whatever it is they happen to feed on, hemipterans inject saliva through one channel of their proboscis. Compounds within the saliva