Posted on 04/12/2013 8:50:30 PM PDT by LibWhacker
Generations of Eastern European housewives doing battle against bedbugs spread bean leaves around the floor of an infested room at night. In the morning, the leaves would be covered with bedbugs that had somehow been trapped there. The leaves, and the pests, were collected and burned — by the pound, in extreme infestations.
Now a group of American scientists is studying this bedbug-leaf interaction, with an eye to replicating nature’s Roach Motel.
A study published Wednesday in The Journal of the Royal Society Interface details the scientists’ quest, including their discovery of how the bugs get hooked on the leaves, how the scientists have tried to recreate these hooks synthetically and how their artificial hooks have proved to be less successful than the biological ones.
At first glance, the whole notion seems far-fetched, said Catherine Loudon, a biologist at the University of California, Irvine, who specializes in bedbug locomotion.
“If someone had suggested to me that impaling insects with little tiny hooks would be a valid form of pest control, I wouldn’t have given it credence,” she said in an interview. “You can think of lots of reasons why it wouldn’t work. That’s why it’s so amazing.”
But even though there is no indication that the bean leaves and the bedbugs evolved to work together, the leaves are fiendishly clever in exploiting the insects’ anatomy. Like the armor covering knights in medieval times, the bedbug’s exoskeleton has thinner areas where its legs flex and its tiny claws protrude — like the spot where a greave, or piece of leg armor, ends.
“The areas where they appear to be pierceable,” Dr. Loudon said, “are not the legs themselves. It’s where they bend, where it’s thin. That’s where they get pierced.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I have, and those vectors have nothing whatsoever to do with the cleanliness of quarters. They have everything to do with the fact that bedbugs subsist on the blood of mammals.
“Orthoboric acid, 64%”
Is that the stuff that has glass like sharp, angular structures to the individual grain shapes? Gets on the fleas and eviscerates them?
No, that’s how you motivate ME to walk on a kidney bean leaf.
I have, and those vectors have nothing whatsoever to do with the cleanliness of quarters. They have everything to do with the fact that bedbugs subsist on the blood of mammals.
CedarCide is perfect.....
Yup. It’s so small it has no effect on people, but it rips fleas to shreds. I imagine it has the same effect on other small critters like bedbugs and mites.
Orthoboric acid? Is that a specialty product?
That is what the ORTHO Company re-names boric acid so they can retail it at 5X-10X cost.
NOT to be confused with diatomaceous earth (DT)
It’s nonsense. The bedbug problem in the west grew out of trade with China.
I'll bet she's a hoot at parties.
La Lydia got the point by noticing that the writer implied DDT becoming ineffective which probably isn’t true at all, and at the same time concealing the fact that the probably effective DDT was banned, rather than becoming ineffective.
To me this is very effective and talented propaganda writing, it is ‘as smooth as butter’ writing.
“”But the commercial availability of pesticides like DDT in the 1940s temporarily halted the legions of biting bugs. As their pesticide-resistant descendants began to multiply from Manhattan to Moscow, though,””
Y’know, I’m gonna have to bookmark my own thread, here. I don’t usually do that, but there have been so many good ideas bouncing around this one, I’ve just GOT to do that, for future reference. Think I’ll save it to my hard disk, too.
Holy Toledo!!! You’re giving me the willies here. Is that real or ‘shopped?
One of the places to pick up bedbugs these days in film theatres, dogs go through each week to find bedbugs.
Bedbugs may come from filth but they are carried by people who are not filthy but who do things like put their purse down in a theatre
Looks real
Interesting, thanks. I’ve used boric acid on ants and cockroaches in the past. Very effective stuff. Cheap, too. I bought a one pound container at the drug store when I was in college and the cockroaches in my student-housing “pad” disappeared after only one application. Kept that stuff waaaaay past its expiration date and would use it whenever I saw ants (luckily, never had cockroaches again after I got out of student housing). Finally threw the bottle out after 20 years and hadn’t even used a fourth of it.
Give me DDT any day of the week, or a chemical equivalent. I've got better things to do with my time than laying out bean leaves every day, or its chemical equivalent.
Note, too, DDT did actually solve the problem in this country once. Bean leaves never did that in Europe. But that's what these jokers want us to place our bets on. No, thanks, bean leaf jokers!
Then I read someplace else that you can forget about that tip, because your luggage can pick up the beginnings of a bedbug infestation from contact (even if it's only secondary contact) with other luggage in the airport, or on a plane, or in the trunk of a taxi. Very discouraging.
Bedbugs may come from filth but they are carried by people who are not filthy but who do things like put their purse down in a theatre
Dogs (trained) are the most effective means to find infestation.
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