Since FR posters seem always to ask:
Dr. Dini Miller is my age (not young), but she is as cute as a bug.
Posted on 09/23/2010 5:37:30 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Listening to 14 insect scientists present their latest discoveries at the BedBug Central summit here on Wednesday, I was hit with one nagging question:
Are you people crazy as bedbugs?
I don't mean to be rude, but as they described the hours they spend in the laboratory observing the behavior of these bloodsucking specks who've ruined people's lives - or at least their mattresses - I had to wonder.
"I worked with German cockroaches for 18 years, so I think bedbugs are adorable," said Dr. Dini Miller, an elegant blond entomologist at Virginia Tech who was surrounded by bedbug groupies offering to send her the creepy crawlers they'd collected from Texas to Canada.
Adorable? How about bedbug sex - which males seem to try to have every minute or so. Dr. Coby Schal of North Carolina State revealed that "males have a can opener-like apparatus that will puncture the abdomen directly" - and not just of age-appropriate females. "Males will jump on anything, even young nymphs. They'll also jump on other males."
That got me wondering about gay bedbugs until Schal started talking about his research on bedbug feces. It's a good cause: Schal's hoping to recreate the Eau du-du Bedbug scent to help him build a better bedbug trap.
Still, with long hours in the laboratory inspecting bedbug excrement, Schal had to admit, "I don't know what my mother would think of the direction my life has taken."
Dr. Josh Benoit, who says he's been "superfascinated" by six-leggers since he was little, stopped collecting them in high school.
"Girls didn't like it," he explained. Understandable.
He got back into bugs in college, though.
"There's still so much about bedbug physiology we don't know. Doing research with mice, there are all sorts of rules, but with bedbugs, if I want to cut off their antennae or freeze them, I can."
Despite this, Benoit, 27, has a girlfriend. Poor dear.
I sought out Dr. Stephen Kells of the University of Minnesota, who predicted the bedbug pandemic in 2006. He figured out that bedbugs from other countries have mutated to be resistant to 88% of common pesticides after he dipped one in, "and it lived for four days and laid eggs."
Great: mutant bedbugs. Rolling off luggage carousels at JFK and headed to a mattress near you.
Then there's the legendary Harold Harlan, who had a thousands-strong bedbug collection and wrote the Army's guide to getting rid of the pests.
Harlan famously saved 600 bedbugs he'd "harvested" at Fort Dix in 1970. Scientists now use expired blood donated from the Red Cross to feed these insects their blood meal, but Harlan had no such luxury. So he grew his colony by letting them feed on his legs. For 30 years.
Now, that's crazy, no? Not according to Kells, who calls it foresight that gave scientists a pre-mutant control group for comparison.
"One year, you could look at it and it's crazy," Kellssaid. "The next year, it's genius."
Get me outta here!
One of my friends had a roommate who was working on her PhD in entomology and there were always numerous insect specimens in the freezer.
I don’t get bedbugs. Don’t people wash their sheets?
Ya’ mean ya’ gotta wash them?!?
The ones I bought stated a I would have to change my sheets for 3 years..........Dang...
I haven’t ever had them. I think they burrow into the mattresses and are hard to get rid of.
“Ya? mean ya? gotta wash them?!?”
For real. What is going on here? Bed bugs? Pfftt...
Let’s talk about crabs and we have a topic. Nothing crawling in my bed besides me and a lovely lady.
“I haven?t ever had them. I think they burrow into the mattresses and are hard to get rid of.”
If its that much of a problem, you haul it out to the street and get another one. People buy used mattresses with pecker tracks included. Who knew? LOL!!
If your property is infested, relplace it. Geesh....
You are borderline disgusting.
I dread when the infestation takes over college dorms.
Which, it will...
Since FR posters seem always to ask:
Dr. Dini Miller is my age (not young), but she is as cute as a bug.
This stuff applied with a non-thermal fogger works like a charm. It kills near instantaneously. Plus, it's 100% non-toxic. Unfortunately, I know this from first-hand experience.
For sure, and we didn’t have any trouble with “ Bed Bugs” until our boarders were unindated by illegal immigrants. Now they have infested everything. IBM building was the latest victim.
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