Unheard Bed Bug Facts and Myths

You might have asked your parents, what a bedbug even was today, bedbugs are the fastest-growing pest control emergency in the developed world one.

 

Bed Bug Myths

Bed bugs have even been found living inside a prosthetic leg, they’ve been dealing with bedbugs for a really long time since they infested ancient Rome.

The Romans actually brewed them and drink them as a cure for snake bites, which I’m sure was kind of delicious to them.

They also infested ancient Egypt because the Egyptians wrote about them probably complaining to their landlord.

In fact, archaeological evidence tells us that bed bugs have fed on humans for at least 3500 years because fossilized bed bugs have been found at dig sites.

Bugs may have been plaguing us for much longer than that based on what’s in their mitochondrial, DNA. That is the DNA inside the PowerHouse of the cell.

Comparing the mitochondrial markers and bed bug populations around the world. We’ve learned that they originated in caves in the middle east where they would have fed on back now bedbugs can’t fly, and they can’t jump.

 

 

Read also: Are Bed Bugs Dangerous? Facts About Bed bugs Bite

 

Bed Bug Facts

Bedbugs are blood-feeding insects that are about the size of an apple seed. Once, they’re fully grown, they survive on the blood of mammals and insects, but they prefer human blood.

A colony of bed bugs can have thousands of individuals, you can have them without even knowing it. So, here’s what you need to know about bed bugs.

The name bed bug might make you think they only live in bed, bed bugs will live just about anywhere. They can hide under an adult bed.

The bug is 5 millimeters long and as narrow as a piece of paper and they can crawl up to 30 meters in a night to find a meal.

This means bed bugs will hide behind light switches on a wall, paint, and wallpaper, or the gap between walls in the baseboards or just about anywhere else.

How do we get rid of a bed bug infestation that is heating both eggs and adults, this will kill them in under 10 minutes. If exposed to temperatures above 46 degrees celsius.

Cheap beds in hotels and hospitals had all those janky creatures. Metal frames were popular means because you could rub them in kerosene and light them on fire. That would definitely take care of any bed bugs living inside them.

 

Read also: How Often Do Bed Bugs Feed? Feeding Habit of Bed Bugs

 

Facts and Myths About Bed Bug Infestation

The reason you grew up thinking that bed bugs were maybe not even a real thing, is because bed bugs were almost wiped out in 1950 all because of an incredibly useful.

Also, super terrible, a toxic little chemical called DDT. DDT stands for dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, and it was the first chemical pesticide to be put to widespread use.

It was rolled out after World War II and by the end of the 1950s bed bug populations had been so reduced in the developed world that scientists mostly stopped studying them.

However, one treatment of DDT was enough to completely wipe out a population of bedbugs and they would stay wiped out for up to a year.

A DDT was banned in the US in 1972 for a lot of reasons. For one thing, females who are exposed to DDT before puberty are five times more likely to develop breast cancer.

DDT has also been linked to male infertility, as well as miscarriage, weakens the nervous system, liver damage, and developmental disabilities in children.

It may not kill humans the way it kills insects, but it sure isn’t good for us. We should like not to bring DDT back ever.

Modern bed bug treatments can be effective, but they’re costly and not as reliable as DDT was, there are other pyrethroids now.

For example, they don’t have so many harmful side effects, we can try using those against bedbugs, but the bugs have evolved a near-complete immunity to that bed bugs.

Today, bed bugs are 10,000 times less vulnerable to pyrethroids than they were 50 years ago. This links back to those sodium pores then made up of about 2000 amino acids.

And it turns out that if you change just a handful of those amino acids, the sodium pores can still do their job at the pyrethroids.

However, steam treatments are effective, hot steam will kill bed bugs and their eggs, but steam needs to come in direct contact with the bugs to kill them.

This can be tough if they’re like inside your mattress, in that situation bed bug-proof mattress covers are required.

Essentially, you wrap your bed in airtight plastic and starve the bed bugs out. But like I said, earlier that can take up to a year.

You can also seal the cracks and crevices where bed bugs like to hide. This will cut down on the number of locations where they can lay their eggs.

Linens and Furniture can be put in a freezer unit for a couple of weeks to freeze the bedbugs to death. If you have a bed bug infestation, you may end up needing a professional exterminator to eliminate them.

All of those things may be more and the cost can run into thousands of dollars.

 

Read also: How Do You Get Bed Bugs?

 

Conclusion

In conclusion, If you’re dealing with a bed bug infestation or just want to know what to do, try to contact your local pest control expert, just don’t look to the lessons of History because of old-school ways of wiping out.

Bed bugs were bad. Probably our best hope is that science will come up with something new something as effective as DDT.

But not as awful as DDT and hopefully they come up with it soon. If you learned something reading this article, it will be nice if you share your thoughts via the comment section below.

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