Bedbugs and the Monster House Bug - a comparison of two species

I have found bed bugs to be one of the most fascinating creatures I have encountered, and this is true in spite of all the problems they have caused and are still causing for me. As this saga of the bed unfolds the bed story continues to take all sorts of bizarre and unpredictable twists and turns, and although emotionally, I would describe myself as being extremely pissed off by what has been unfolding in my life, if I put aside my feelings and become totally objective about things, I am actually feeling quite fortunate that these things are happening to me, for I have a sort of scientific curiosity about things, and with these bed bugs it is always one fascinating discovery after another. When I think of all the things I would never know if matters had not taken the course which they did, I can't imagine myself changing a thing, and this remains true even the situation continues to deteriorate, and is now becoming one of the most monstrous experiences of my life.

In would like to share with people my latest fascinating discovery about bed bugs and about human behavior as it relates to bedbugs. Now that there is this plague of pesticide resistant bedbugs building up in the country, people are going to have to deal with bedbugs sooner or later, since those things are experiencing an exponential population explosion, and they are about to overrun the entire country like some unstoppable steam roller. The first reports of the pesticide resistant bedbug that I have discovered was a report on the BBC website dated back to 1998, and bedbugs have continued to spread since that time, with the rate of growth accelerating each year, as is typical of exponential functions. For those who are interested, the exponential function which describes the population explosion of bed bugs is ‘x squared' (see the accompanying graph).





It turns out that my experience with bedbugs is probably quite different than the experiences of most other people, for you see it is typical when people discover bedbugs, that they do not waste any time becoming acquainted with the bug, but rather they are instantly on the phone to the pest control company. It is also typical that people have bedbugs for quite some time, and do not know it, and that by the time they get around to making the discovery followed by the phone call, the bed bug problem is already out of control in their place. I had bedbugs for months, and did not know that I had bedbugs, and the reason for it all is a combination of public ignorance concerning the bedbug (entire generations have lived their lives without a thought about a bedbug) as well as the secretive behavior of bedbugs. You see a bedbug does not want to get caught, since it is a very naughty bug which sneaks up on people while they are sleeping and bites them so as to suck their blood. This behavior is not well regarded by people, and so therefore if some bug wants to get away with a dirty stunt such as that one, well it had best be a very careful and very, very secretive bug, which is exactly how the bedbug behaves.

Immediately after discovering that I had bugs, and then discovering that the bug was a ‘bedbug', I understood that the reason for the sudden reappearance of this problem was that we had a pesticide resistant bedbug on the loose in the country. I knew this right from day one, when I went searching for information on bedbugs, and was then told that story about what a special type of bug a bedbug was, being a bug that needed to be sprayed and sprayed over and over again. It was also a bug that was experiencing an exponential population explosion at the same time that it was being sprayed over and over again, which of course told the whole story right there, for if spraying a bedbug was a worth a damn there would not be a plague of bedbugs, for you see I have lived my entire life without giving one second of thought to a ‘bedbug' because in those days it was different, and spraying a bedbug was something that worked on bedbugs, while obviously it doesn't work anymore, as you can tell, because now we have bedbugs all over the place.

Just as an aside here, I will mention that if you tell people about that pesticide resistant bedbug they get very pissed off, they go into denial, and then they spray the hell out of the bedbug. The way to deal with this troublesome display of human behavior, is to leave people to spray and spray and then, as the bedbug takes over the entire country, somewhere along the line people will have to clue in to the fact that it is a pesticide resistant bedbug, at which time they might then begin to wonder why they are spraying, since that only compounds the problem. But more on that later...

Now I do not want to spray a pesticide resistant bedbug with pesticides, but unfortunately, I live in a high rise, and that means that I am getting sprayed because it turns out that when you are in a community of people, you have to join the crowd and if they are doing something ruinous, well you have to become ruined right along with everyone else, because you are just one person and there really isn't a hell of a lot you can do about it...If you are autonomous, you make your own decisions, but when you are part of a community, you do not, and when because of human nature the community really makes bad decisions, you have to endure the process and also suffer the consequences yourself in the hope that somewhere along the line, as things keep getting worse, perhaps the benefits of a delusion might eventually be outweighed by the costs associated with it, thus causing them to smarten up, hopefully this taking place sometime before Armageddon.

In the high rise I live in the pesticide resistant bedbug has been present in the building for years, but it had so little resistance to pesticides, since usually resistance develops first in isolated individuals, that there was a lag time of close to a year and a half between reported infestations, which then fostered the illusion that someone brought a bedbug into the building, perhaps in some furniture, thus requiring another periodic extermination to take care of the problem. After that last ‘extermination' the bedbug trotted over to my place to start over again, which is how I got the things. When I discovered that this was the pesticide resistant bedbug, which was pretty obvious when you consider how it was trotting around the building, I understood that the worst thing I could do was to spray that bedbug with pesticides, since if bedbugs are to develop resistance at the population level, they require help from human beings. The way this works is that human beings must spray and kill all the bedbugs that are not resistant, getting rid of them, so that the pesticide resistant gene can then be passed on from bug to bug and the pesticide resistant bedbug can then start up a real plague, since the bad genes were finally at long last eliminated and thus could cause no more problems for those bed bugs. This will take some time, since female bed bugs only need to be fertilized once and can then go about laying 500 eggs. A pesticide resistant female runs the risk of being fertilized by a genetically weaker male, and for this reason you can kill lots of bedbugs, at least at the start. You might have ten resistant females, and two might have been inseminated by a resistant male, while eight mated with weaker males. Then you might have five of each, and then finally, after the humans have sprayed pesticides enough times, you might have nine females inseminated by nine resistant males, and only one female with the weaker gene, at which time things really start to get interesting. For bedbugs to achieve this highly desirable outcome they will need help from the humans, and that never proves to be a problem, as humans spray bedbugs on sight, and that includes pesticide resistant bedbugs, which are also sprayed, only more often, given their resistance, which turns out to be one hell of a bad idea.

When you are determined not to spray that bedbug even one more time, as I was, you wind up spending some time with the bedbug, as I did, and naturally, after you have roomed with someone for a while, you get to know them. This was very interesting, and it is becoming even more interesting now that the building is being sprayed over and over again, and the bedbugs are becoming more and more resistant, surviving in greater and greater and greater numbers, with almost no lag time between infestations. Since the bedbug spraying began the bedbug has spread to three floors, and there is no longer a lag time of a year between infestations, but rather infestations are popping up immediately, owing to the fact that the bed bugs are now surviving in ever greater numbers, since with all this repeated spraying all the weaker bedbugs are being knocked down with ever increasing speed, thus allowing the bedbugs to begin to experience exponential growth rates. Instead of taking a whole year to reappear in just one suite, they are now invading multiple suites on multiple floors in a matter of days or weeks.

I lived with bedbugs for a few months without spraying them, and let me tell you, do people ever give you supreme shit for doing that. This does not mean that I did nothing at all. First, I starved the bed bug, by employing a tenting solution. This makes sense. You cannot have a plague of bedbugs without blood donors. Female bedbugs cannot lay eggs without a blood meals, and nymphs are unable to molt and thus mature to go on to mate without a blood meal at each stage. First slam on the brakes and prevent any further growth of the bedbug population, for it does not make sense to be making bedbugs as fast as you are getting rid of them. Eventually the bedbugs in my suite turned into translucent golden colored bugs, which is the natural color of a bed bug when it hasn't eaten in quite a while, and when this happens, the bedbug goes into stasis to conserve energy and becomes immobile. Bedbugs chose preferential nesting sites in various boxes near my bed, and that turned out to be a mistake, since I was able to kill just about every bed bug in the place by freezing all my stuff at temperatures which were dipping down to the minus thirties. This was so effective I was able to sleep for five hours out in the open without getting bit by a bedbug, so many of them having been bumped off, since it is the nature of bedbugs to chose what they consider the ideal nesting location. They will turn their nose up at a plastic tray, but they find a cardboard box impossible to resist, although a box ten feet away they will pass up if they can find a box two feet away. You can be sure they will in that box two feet away, while a check of the box ten feet away will reveal not a single bug, and for this reason I would like to suggest setting a trap for a bedbug by placing some cardboard boxes, perhaps with some natural fibers like cotton which bedbugs also love, about one foot away from you bed. Leave it there for a while, and trust me, those bedbugs will take the bait, and you can get rid of a hell of a lot of bedbugs and their nymphs and their eggs by pulling a stunt like that one.

Well as I was saying, I split a suite with some bedbugs for a few months, and became intimately acquainted with them. I am not squeamish, so this didn't bother, since they were not allowed to bite me (the tenting solution is quite elegant and simple and does work, provided you make damn sure there is not so much as a small crack they can worm their way through, because they are persistent, and if there is so much as a small crack in your defenses, they will find it. I also discovered that bedbugs have a memory, and once they find that crack, well they will be visiting that crack again and again. You see, when I first found bedbugs, my first response was to seal off the bedroom, and sleep on the living room floor while I tried to figure out what to do. It took them about a week and half of persistent effort to finally find a crack and locate me on the living room floor. Naturally I was real sleepless, having not thought of that tenting solution at the time, and because I work late and sleep late, my REM sleep pattern is during daylight hours. Bedbugs have an internal; clock which they adjust to match your clock, and so that business about the bedbug showing up around five in the morning, because that is when you are in REM sleep is not true, unless you are, in which case it is. One sleepless day I happened to look over at my bedding, and there perched on my pillow, looking for me, was a bedbug. I looked at the clock, and realized that bedbug was expecting me to be in my REM in sleep, which wasn't happening because those buggers were causing me to lose sleep. They say a bedbug follows a trail of CO2 to find you in bed, and that is not completely true, because I was not in bed. The first time that bed bug tracks you down maybe it will use CO2 to find you, but after that it is no longer required that the bed bug be as primitive as a mosquito, since it remembers, and it also carries a watch, so for this reason it can just trot over and look for you even if it turns out that, alas, you weren't there. In the same way you can expect a bedbug to remember every damn crack or hole in your defenses, and return again and again, so therefore it is imperative that you remember that this is a bedbug we are talking about here, and make damn sure you don't feel complacent about some supposedly ‘minor' crack or unimportant hole.

If you visit the bedbug blogs and information sites out on the internet you will be given lots of information which allegedly describes the behavior patterns of a bedbug. I remember thinking after getting to know that bug myself that bedbug blogs and information sites are the biggest source of misinformation about bedbugs on the planet, and my explanation for those descriptions of that terrible monster bug, that hideous creature, that you find on such sites was that the people who were responsible for such sites were obviously hysterics who were over sensitive and thus inclined to go over the deep end when it came to discussing that bedbug. For you see, I lived with a bedbug myself, and compared to my experience what I was reading on those bed bug blogs was a pile of nonsense, and thus obviously some people were hysterical and thus should just be ignored.

However, it turns out that there are two types of bedbugs in the world. There was my bedbug. I will call it the natural bedbug, a product of nature and evolution. Because I refused to spray the bug with pesticide for some time, I got to know the natural bed bug. Now my life is getting very interesting, for you see, the building is now getting sprayed for bedbugs, over and over again, and the bedbug story has now taken a very bizarre turn, for now I have been introduced to that other type of bug, the one you read about on the internet, that human creature, the monster house bug. I call that thing a house bug, because it is not a bed bug anymore, but rather it is now the kind of crazed monster bug that will bite you anywhere in the house, and at any time of the day or night, and therefore it does not make sense to me to keep calling that thing a bedbug, when it is not a bedbug anymore, but rather a monster house bug.

I am actually quite satisfied that my place is being sprayed over and over with pesticides, because now finally I can read bedbug blogs on the internet, and instead of wondering what the hell would be wrong with those people that they would post such hysterical crap about a bug like that bedbug, well now I can really appreciate the full horror of that monster house bug, for you see, since the pest control company has been visiting my pad, I no longer have to deal with bed bugs, for I have the new monster house bug in my place now.

There are probably very few people who know the bedbug, since most people spray the bedbug on sight, and when you do that, you meet the monster house bug, which is not the same as meeting a bedbug. I did not spray for a few months, and so therefore I have a unique perspective to share with people, for I know the bedbug, and most people don't, and this gives me a point of reference with which to compare that monster house bug, the creation of the pest control company, with nature's bug, the bedbug.

Let me describe the bedbug to those of you who may not be familiar with this particular house guest. A bedbug is a bug that hides all day so you won't find out that you have bedbugs. You can have bedbugs for months, like I did, and never know it, because you never see a bedbug (unless the pest control company shows up, in which case they will be crawling all over you twenty four hours a day-but more on that later). A bed bug will never crawl ten feet if it can crawl one foot, which is why you will always find a bed bug in a cardboard box one foot away, but never ten feet away if a box one foot away is available. The reason for this behavior is that bed bugs are at risk when out crawling, therefore they would rather not crawl. The truth about a bed bug is that really, it would rather not bite people, but it has to bite them, since it is a bed bug. For this reason a bedbug will only crawl out about once every week and half, do a quick bite and then it is back into the cardboard box, hopefully after only the very shortest crawl, because a bedbug, you see, is a very timid bug and is just terrified of human beings. For this reason a bed bug will only dare to come out at five in the morning, when you are in the deepest REM sleep.

If a human being should happen to surprise a bed bug, and catch a bed bug out in the open crawling, the bed bug will be seized with wild panic. If there is no crack nearby, the bed bug will turn left, and then turn right, and then in a state of wild confusion fueled by growing terror, it will turn north, south, east, and west, while hopping on its toes, ready to bolt at top speed, if only it could find a nearby crack in the wall or some similar place. If the human makes a move, and the bed bug happens to be facing west, well then that bedbug will bolt at a full speed trot going west, even if north might have been a better choice. If you are moving something around, and a bed bug was hiding there, and if there should be a crack about two inches away, that bed bug will fire off like a bullet and will be in that crack like a bolt of greased lightening. If you are inspecting your stuff before freezing it outside, and you happen to open that cardboard box, you might find a bunch of nymphs. They are like large grains of pepper, and if they stood still, you would not even notice them, because they look like specks of dust. However a bedbug nymph is the most easily frightened of all bedbugs, and while a fully mature adult my try that bug trick of freezing and not moving, a bed bug nymph will roar off into some crack every time, or it will hop around in panic and then roar off in some direction to get away. If freezing on the spot doesn't work, that mature bed bug will zoom into some nearby crack so fast it looks like a blur (when frightened they are extremely fast bugs).

Now if you starve a bedbug, it loses its red coloration, and turns a golden tawny color and becomes translucent. If you read the bed bug blogs you will be told that you cannot starve a bed bug, and the very suggestion is such ridiculous nonsense it isn't even worth considering, for the bed bug will just attack you in the kitchen while you are making lunch. Actually you cannot starve a monster house bug (more on that later) but you can starve a bed bug quite successfully. I had great luck with the tactic, for you see, the bedbug is so damned scared of me, that even hunger will not make that bedbug attack me in the kitchen. For this reason bedbugs can live there entire natural lifespan of a year and half without one bite of food, for you see, there is no way that bedbug is going anywhere near a terrifying creature like a human being, unless it happens to be five in the morning, and the bedbug can be sure they are so sound asleep that it might be possible to do a quick bite and then get the hell out of there in one piece.

This then is the bedbug, truly nature's most terrified bug, and having gotten to know that creature so very well over the course of a few pesticide free months, you can understand why I would be so appalled by the misinformation about the monster house bug I was reading on those hysterical sounding bed bug blog websites. I kept reading all this obviously hysterical crap about bed bugs climbing on people in the daytime and how you have to change clothes carefully before visiting a friend because bed bugs will be crawling all over you all day long and you don't want to give a friend a bedbug, now do you? Those people, I thought, they really need to take a pill or something. A bed bug? Crawling on people all day long? That'll be the day, I snorted to myself. Well it was quite disgusting to me reading those ridiculous bed bug blogs.

Then the pest control company came. That makes all the difference in the world. You see one thing that bed bug blog people have in common is their great insistence on calling the pest control guy, and it is for this reason that bed bug blog writers are experts on the monster house bug while at the same time remaining completely clueless about the natural bed bug. I however, am now an expert on both these species, and so for the very first time I can read those bed bug blogs and actually understand what those people are talking about for the very first time, for now I don't have bedbugs anymore, but I have that other fearless, reckless, aggressive creature, the monster house bug instead. Naturally I am very nostalgic thinking about my days with the bedbug, because now my life is becoming a living hell. I just cannot stand that dreadful little monster, that pesticide addled, pesticide resistant monster house bug.

In a previous article I wrote about the experience of the African people, who have had DDT sprayed in their homes as part of an anti-malaria campaign, and then were being constantly attacked by the monster house bug, since like the pesticides we use in this country, DDT turns bedbugs into fearless and aggressive little monsters. The presence of the monster house bug is the signal indicator of the existence of the pesticide resistant bedbug. DDT does not kill bedbugs. They are resistant to it. The chemicals we are using in this country do not kill bedbugs. In both cases the effects are the same, for these chemicals turn bedbugs into disgusting little monsters.

I went for months without a single bed bug bite. Now I have bed bugs crawling all over me all the time. They are no longer afraid of me. They are reckless and they are aggressive. I have twenty bed bug bites on my arm, I stopped counting at three dozen on my legs, since those things keep crawling up my pant legs. I have a few dozen on chest, and I didn't even bother counting the bed bug bites on my back. My face is covered with twenty two bed bites. Many of my bites are tiny bites from nymphs which are crawling all over me and biting me all over the place, and which are like specks of pepper, and thus almost impossible to detect. If you happen to catch a bigger bed bug at it, you can swat the thing, but you are helpless when you are under daily attacks by those nymphs. All you can do is wait for them to get big enough so that you might be able to swat them. Bed bug bites are painless. They use an anesthetic. When a large bed bug crawls on you, you might feel it, but you cannot feel the crawling of the smaller bed bugs.

One evening, when I was at work, I looked in the mirror, and there to my horror was third stage nymph, biting me on the forehead. I am now a pestilential pustule of infection, a walking carrier of crazed pesticide addled bedbugs. If I step into the home of a friend I risk dropping my crawling nymphs all over their place. Now that my bedbugs have gone completely lunatic, I must begin to follow a strict routine. No clothes I wear at home must ever again be worn to work or to a friends house, lest I spread bedbugs everywhere I go, because they crawl all over me, and even follow me to work, those damned things. I must shower, and then peeling open my plastic bag I must carefully remove fresh clean clothing, and then get the hell out of the suite before some bedbug hops onto me and hitches a ride to wherever I am going.

Needless to say I am extremely pissed off at what is happening to my life. However, at the same time I wouldn't change a thing, because I am fascinated by all this. Just think about what I am learning. Now I understand how those damned bed bugs are spreading a plague over the whole country. The very method that is supposed to be controlling the bed bug is responsible for the plague. You do not spray a pesticide resistant bed bug with pesticides, for you will get a plague of bedbugs, real nasty ones to, the worst damned bedbugs I have ever had to put up with. Those bedbugs have gone completely screwed in the head, and are not bedbugs anymore. They are monsters now, the monster house bug, the kind of bug that hops onto people in subways and on buses, that hops onto you leg and then jumps off in restaurants and bars only to hop onto someone else. They are fearless now, and they are very aggressive. They are the pesticide resistant bedbug which was sprayed with pesticides, which is a big mistake. I always knew that was a mistake, but I never knew until I got my own place ‘treated' with those pesticides just how big a mistake that really is...and now that I do know I want to make sure everyone else knows about it as well.

If you are going to control a bug, you need to adapt your control strategy to the bug you are attempting to control. You need to understand that bug, its ways, its behavior. My advice to people is that you should try to control a bedbug because that is a lot easier than trying to endure a monster house bug. You cannot control those things, and even though you sleep in tenting, that won't work anymore, since they will just bite you all day long. This is not to say you should give up on the tenting idea, since at least when you are in bed you won't be getting bitten by the monster house bug. You don't need more bites from that thing, since it will already be covering your body with bites during the daytime if it can't bite you at night, and during the daytime you might have a chance to swat one of the things if you catch it.

If you are in the position to make your own decisions, free from the interference of other people, I would recommend that you do not spray a bedbug, but that rather you should starve the bedbug and force the thing to go into stasis. The alternative is the monster house bug, and that thing will make your life into a nightmare. If you are going to spray the place, do not take advice from me, because I give advice concerning bedbugs, and that would not be the bug you are interested in. You should consult the bed bug blogs and get your information from those people, because it turns out that they are experts in the behavior of the monster house bug, and all that advice they give is perfectly sound when it comes to dealing with that monster bug, which is what you will be dealing with if you pick up the phone and call for someone to use pesticides on a pesticide resistant bedbug, but the advice you get at such locations doesn't apply to bedbugs, since a bedbug is a completely different sort of bug and therefore can be controlled using completely different methods, these being methods that are appropriat e for bedbugs, but turn out to be not worth a damn as far as it concerns that monster house bug.

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