08.30.10
Summer of the bed bug
http://www.nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/08/in_1913_the_department_of.html
New York, Darwin, and Cimex Lectularious
In 1913, the Department of Agriculture issued a warning to
housewives about a bug called cimex lectularius, then known as a
“chinch,” “crimson rambler,” or “mahogany flat.” Now we call it
something else: a bedbug.
Even then, the bedbug was said to show “a certain degree of
wariness and intelligence from its long association with man.” The
Department of Agriculture chose to look on the bright side: Thank
God the damn thing lost its wings ages ago, because “otherwise
there would be no safety from this pest, even for the most careful
and thorough housekeeper.” Nearly 100 years later, freedom from
cimex is increasingly hard to find. Summer 2010 has been the
Summer of the Bedbug.
bed bug victim said,
August 31, 2010 at 1:22 am
I got bed bugs from my previous fellow tenant. This stupid guy brought a used sofa into his room and now the entire apartment is full of bed bugs.
Landlord didn’t help much either. When I moved out, she didn’t even pay back my deposit. Was it my fault to bringing these bed bugs? No, and she knew that.
She agreed with that too.
It was a terrible experience.
Here is my advice when you have bed bugs:
Don’t throw away your mattress immediately; otherwise someone else can get bed bugs.
1. Buy 3 cans of bed bug spray (you really need that)
2. Spray your mattress
3. Seal your mattress with thick plastic mattress cover
(must NOT have any holes, otherwise they can get in and bit you again)
4. Find the bed bugs in your bed frame and kill them
5. Spray your bed frame every day for at least 1 week
6. Wash your bed sheets and blankets with HOT water
7. Wash all your clothes with HOT water
8. Dry your clothes in heater (heat can kill bed bugs)
9. After cleaning, put your cloths in a plastic bag with air zip
10. Put your bags of cloths in the middle of your house
11. These are just the basic steps, bed bugs can still hide in the holes and cracks of your wall.
There is more to do than this …
Remember to organize your furniture and seal everything with plastic bags. Bed bugs don’t just hide into your bed, they are everywhere in your house.
MBFM said,
August 31, 2010 at 12:20 pm
That was great advice. Let us know how you do.
In The People’s Guide To Mexico, by Karl Franz, on page 156 in a subsection entitled Housekeeping Hints, there is this:
“Bedbugs can be repelled by smearing the pulp of calabaza helionda (apodanthera undulata, otherwise known as calabansilla) on the bedframe. This is a wild gourd or squash, about the size of a baseball. If you make the mistake of tasting it, you will see why bedbugs can’t stand it”
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=apodanthera+undulata&btnG=Google+Search
Run some google searches and see if they have this in bodegas (markets).
nemo said,
August 31, 2010 at 12:50 pm
Good stuff: I will upgrade these to post level tomorrow.
MBFM said,
September 1, 2010 at 11:56 am
Yesterdays New York Times science section had an article about bedbugs. It stated that allergic/anaphylactic shock can be triggered by repeated bedbug bites but is rare.
Rare though it it, its life threatening. Here, from the best of craigslist is
one man’s ordeal, entitled ‘An Open Letter to My Bedbugs’, from August, 2006
http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/chi/196226851.html
(quote)
Listen up, you heinous little motherfuckers. I am not playing. Before I deliver the grim news of your collective fates, let me give you a brief synopsis of how you have driven me to the brink of insanity over the last three months. Here it is.
Unfortunately, because I am paying over $400 a month in student loans and am therefore very cheap, I made the mistake of accepting a used mattress from a coworker to put on top of my new bed frame and box springs. So. You and I have, by my calculations, been residing together since May. MAY. That’s when I unwittingly brought you and your home into my bedroom. That’s when I became your new food source. Your “host.”
You guys are pretty tricky, I have to tell you. I mean, when I started seeing little purple dots on my toes in the morning, I did what you wanted me to do, which was to blame them on anything and everything under the sun except you. This is because I was wholly unaware that such hideous creatures as yourselves existed. I figured it was a spider, so I vacuumed profusely. Then I thought it was mosquitos, so I busted out the Off. Nothing seemed to be working. But you know this already, don’t you? Yes, you snacked on me all through the month of June, getting your fill of my blood while I snored on, retreating back to the crevices of my mattress just before dawn, leaving no sign or trail.
Ahhh, June. What a peaceful, sane month. Ignorance, in this case, was truly bliss.
But then came July and with July came some strange occurances. You multiplied, didn’t you? Got a little more hungry, huh? You must have because that’s when my body started to revolt against whatever it is you injected me with when you were gnawing on my flesh. See, I started having these weird allergic reactions. Getting hives for no reason at all. So I changed my laundry detergent to something dye-free, fragrance-free. That didn’t work. Then I changed my soap to something hypoallergenic. No, that didn’t work either. And the hives kept getting worse, until one morning, I woke up with not only hives all over my chest and back, but about twenty purple dots on my feet, which I (ignorance, remember) attributed to the allergies. Remember that morning, my little roommates? Do you? That’s the morning my throat swelled shut and I had to be rushed to the emergency room.
You had us all stumped, from the ER doc to the allergist. They ran tests, researched, poked, prodded, scraped… All to no avail. The diagnosis? I was allergic to myself, because they could find nothing that I was allergic to otherwise. I was ALLERGIC TO MYSELF?? Yes, that was the diagnosis. But they were so very wrong, weren’t they? You guys are so slick as to leave bites that disappear pretty quickly and could be ANYTHING, right? So I took my Allegra and went to sleep every night and you fed on, didn’t you?
Then came August. I was dealing with being hivey all the time and rashy some of the time and generally very uncomfortable, but I was dealing, you know? And then you showed your faces. Literally. See, I have it figured out now.
The grandaddy of all bedbugs came to play, didn’t he? He must have been starving because he gave me three bites I just couldn’t ignore. I mean, these were nasty, bright red and the size of a penny and really fucking itchy. That’s when the lightbulb went on, bitches. There was something FUNKY going on in my bedroom and I was on to you, I just didn’t have a clue that you were so stealthy. Really, you are.
But I looked you up. God bless the internet.
Yep, I Googled your asses and when I typed in “bites while sleeping,” there you were. You are some ugly motherfuckers, too. I’m not just saying that because you’ve been stealing my blood without my knowledge or consent, either. You are really ugly.
This is where the insanity begins, because in order to prove that you really were cohabitating with me, I had to willingly and knowingly be your food and catch you eating me. This, as you know, meant sleeping (and I use the word “sleeping” very loosely at this point) with a flashlight beside me and waking up intermittently throughout the night for five nights straight to examine my body and catch you in the middle of snacktime. Thing is, you instinctively knew I wasn’t sleeping, didn’t you?
So you held out for as long as you could. But one of you was weaker than the rest. He couldn’t last, he couldn’t hang and he gave you up, huh?
So there I was, reading my book, completely not expecting you guys for several more hours when he ran out from under my sheet, straight past my nose, towards the edge of the bed. Now I told you before and I’ll tell you again: I am not playing. I smashed that motherfucker so fast he had no clue what hit him. And what came flying out of his crushed body? Come on, you know. YES! MY BLOOD!!
Alright, bitches. I have you now. I saved his corpse. I bought a magnifying glass. I called Terminix and I slept on the living room floor for two nights.
And when Drew, the friendly Terminix employee, showed up at my door last night, I told him straight out what I have already told you twice: I am not playing. Drew and I threw out the evil devil spawn mattress. We threw out the box springs. We threw out the fan, the bookcase, the books, everything in the back closet. All of it, gone. GONE, I tell you. And then Drew, my new best friend, sprayed the FUCK out of the entire house. I was not playing. He said it probably would be okay to just get the bedroom.
Fuck that. You bitches have been giving me hives for three fucking months now. You’re dead, it’s over. We left no crack unsprayed, no piece of funiture unbombed. That’s right, assholes, I BOMBED YOUR ASSES. TWICE.
And tomorrow, I’m coming for the couch and chairs. They’re history. As I said, you’re pretty slick, so I can see you thinking you can make a new home in my living room. Go fuck yourselves.
And if any of you survived the initial attacks, be warned. Drew and I have a little deal and it’s called HE’S COMING BACK in two weeks to bomb you again. And then he will come back once every 90 days for the next YEAR.
So be prepared. YOU WILL DIE. I am not playing.
this is in or around you’re dead
no — it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
PostingID: 196226851
Darwiniana » Bed bugs said,
September 1, 2010 at 1:43 pm
[...] Comment series on the bed bug…: http://darwiniana.com/2010/08/30/summer-of-the-bed-bug/comment-page-1/#comment-354121 [...]
MBFM said,
September 2, 2010 at 12:37 pm
Question for Bed Bug Victim:
When you advise washing belongings with hot water, will the ‘hot’ setting
on laundromat washing machines and the high setting on the drier be enough?
Or must the water be hotter even than that?
Great list of advice. I hope someone can track down that wild squash. If it
grows in northern Mexico, it might be indigenous to the US and if so, someone could serve suffering humanity by finding a way to sell the seeds so that people can grow some in their back yards and have it available just in case they or someone they know has bed bug problems and need a plant based repellant.
This information was from the 9th edition printed in 1992/1993 of The Peoples Guide to Mexico, by Karl Franz, and can be found on page 156 under ‘Housekeeping Hints’ in the boxed section at the bottom of the page.
bed bug victum said,
September 2, 2010 at 1:01 pm
Hi MBFM,
Good question.
The temperature must be higher than 45 Celsius.
Another tip that I’ve learned:
Instead of washing your cloths, put your cloths first in the dryer.
Because after you wash the cloths, it’s still wet. So putting the wet cloth in the heater will not have the maximum effect.
I think putting the heater first is the best, because your cloths are still dry.
It’s all about HEAT. Burn them, burn these stupid bed bugs…
You can read all the details about how to kill bugs here:
http://www.bedbuggoaway.com/bedbugs-size.shtml
The complete check list is there.
Hope this will help you!
MBFM said,
September 3, 2010 at 10:05 am
I dont have them (at least not yet) but this is excellent information. Bed bugs are a problem all over the country these days.
Here is survival tip:
Pre-Test Laundromat Driers to See if They Run Hot Before Loading Them!!
As Bedbug Victim informs us, to achieve the Holy Grail of bedbug eradication, you need that target temp of greater than 45 Celsius That that means the laundromat drier you select has to be running hot.
45 Celsius = 111 F
http://www.sciencemadesimple.net/temperature.php
If a laundromat drier is running below 45 C/111 F, (even if set on high), and you put your stuff in there, it may not kill the bugs and, dear G-d, the little darlings may not only stay alive in your bedding but worse yet, a few may lurk in that drier and infest someone elses stuff.
Because some laundromat heaters dont get as hot as they should (usually just before they break down and elicit customer complaints to management), you dont want to be screwed over in your hour of need.
Because some laundromat driers do not heat up as much as they should, test that drier by putting in a quarter, turn it on and set it on High.
Then feel whether the glass heats up. Or if someone has recently unloaded a drier, and the glass is still hot (not warm but HOT), you know immediately that that one runs hot enough to 1) dry your clothes or 2) Fry the bedbugs.
(Pre testing driers is a good idea anyway. I once wasted an hour on a drier that ran lukewarm. Lost a couple of dollars, one hour of time and my load was still water-logged.)
bed bug victim said,
September 14, 2010 at 12:34 pm
Ok, here are a few more tips:
Plan A
1. Go to a public laundry place, those coin machines
2. Put your cloths immediately in the dryer with the highest temperature
Plan B
1. Boil water at home
2. Put your cloth in the bucket
3. Put the boiled water (100-90 Celcius) into the bucket
4 Die bed begs!! I hate them
How do know all these tips? I have been fighting with bed bugs for almost a year. It’s terrible time consuming.
Sometimes sleepless nights. They keep coming back.
Keep bed bugs away from your mattress. Don’t let them bite you.
They need blood. Once they have bitten you, they can muliply again and the whole bed bug problem starts over again.
Here is a complete list about prevent and keeping bed bugs away from your bed
http://www.bedbuggoaway.com/bed-bugs-matress2.shtml