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Researchers Develop New Trap To Capture Bloodsucking Bed Bugs
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Bedbugs (Cimex lectularius) are small blood-sucking insects that can live in cracks and crevices in and around your bed and crawl out at night to bite your exposed skin and feed on your blood, just as mosquitoes do. Now BBC reports that researchers from the Rutgers University Department of Entomology have developed a new trap that has a 77% probability of capturing bed bugs, nearly three times as many bed bugs over 28 days (PDF), as the the Climbup insect interceptor trap, which the authors cite as the best monitor on the market. A better trap design can allow people to detect bed bugs while they are still in small numbers. 'If you have only 10 or 20 bugs in your apartment, it's very hard to see with your eyes,' says Lead author Narinderpal Singh. 'When people realize they have bed bugs they are often already in their thousands, or hundred thousands. It's relatively easy to eradicate the bed bugs when they are in small numbers, but when they are everywhere, it's very hard to eradicate them.' The device can be created at home very cheaply and consists of a plastic dog bowl that's been inverted, with the outer wall covered with a layer of dyed-black surgical tape. The researchers contend that higher walls make their trap more effective than the interceptor trap because it's harder for bugs to escape."
Fuck you North East!!!! http://www.bedbugregistry.com/
After years of research and government grants, we have invented ... a black dog bowl. ;-)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
simple idea, lots of people will want it. that ones almost as good as the post-it note. nobody wants bedbugs.
The path to their door, I mean...
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
This story bites. Enough said.
So placing a sticky card under your bed won't work?
Is there a place where a normal person can buy the chemical attractants?
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
They seem to be able to catch anything.
My landlord is so paranoid about getting them I have to initial three separate paragraphs in my lease stating "I will not bring used furniture into the house" "I will notify the landlord immediately if any bedbugs are detected" "I will take steps to ensure bedbugs do not enter the house."
Maybe they should figure out how to prevent them from reproducing instead of trapping a few examples of a menace that, as the summary notes, numbers in the hundreds of thousands.
Just give us the same thing that got rid of them the last time around. DDT works.
Slashdotter: But then nobody would want to get in the bed with me.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
You regularly wash your mattress and pillows in hot water?
a new trap that has a 77% probability of capturing bed bugs
Well, what does that mean? If I have bedbugs, and I leave this out overnight, is there a 23% chance it'll be empty in the morning? Will it capture 77% of the total number of bugs? Over what time period? And so on...
The BBC article is a bit less vague:
In a laboratory setting, they found that their trap had a 77% probability of capturing bed bugs released, whereas the shallower trap only had a 23% probability.
Although this too could use a rewrite. Does it mean 77% of all the bugs were caught by the new trap, and 23% by the old? Makes sense, given that the probabilities add up to 100% (and the article's photo shows both traps in the test area at the same time). But if they are meant to be independent probabilities, then there's a 17.71% chance that any particular bug won't be caught at all*.
*obviously statistically speaking all bugs will all get caught eventually, another reason not to assume this second interpretation is correct, unless they were doing this a timed trial. Go bedbug, go!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Interesting point. Unfortunately you framed it in a bigoted rant and will subsequently be ignored.
-Izrun
And as a result, you're a stupid contrarian douchebag?
Cleaning clothes to remove normal stuff you can absolutely do in cold water.
If your underwear and sheets need to be sterilized, you have other issues you need to deal with.
You are a fucking idiot and an asshole.
Not really a good point at all. Bedbugs don't hide in the sheets. They hide in the crevices of the mattress, box-springs, bed frame, and surrounding areas. You might find a few bugs crawling the bedsheets, but it's not where they lay their eggs.
Natural selection will favor bed bugs with an inate aversion to upside down containers.
For some people, it's a long way to get to know a person completely, and there are steps to take.
But is it more effective than putting kidney bean leaves on the floor? Story was out months ago about this old (OLD) method that works because the leaves have tiny hooks on then that latch on to the bugs' legs. Set them out at night, gather them in the morning and burn.
Fuck that.. Liberal use of poison!
I've looked on Google and can't find one near me...
I'm just glad they didn't spend $15 million in tax payer money to invent a $10,000 trap that no one would use. (No one who isn't buying traps with tax payer money, anyway.)
I wonder if the same design works for fleas. I understand fleas are also attracted to CO2, so the yeast + sugar water thing would likely improve results with fleas as well.
I'd been baiting my traps with an an aerosol can of CO2 produced by emissions from an SUV belching C02 into a Styrofoam container full of dry ice kept cool by an R-22 refrigeration system powered by my diesel generator.
> I have read there has been a dramatic increase in bed bugs over the last decade in major urban centers. There is a very good reason why it has.
Yeah, that's where the most people are and where people move around the most. If you live in the boonies you never see people in on business trips, and you're more likely to own a house with no close neighbors instead of live in an apartment with a constantly-shifting set of neighbors. Less vectors.
> People have been told to save energy (and the environment) by using cold water to wash their laundry.
And they aren't people in the country? Got news for you: When you have your own water heater instead of a coin-op laundry, you look for ways to save hot water.
> While your laundry comes out smelling and looking clean just the same, you STILL need to use high temp wash under certain situations, like washing your bed sheets.
Wow. You're an entomologist like Rosie O'Donnell is a metallurgist. First off, the bugs don't live en masse in the sheets, so that won't halt an infestation. Second, when you're trying to kill bedbugs in fabric, it's usually recommended to DRY it on high heat and not even bother tossing it in a wash cycle unless you were going to anyway.
> I mean this is why I hate stupid green alarmists because they can't apply rational common sense to anything.
Try not to look in any mirrors. Learning the concept of self-awareness might destroy you.
I've heard that bed bugs are particularly sensitive to CO2. I wonder if anybody makes a plastic bag that you put over your box spring and mattress. Then, vacuum out the air and attach a CO2 cartridge and inflate the bag. Do this in the morning and I've been lead to believe that the bugs are dead by nightfall. Is this wrong or is it really that simple?
So the bugs survive the cold water wash only to be killed in the dryer.
Hint: clothes and sheets aren't the only place bugs like to hide.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
I always use hot water when washing things like linens, socks, underwear, sleepwear and sportswear. Pretty much everything else I wash cold with cold water specific detergent. I've never in my entire life had bed bugs anywhere that I've lived, nor problems with dust mites. Rarely, I'll wake up with a small spider bite, but I'm ok with that.
Bug problems almost always stem from a lack of hygiene and regular cleaning. Bedding should be washed a minimum of once a week, but it's better to wash every three days or so. It also helps if you have hardwood floors (or any uncarpeted floor) and an air or water bed. Personally, I sleep on a very nice Serta air bed, which means that there is no place for any bugs to hide except in the sheets or blanket.
The Paiutech Department of Verminology has developed a new trap that has a 100% probability of capturing MBAs, nearly three times as many MBAs over 28 days (one fiscal month), as the classic hooker with blow trap, which the authors cite as the best monitor on the market. A better trap design can allow people to detect MBAs while they are still in small numbers. 'If you have only 10 or 20 MBAs in your corporation, it's very hard to see with your eyes,' says inventor and Paiutech COO Marion Sam. 'When people realize they have MBAs they are often already in their thousands, or hundred thousands. It's relatively easy to eradicate the MBAs when they are in small numbers, but when they are everywhere, it's very hard to eradicate them.' The device can be created at home very cheaply and consists of an empty bottle of Chivas Regal filled with bleach to which is affixed the label: "Six Sigma Smart Juice".
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Having stayed in the Hilton (Union Square San Francisco) and coming home with bed bug welts and bites, I can I think I can explain a few things. First, once you see the (clustered) bites, it's too late. Those bites take days to show sometimes. Second, The hotel denies everything. Having been denied satisfaction I left the hotel, but did NOT return home right away fearing for the little fuckers are in my luggage.
I stopped at a coffee shop to internet surf. I found this guy's blog about his battle with bedbugs and how he had to remove ALL furniture from his house in his losing battle against the little bugs. This guy had traps setup, tracking migrations from room to room, sticky side up tape being the most effective. The other side note about the bugs, all sorts of chemicals may or may not work, and HEAT over TIME was the ONLY way to kill these things dead.
I stopped at a dry-cleaner and walked in with NO LUGGAGE and explained the situation I thought I was in. The cleaner said they could take most of my luggage, but not all. They brought out a bio-hazard bin and took my clothes for "special" treatment. I had to take my shoes, suitcase and a few other items home. I threw everything in a 170 degree electric oven for 4 hours each until clean. The car I drove home in, went out to the central valley and sat in the summer sun for 5 hours while I watched movies and drank coffee.
Long story short, use the internet to keep you home safe. HEAT over TIME will KILL the fuckers.
Bedbugs have nothing to do with hygiene. They live off blood and only blood, not dirt or mold or anything related to cleaning.
And there are always places to hide. An air or water bed is a good start, yes, although you can get the same effect by encasing your mattress in a bug-impermeable casing. But they can still live in the bedframe, the walls, nearby furniture, etc.
In fact, a quirk of bedbug biology makes it even worse. Bedbug sex is extremely painful for the female (the term is literally "traumatic insemination"), to the point that female bedbugs will often flee and hide after the first mating if there are other males in line. Then she'll lay her eggs in that new hiding spot. So you'll get a second colony in your ceiling fan, or your electrical sockets, or some other crazy hiding place.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Well, I have always been a pretty clean person and I have never had beg bugs anywhere that I've lived.
And I carry around a Tiger Stone in my pocket. Never been attacked by a tiger.
Sounds like someone is in denial about their cleanliness.
Something has to initially draw the bugs to your home. That's filth. Ants, flies, cockroaches, dust mites, etc are all attracted to poor sanitary conditions. I have never had problems with any of them, but I have known plenty of slobs who did.
Not everyone uses a dryer. The only place I've seen widespread dryer adoption is in the USA. I can't stand them myself, they use lots of power, damage clothing much more rapidly, cause static build up and cause skin irritation because you have to use bleach for whites. Much rather line dry.
We got some inexpensive disposable containers, filled them with talcum powder, and put the legs of their bed in it. That stopped the bites right away (apparently they were elsewhere in the room and traveling to her bed. But, it didn't trap them. Apparently they couldn't climb up the plastic.
Next ,we get the 6"x8" sticky pads and put them under each bed leg. It was a bit of a mess (stuck to the bed) but it trapped the bedbugs the first night and THEN proceeded to catch hundreds of other bugs over the course of 6 months (spiders mostly).
They are much cheaper in bulk and when not sold as bed bug pads.
After I searched for the, I got bed bug ads on lots of sites for about a month (I guess google was serving their ads. But it was creepy to get bed bug ads on a gaming site).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Question- Do you use a clothes dryer? They typically heat clothes to about 180 F or higher. Hot water heaters are usually set to 120 - 130 F, so unless the clothes washer has a booster heater that is the hottest the clothes in the washer will get. Why will the clothes dryer not kill bed bugs?
Exactly- and very tiny areas like under the rail that supports the nightstand drawer.
I don't understand why they leave the bed and come back.
That speaks to selective pressures.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I used to stay in cheap hostels and in Singapore there was one which was infested with bed bugs. I was getting bit every night until I found that if I sprayed a ring of high powered DEET insect repellent in a ring around the edges of the mattress, the bed bugs wouldn't cross the ring and therefore wouldn't bite me. (I had a DEET spray that was supposed to last 8 hours). Better than spraying yourself with DEET every night.
I have heard they can climb on the ceiling and drop down, but thankfully that didn't happen (maybe it's a rare occurrence?).
Bug problems almost always stem from a lack of hygiene and regular cleaning.
Not with the bugs in question.
Ever stay in a hotel? If so, than it's basically nothing but pure, dumb luck that saved you from bringing some of these critters home with you. And should that happen someday, it's highly unlikely that you would even notice them until they had already multiplied into a pretty well established population. And if you think that staying in upscale hotels will save you, I'd point out that the only place I've ever encountered these critters was in a high end suite at one of the most upscale hotels I'm likely to ever see, much less stay at. Definitely priced out of reach for any regular person paying out of their own pocket. And yet, I spent the next 6 weeks waiting for those godawful bites to subside.
The only thing that saved me from bringing them into my house was a trip to the laundromat straight from the airport where I ran all of my clothes through 2 dryer cycles, and tossed my luggage into the dumpster out back.
Personally, I sleep on a very nice Serta air bed, which means that there is no place for any bugs to hide except in the sheets or blanket.
I'm sure the room that bed is in offers plenty of crevices that they would find extremely cozy.
Not really a good point at all. Bedbugs don't hide in the sheets. They hide in the crevices of the mattress, box-springs, bed frame, and surrounding areas. You might find a few bugs crawling the bedsheets, but it's not where they lay their eggs.
Case in point, I got infested when a friend gave me a chair for my computer desk.
While it infected my bed, it wasn't the source.
Be seeing you...
*sigh*
Ants, flies, cockroaches, dust mites, etc. are not bedbugs. Bedbugs are not drawn to filth. They might use trash strewn about as a hiding place, but "clean that mess up or you'll get bedbugs!" is just not true. Bedbugs are drawn to you, because you are their food source. They spread by hitchhiking on clothes, luggage, etc. from an infested area to an uninfested area. Hotels are prime breeding and distribution spots. Or, if you live in an apartment complex or building, they'll spread between the walls from apartment to apartment.
If you really want to avoid getting bedbugs, the best thing you can do isn't to keep your room meticulously clean. It's to put your clothes and luggage in the dryer as soon as you return home after spending a night in a hotel.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Nah, not all-American, that's just the southern part. To bring in the rest of America, the Styrofoam is made from corn pulled from the school lunch program in Iowa.
The corn is trucked down to southern California in trucks that run on highly toxic lithium batteries, which made by smelting thousands of tons of lithium ore in coal
furnaces and charged with electricity from either the coal power plant, or the ethanol burning plant down the road. Ethanol burning, mind you, not ethanol powered.
It uses 20,000 gallons of diesel each day to run the plant, drying all the water out of the ethanol and such. The ethanol is then burned along with some chemical catalysts to produce the power for it's customers. Well, not customers, exactly - really the feds are the the customer - they pay 90% of the bills. The users only pay 10%, to match the price of electricity from natural gas. But I digress. The ethanol is also made from the same Iowa corn, of course, so most of the corn that's brought in doesn't get made into styrofoam, but instead made into ethanol for electricity to charge the lithium-battery trucks that bring the corn. The only problem is, it's getting harder to get
enough corn from Iowa because they say there's a food shortage up there. I don't know why, with all that farmland they have.
Anyway, so down in SoCal they make the corn Styrofoam by bubbling corn porridge with cyanostrychninehydrodeathdioxide. They used to make it by blowing air into plastic, but plastic aint biodegradable, so they they use corn porridge with cyanostrychninehydrodeathdioxide bubbles for the Styrofoam. That's awesome because all those new corn porridge jobs netted the Corn Stirrer's Union another $12 million per employee in retirement benefits. After they make the Styrofoam there, they truck it over to Connecticut so that a woman-owned business there can sell it back to the SoCal company they bought it from, who gets a $90 million tax credit for buying from a woman-owned business.
And THAT is how they styrofoam is ALL-American.
Bedbug sex is extremely painful for the female..
dude..! i knew some juicy info from the bedbug war frontlines will surface in this /. discussion, but this surpassed even my wildest expectations
So how did we get rid of them? We tried various techniques. Encasing our mattress/boxspring and pillows in bedbug proof cases. Putting the legs of the bed in bowls of water. Spraying multiple times, sweeping constantly. The spraying did reduce the numbers, but didn't eliminate them totally. The final nail in the coffin for them was going out and buying a clothes steamer, and steaming the mattress, boxspring, pillows, baseboards, and any other hiding spots in the bedroom. They have to be heated to a certain temperature (can't recall the exact temp at the moment) in order to kill the adults and eggs. So it was a very slow process to make sure they were cooked by the steam. We repeated this process every other day for over a week. At the same time we washed our bed sheets and clothes... ALL OF THEM, even ones we rarely wore and were still clean.
Of course we were paranoid that there were still eggs, waiting to hatch that we had missed... and we were just waiting for that second outbreak. Lucky for us it never came.
Your friend gave you a chair that was infested with bed bugs. That chair then infested your bed but it wasn't the source. Do you know how dumb that sounds? Either logic or English has failed you.
Yeah, that's kinda the point, that the whole device is ridiculous on several levels, including that one.
Funny THAT is the part you found odd.
Ya know what, the experts say the same BS about lice- oh they don't actually like dirty hair, they like clean hair. THAT IS BULLSHIT! The only people that get lice, roaches, bed bugs, mites, fleas, and flies are nasty fuckers. Same goes for rats. Sure you can be super clean but that nasty fucking friend your other friend brings over, yeah he gave that shit to you. The only insect I can give you a pass on are ants. If it is raining alot and the ground is saturated, then they will go inside any house. But those other vermin? Nasty fuckers breed em and keep em alive which spreads that shit around to everyone else. Sorry guy, this is one time where thousands of us people gathering anecdotal evidence are actually right. Wash your ass, fix your leaky plumbing and dry up the cesspool under your trailer, take your goddamned trash off to the dump, wash your fucking nasty ass, vacuum your house, wash the goddamned dishes, wash your nasty fucking ass, wash your dog's nasty fucking ass, stop raising chickens in your living room, and most importantly- WASH YOUR NASTY GODDAMNED ASS!
Considering the massive bedbug problem in the state, they may want to try and get in at the starting gate.
Of course, they're probably too busy policing Big Gulps and other 'health' issues to take care of something small (like this health issue).
You know, it is usually worth learning something about what you're talking about instead of just spouting your uninformed, prejudicial, snobby bullshit. We're supposed to be nerds, people that come to opinions based on actual facts.
IIRC, they scatter under light. Maybe they're just hiding from the light in whatever crevice they can?
If they would stay in the bed, we would just burn the bedlinen and presto.
One of the other posters said that bedbug sex is very painful and the females are hiding from the males after they have sex the first time.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
It's an odd topic, but I recall reading an article on it. The male will basically "crack" the female's shell and forcibly impregnate her in various cases IIRC
I wash my pillows in 60C from time to time.. Throw them in dryer with a couple of tennis-balls makes them like new...
Mattress i use a steamer (high-pressure steam) on from time to time. (A real machine, not the crap they have on tv-shop etc)... Doing this have allowed me to keep my current bed for about 10 years now without it spewing dust into the air.....
As a side-note, there are some firms that do high-pressure steam cleaning of beds. They have some machine that is a vacuum+steamer at the same time that is supposed to clean 30cm into the mattress and kill most types of of bacteria/insects without chemicals.
But also. It's a good idea to replace all fabric in the bedroom from time to time.. Perfect time is in the winter when you remove all the old crap and open the windows and let the temperature in the room go below freezing for an hour or so.. (be careful with the heaters, don't turn them off).
If your underwear and sheets need to be sterilized, you have other issues you need to deal with.
Actually this is quite normal for a large part of the population that have allergies.. Problem with washing with too low temperature, and a low amount of water, is that first the allergens are not completely removed and it allows old detergent to build up in amount in the fabric and the other part is that the rinse-cycle does not remove enough of the detergent since it does the rinse cycle with only cold water and this is causing skin-irritation for people...
This IS be a big problem among children since they have a bit more sensitive skin.
What i would love for the future, to please the "greenies", is a steam-cycle on the washing machine to just freshen the clothes instead of washing them.. Then i could probably keep using them for 2-3 times as long, depending on what i do, before needing to wash them for real, at 60C.
But for all the people out there.. It is recommended that sheets should be cleaned at 60-90C to make sure that all bacteria and dust-mites are killed.
Underwear is probably a whole different area, but 60C should probably be used, at least every 3-4 wash, since those areas can be a bit sensitive against detergent residue buildup.
I'm fascinated and hopeful from the plethora of various non-chemical bed bug control methods which have been discussed here, but rather bemused that no one has talked about insect growth regulators, which are much less toxic than most insecticides (they actually don't even kill the insects themselves, just short-circuit their life cycle, preventing reproduction), yet more effective for long-term control (from what I understand).
Did I miss something and bed bugs have already developed a wide immunity to these agents?