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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...
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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.
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.
People have been told to save energy (and the environment) by using cold water to wash their laundry. 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.
I mean this is why I hate stupid green alarmists because they can't apply rational common sense to anything. Sure, washing your jeans or shirts in cold water makes an environmentally sound choice, but then you get the stupid green alarmists who wash EVERYTHING in cold water using some weak ass granola derivative laundry detergent.
Guess what? Bed bugs survive cold water washes using ineffective detergent which is why bed bugs are increasing in urban centers which have a high concentration of stupid green alarmists.
Use common sense and realize that your bed sheets and underwear should be washed with the hottest fucking cycle your laundry machine can muster, that will end your bed bug and (most liikly) crab issues.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
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.
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'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?
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.
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.
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?).
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.
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.
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).
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?