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Brian’s Bug Bits and Bytes

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This article from BBC Future is, by far, the best I’ve read about our current bed bug situation. A must read! –

Why are bed bugs so difficult to deal with?

By Jasmin Fox-Skelly 19th October 2023

Bed bugs around the world are developing resistance to insecticides, and infestations are making headlines. How do we deal with them?

France is currently in the grip of a bed bug invasion.

This year, in Paris, bed bugs have been reported in schools, trains, hospitals and cinemas. But the infestation has been gathering pace for some time. In 2020, an entire unit in a French hospital had to close after a patient was admitted carrying bed bugs. The decision to close the unit was taken after investigations using a sniffer dog revealed that four rooms were infested. The closure lasted 24 days, and cost approximately US$400,000 (£333,000) to treat.

It appears to be part of a “global resurgence” of bed bugs that has seen the creatures – small, oval-shaped insects smaller than a grain of rice – becoming a growing problem in cities around the world over the past two decades. Global travel – which has allowed the biting insects to leap continents hidden amongst the luggage of oblivious aircraft passengers – has made it easier for them to spread. But once they gain a foothold somewhere, a recent study suggests they may also be getting harder to treat.

In 2005, Warren Booth was a young postdoc researcher in North Carolina, when he began doing a seemingly strange thing. He contacted pest companies and asked them to send him common bed bugs, known as Cimex lectularius. Between 2005 to 2009, he managed to collect 161 examples from 38 US states, each taken from a separate infestation. He intended to study them, but his research was cut short when he was given a job as a geneticist by the University of Tulsa.

Fifteen years later, he teamed up his graduate student Cari Lewis, who had amassed a collection of 233 bed bugs taken from US states between 2018 to 2019. Together they had an impressive stockpile. But what to do with it? Being geneticists, they began to sequence the bugs’ DNA.

They were looking for mutations in a region of the genome that codes for the sodium channel. This channel is essential for nerve function – in bed bugs and humans alike. It sits inside the cell membrane of every neuron in the body. When it opens, it lets positively charged sodium atoms, or ions, flow from the outside of the neuron to the inside. This causes the neuron to “spike'”, allowing messages to be relayed around the body.

Sodium channels are essential for survival, but some drugs stop them working properly. These include the banned pesticide DDT, and pyrethroid insecticides – the latter of which is a common over-the-counter remedy for bed bugs. Both bind to sodium channels and stop them from closing.

“The nerve continually fires and the animal dies of paralysis,” says Booth, now an associate professor of urban entomology at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, US.

Over the years, bed bugs have acquired three different mutations in the genes coding for sodium channels, which prevents insecticides from binding to them. We don’t know exactly when the mutations developed, but they have been around since at least the 1950s, after the widespread use of DDT in World War Two.

However, until now the extent these mutations are present in the bed bug population has been difficult to measure.

Booth and Lewis’s study showed that 36% of the older bed bugs collected in the US between 2005-2009 had a single mutation in their sodium channel gene, while 50% had acquired two mutations. Just 2.5% of the population had no mutations, and were therefore susceptible to insecticides.

“Whenever you have one of the mutations it results in a several hundred-fold resistance to pyrethroid insecticides,” says Booth. “If you have both mutations that can ramp up to around 16,000-fold. So, it means you’re not going to kill them. You can pour a bucket load of insecticides on them and it’s still not going to have an effect.”

In the more modern bedbug samples from 2018-2019, 84% of the bed bugs had acquired two mutations in their sodium channel gene, giving them total protection. Not one single bed bug from the more recent samples in the US were susceptible to insecticides.

“We saw a change in frequency of not the single mutation – the single mutation was always present – but the change in the frequency of having both mutations, so therefore that higher level of resistance,” says Booth. “Pretty much every bed bug population you see nowadays has both mutations, which is really bad because you’re not going to kill them. It means you can’t go down to your local hardware store and buy an over-the-counter insecticide and expect that to do anything – you really need to get professional pest control.”

Booth and Lewis attribute this change to this widespread use of common over the counter insecticides.

“People don’t want to spend hundreds or thousands treating bed bugs if they think they can go down to the hardware store and buy a $5.99 (£4.90) bottle of insecticide to kill them,” says Booth. “Unfortunately, what they are doing when they do that is selecting for bed bugs with the mutations, eliminating the ones you can kill, but allowing the ones that you can’t kill to thrive.”

This means the bed bugs with genes that still make them susceptible to the insecticides don’t live to pass on their DNA, while those that are resistant do, allowing the population to rapidly become difficult to get rid of.

They are also adapting to insecticides in other ways

So, is the same true in the rest of the world? In 2018, Booth worked with Ondřej Balvín, a ecologist at the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague. Together they sequenced the genes of 393 bed bugs taken from 131 unique sites of infestation across Europe. Countries sampled included the UK, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Poland, Sweden as well as others. They found that only 3.8% of bed bugs were susceptible to pyrethroid insecticides, with 93.5% of the bed bugs had a single mutation. Unlike the US, however, none had acquired two mutations.

It appears something was happening in US bed bug populations to drive a higher rate of mutation. It’s possible that at some point in the past, a female bed bug with a single mutation randomly adopted a second mutation. As it essentially made the bed bug immune to over the counter insecticides, that variant spread like wildfire amongst the population.

Other studies have also shown that the majority of bed bugs in Australia and Asia have also acquired single mutations. While a recent study confirmed that mutations are now also widespread amongst a tropical bed bug – a separate species known as Cimex hemipterus – in Iran.

“In Europe, Asia and Australia, we find that instead of having both of mutations, bed bugs tended to have only one of those mutations,” says Booth. “However it’s still bad. These insects are still many hundreds-fold resistant to pyrethroids, so again you’re not going to be able to go down your local store and treat this yourself.”

More recently, however, researchers have also found double sodium channel mutations in bed bug populations in Paris. One analysis of 156 bed bug specimens collected from buildings around the French capital in 2019 found 73% carried double mutations, which could lie behind the recent plague of the insects in the city.

But all of these studies focus on just one type of resistance, relating to the sodium channel. Research shows that bed bugs are acquiring resistance to other classes of insecticides too by adapting in other ways.

Changing behaviour

In a 2016 study, scientists at Australia’s University of Sydney found evidence that bed bugs have developed a thicker exoskeleton to stop pesticides from being absorbed into their body. The higher the bed bug’s resistance to pyrethroid insecticides, the thicker its outer shell, or cuticle was. Insects with a cuticle thickness of around 10 micrometres (about a tenth of the thickness of a human hair) were effectively resistant to the insecticide.

According to Booth, bed bugs are also changing their behaviour to avoid being poisoned.

“If you look at a bed bug they are pretty flat to the ground,” says Booth. “However, we are seeing some now that can stand up and keep their body off the surface, allowing them to minimise the part of their body that comes into contact with the insecticide.”

The behaviour of bed bugs makes them difficult to treat in other ways too. Bed bugs have a tendency to walk around from place to place, and hide in little cracks and crevices, behind wallpaper, under carpets, and amongst household clutter. They may well, therefore, go for long periods without interacting with insecticide residues. This was backed up by a 2020 study, where entomologists Stephen and Alice Kells exposed bed bugs and cockroaches to chlorfenapyr, a relatively new pesticide that bed bugs are not yet completely resistant to.

They used two different products, a liquid spray and an aerosol, and then calculated how much of the chlorfenapyr was actually absorbed into the insect’s bodies. They found that for both products, the amount of insecticide taken into the bed bugs’ bodies was significantly less than that of the cockroach.

“Exposure of bed bugs to an insecticide is very much a time and dose relationship,” says Stephen Kells. “Bed bugs have to be in contact with the residues long enough for the dose to accumulate. So, if they’re not applied in the right places or at the right concentrations it’s likely that bed bugs will either avoid the exposure altogether, or not be in contact enough to receive a lethal exposure.”

Fighting back against bed bugs

What, if anything, can we do to defeat the bed bug? One option is heat treatment, which involves heating up the room or entire property to a high temperature. In a study this year, researchers took 5,400 adult bed bugs from 17 infested locations in Paris. They separated them into five groups and placed each group in different tanks to simulate their natural environment. Some were allowed to set up camp amongst furniture remnants, or scraps of mattresses or blankets, while others were left uncovered in the open air. The researchers then subjected the bugs to heat. All the bugs were killed after just one hour of being heated to 60°C. (140°F)

However, a 2021 study found that bed bugs have a tendency to simply flee when it gets too hot. This could be a problem, especially in multi-story apartment buildings where bed bugs could simply move out of one apartment into an unsuspecting neighbour’s flat.

Heating your house is also not something you should try at home.

“Don’t ever try to use heat yourself,” says Booth. “I’ve heard stories of people going to get propane heaters and setting their house on fire. It just doesn’t work. You’re more likely to kill yourself then do harm to the bed bugs.”

Some researchers are coming up with ways to lure bed bugs out of their hiding places so that they are more susceptible to pesticides. Students at Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology recently created a machine that can simulate human breathing. The idea is that the machine could act as bait to lure the bedbugs out of their nests, as research suggests that bed bugs are attracted to the carbon dioxide (CO2) that humans emit.

Researchers are also developing natural-based biopesticides that insects are less able to evolve resistance to. In 2012, Nina Jenkins, an entomologist at Pennsylvania State University in the US, developed a formulation containing Beauveria bassiana, a natural and indigenous fungus that causes disease in insects, but is harmless to humans.

Unlike chemical pesticides, which require direct, long-term exposure to be lethal, the fungus spores are picked up by bed bugs when they walk across the sprayed surface. Once covered in the spores, the bugs spread them around by grooming themselves, and within 20 hours of exposure, the spores germinate and colonise their bodies. Jenkins has now formed a spin-out company to market the product.

“Bed bugs only need to contact the treated surface briefly to pick up the spores and become infected,” says Jenkins. “Exposed bed bugs also take the spores back to their hidden shelters, infecting other bed bugs in the population. This strategy works because bed bugs are ‘obligate blood feeders’ who must emerge from their hidden shelters to seek a blood meal.”

In any case, press reports that suggest that other cities in Europe and the US could have “caught” bed bugs from France are misleading.

There is hope that with the right policies, infections can be managed

“Are bed bugs infestations suddenly erupting across France and London, or have they simply gone unreported?” says Booth. “I think it’s the latter. They have always been there, but simply gone relatively unnoticed. They are incredibly cryptic, and as such, many infestations at low levels will go unnoticed.”

There is hope that with the right policies, infections can be managed. A 2022 study found that the number of bed bug complaints in New York reduced substantially between 2014 and 2020, after the city introduced laws that required landlords to report infestations and to notify all residents in the building. Landlords are also required to treat infestations within 30 days. However even in this study, higher income boroughs (Manhattan and Brooklyn) saw steeper declines than the lower income boroughs of Queens and Staten Island. In many low-income areas, reports of infestations persisted. Similar patterns have been seen in other US cities, such as Chicago.

“We sadly find that in low-income housing bed bugs are seen as a nuisance and simply tolerated as they cannot afford to eliminate them,” says Booth. “These may act as reservoir populations that can act as a source for future infestations.”

Winning battles by eliminating bed bugs from a home or building is one thing. Will humanity ever vanquish this persistent annoyance for good?

“If you think you’re ever going to get rid of them the answer is no,” says Booth. “Unfortunately, bed bugs are with us until we disappear from this planet.”

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Article From Science Magazine- Bed Bugs date back to the time of dinosaurs, new family tree suggests

by Elizabeth Pennisi

Scientists have recently made progress detailing the evolutionary histories of insects like stink bugs, kissing bugs, and assassin bugs, says Christiane Weirauch, a systematic entomologist at the University of California, Riverside, who was not involved in the new study. But “with bedbugs we have not done too well.” Many species are parasites of bats, and researchers had long assumed that these mammals were their first victims. But bat bedbug species are hard to collect: Many are never found except in the depths of caves where bats roost. “You don’t know how difficult it is to get some of these bedbug species,” Weirauch laments.

That inaccessibility didn’t stop Klaus Reinhardt, whose interest in bedbugs has led him to write two treatises about the cultural history of bedbugs. For the bedbug family tree study, this entomologist at Dresden University of Technology in Germany and colleagues got some of their specimens from museums and other researchers. But the rest they chased down in areas plagued by civil war, and in hot, dark caves, where they traipsed through knee-deep guano—only after dealing with all the red tape needed to get permission to work on endangered bats. Once they had collected thousands of bugs, they sequenced and compared DNA from 34 species to build the family tree.

They used a 100-million-year-old fossil and estimated mutation rates to calculate when bedbugs first appeared and when they diversified. That work revealed that bedbugs “existed long before any records of bats,” says Thomas Lilley, an ecophysiologist at the Finnish Museum of Natural History in Helsinki. The oldest known bat fossil is just 64 million years old, and, according to the new study, bedbugs date back 115 million years, to the time of the dinosaurs, Reinhardt and his colleagues report today in Current Biology. “This is something that people have suspected, but it’s really nice to have it in black and white,” Weirauch says. Also, it now appears that those first bedbugs evolved from an ancestral bug that was already a blood sucker—some researchers thought blood meals came later, after bedbugs had already split from their ancestors.

The new family tree also upends ideas about bedbugs and humans. Two species of the insect—Cimex lectularius and the tropical C. hemipterus—typically bite people. Previously, researchers proposed that the two types arose from a common ancestor and diverged about 1.6 million years ago when Homo sapiens split off from an ancient human line, H. erectus. But the new study indicates the two bedbugs went their separate ways 47 million years ago, meaning both must have independently shifted to a human diet.

Since then, one or two other bedbug species have switched to human hosts, Reinhardt says. For example, his research on Hopi legends has convinced him that a bedbug known to infect eagles also started to feed on humans. And the human-loving bedbug Leptocimex boueti, which also enjoys bat blood and likely had that mammal as its first host, may have switched to people as global guano mining increased. Together, the evidence suggests “a new species of bedbug conquers humans about every half a million years,” Reinhardt says. Given the ever-growing contact among people, livestock, and wildlife, “It may not even take half a million years,” for another bedbug to start sucking human blood, he adds.

Bedbugs’ host-switching success suggests they are incredibly good at adapting to new situations, notes Coby Schal, a behavioral ecologist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, who was not involved with work. “Bedbug populations rapidly adapted to global travel, other changes in human behavior, and [insecticides].” And, he predicts, they will continue to do so.

Original article https://www.science.org/content/article/bedbugs-date-back-time-dinosaurs-new-family-tree-suggests#:~:text=The%20oldest%20known%20bat%20fossil,report%20today%20in%20Current%20Biology%20.

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Pest Control Technology Magazine, March 2021

By Anne Nagro

BED BUG MINISTRY

A good bed bug service doesn’t come cheap. It’s time-consuming, labor-intensive work that often requires follow-up visits. Services that offer a guarantee may cost even more.

According to the PCT 2020 State of the Bed Bug Control Market survey, which was sponsored by Bayer and compiled by Readex Research, a privately held research firm in Stillwater, Minn., the average cost for a typical residential bed bug treatment was $892. Prices of course can be higher. In the PCT survey, 43 percent of pest management professionals said the price of bed bug services increased in the past three years in their markets.

So it’s no surprise that the people who need bed bug control the most often can’t afford it.

TAKING ACTION. This motivated Brian Metzger to step up. Metzger has owned rental properties in Salina, Kan., for more than 20 years. A “very hands-on landlord,” he learned all kinds of trades, from laying carpet to do-it-yourself pest control.

“Naturally I learned an awful lot over the years about roaches, fleas and termites and then I started having to deal with bed bugs in my own properties. That’s a whole different animal right there,” said Metzger.

He began researching the pest’s biology, treatment protocols and products. “I became obsessed with learning everything that I possibly could about bed bugs,” he said.

It wasn’t until he learned about silica desiccant dust and a bio-pesticide that uses fungal spores to control the pests that he had his a-ha moment: A treatment program using these two products could control bed bugs at his own properities, as well as help his entire community.

At the time, the community needed help: The pests were spreading in the library, hotels and residences. “I got pretty sick and tired of basically Salina, Kan., being called the bed bug capital of central Kansas,” he said.

So, he earned his certification and pest control license in late 2017 and started GP Home Defense in January 2018.

“It wasn’t a business idea; it was a personal mission,” he said of this decision. He even turned over his property management work to his son “so I could focus on being a vampire slayer.”

A FOUNDATION IS BORN. “I went into this in large part with a desire to help serve the underserved. People couldn’t afford the $3,500 treatment that they were being quoted by other companies,” recalled Metzger.

But even with little overhead and the ability to charge much less, he found some people still couldn’t afford bed bug treatments.

As such, he began cultivating relationships with area social service agencies to try to get people help. Some agencies can provide assistance if people fit specific criteria, like having children under a certain age or if they’re a single parent. Metzger is now connecting those dots between agencies to get people help.

He also started a non-profit organization called Gopherwood Community Foundation.

Metzger’s property rental company is called Gopherwood Properties, which the GP in the name of his pest control company references. Gopherwood comes from the Bible’s Book of Genesis (6:14), where God tells Noah to build the ark of gopher wood. “When I started buying and remodeling rental properties that’s what I felt like I was doing; building an ark board by board,” he said.

Initially, the foundation focused on creating personal protective equipment like masks to help protect the community from COVID-19. “Now that supplies of PPE are catching up, I’m going to steer that foundation towards helping people with infestation issues,” said Metzger.

He plans to solicit donations and apply for grants to provide pest control services to the people who don’t meet social service agency criteria and who fall through the cracks as a result.

Besides bed bug control, he plans to help people with cockroach and other pest issues. “I’ll need to network with other companies as well because if somebody has a serious rodent infestation, I’d like to be able to help with that but I don’t do rodents,” he said.

SUPERHERO WITH HEART. In the meantime, Metzger continues to help those who need him.

He said it’s not uncommon for people to say, “I don’t even know why I called you because I can’t afford to do this,” while bugs are crawling the walls and ceiling. Metzger learns about their situation and asks them to contact people at the social service agencies, telling clients, “Have them get ahold of me and we’ll see what we can get done.”

“That makes me feel like a superhero going to work when I can help those people,” said Metzger.

These jobs aren’t for every pest control company since they’re often difficult to service. It takes a special person to care about those less fortunate than they are. But for Metzger, “That’s kind of where my heart’s been,” he said.

UPDATE- Trying to run the business AND the Foundation became too overwhelming, and the Gopherwood Community Foundation is no longer active. I still actively work with any social service agency, charity, church, or any other entity that is willing to help in this mission. -Brian

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Pest Control Technology Magazine, June 2020

PCO Metzger Shifts Focus to Mask-Making
Brian Metzger, owner of GP Home Defense, Salina, Kan., is taking a break from pest control to make and distribute masks in his community.
June, 2020

 Brad Harbison


SALINA, Kan. — Brian Metzger, owner of GP Home Defense, Salina, Kan., has shifted his focus from controlling pests to helping keep others safe by making face masks.
Metzger, who founded GP Home Defense in 2018, said March was off to a great start for him, but as COVID-19 turned into a pandemic and began impacting his community, he decided it was time “to put on the brakes.” So, he turned to mask-making and soon established the Gopherwood Community Foundation, a non-profit organization that makes and distributes (free of cost) personal protective equipment (PPE).
“I have underlying health issues that make me one of those high-risk people,” Metzger said. “I figured I could sit out a couple months and survive, and if someone really needed me, I’d suit up and be there.  I was reading about the many facilities that couldn’t get PPE, and I started researching mask guidelines, kind of the way I did with bed bugs.”
Through the foundation, Metzger has been able to recruit volunteer seamstresses throughout Central Kansas.
Metzger decided to sacrifice some of his company’s mattress encasements (used as part of its bed bug program), which he believes are excellent for stopping particulates and droplets. “They have a tight enough weave to make them water resistant without lamination or other treatment.”
The mask’s outside layer is a decorative cotton, an inner layer is material from the top of the encasement; the masks also include a pocket for replaceable filter material, and the inside layer next to the face is stretch knit material from the sides and bottom of the encasements. “One of my volunteers discovered that if she neatly cut along the seams when taking the encasements apart, those stitched seams made good material for mask ties,” he said.
In addition to the masks Metzger’s team has made, he has received donated masks from Andrea Hancock and P.E.S.T. Relief International. Thus far, Metzger said he has distributed about 2,500 masks with a goal to make and distribute 15,000 masks.
Metzger said that doing bed bug work in nursing homes and assisted living facilities has left “a special place in his heart for” these residents. “When COVID gets into these facilities it’s devastating,” he said. “I realized that I was in a position, with enough help, to do something about it.”
Metzger initially began funding the mask-making by himself. As the scope of the project grew, so too did the need for funding, so he set up the non-profit Gopherwood Community Foundation to collect donations. To donate, visit ————————– (UPDATE- No longer accepting donations)

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Contact Us

The best way to reach me is by calling or texting (785) 829-0644.

You can also email me at Brian@GPHomeDefense.com

I look forward to hearing from you and I hope to be of service.

 

Brian Metzger

Owner, GP Home Defense, LLC

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What Do Bed Bug Bites Look Like?

This question is asked all the time.  Many people will claim to be able to tell you what they look like.  The fact is, NO ONE can accurately diagnose a bed bug bite by looking at it.  Not even doctors.  Everyone can react to a bite differently.  The amount of redness, swelling and itching have more to do with how your immune system reacts than with the bug that bit you.

“I heard that bed bug bites will be in threes”

Well, they will, unless they’re not.  The bites in threes is a myth.  A bed bug will start feeding, and if disturbed he may stop and then bite again to continue until he is satisfied.  I have personally watched a bed bug bite and become fully engorged within 30 seconds.  At other times a bug might bite more than once looking for a sweet spot where the blood flows more easily.  Or, you may have multiple bugs feeding in the same location.

“Are bed bug bites usually in a straight line?”

Occasionally, but certainly not always.  Here’s why.  The bed bug doesn’t necessarily need to climb onto you to feed.  It can travel across the bed to the point where your skin meets the sheet, and bite you while still being on the sheet.  If it bites more than once, or if multiple bugs are feeding in the same area, this could result in bites that are more or less in line.  Does that always happen?  Definitely not.  Does it usually happen that way?  Not necessarily.  Sometimes?  Yes.

This photo was selected because it shows 3 bites in a straight line (Ha ha)

Some people’s bites will be small red bumps and may or may not itch much.

Some people get large painful welts.

Many people have no reaction at all.  These 4 bed bugs were study specimens from my personal collection, being fed on my left forearm.  Afterward I had no reaction whatsoever.

If you search the internet for pictures of bed bug bites, you will get thousands of results.  Some of them will undoubtedly be of bed bugs feeding on a reddish-purple spot on someone’s left hand.  That would be my friend and mentor Louis Sorkin feeding them on his birthmark.  His research specimens like that spot because the blood is very close to the surface.  Louis is an entomologist for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and is a rock star in the bed bug research world.

People will often wonder why only one person, or a few people in the household are getting bites.  It is not  because the bugs like that person better.  It is typically because they are having a reaction to the bites and others in the household are being bitten but not having an allergic reaction to it.  If a person is living with bed bugs but does not have an allergic reaction to the bites, the population can often become quite large before it is detected.  (I call these people ‘feeders’)

Sleep tight y’all, and don’t let the bed bugs bite.

Brian Metzger, GP Home Defense, LLC  (785) 829-0644

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Diatomaceous Earth

Diatomaceous earth has received a lot of attention as a possible treatment for bed bugs.  However, many of the claims about DE have been based on studies where bed bugs were placed in constant contact with the dust.  In real world application, that just isn’t how it happens.  In real application, the bugs will come into short term contact with the substance, and can make the choice as to whether or not to walk through it or around it.  This photo is of bed bugs 12 days after being dusted with DE.  The bugs continue to feed and lay eggs despite having a significant amount of DE on them.

The following graphs are from a study published in the publication Pest Control Technology (PCT).  As you can see, the results were hit and miss, mostly miss.

From PCT-   Treatment Outcome.

As in previous apartment insecticide trials (Potter et al. 2006, 2008, 2012), the majority of bed bugs (93 percent) were initially found on beds (15 percent mattresses, 42 percent box springs, 9 percent bed frames), or on sofas and recliners (27 percent). In the more heavily infested units, smaller numbers of bed bugs were also found in such places as nightstands, bookshelves and curtains.

Figure 1 shows the number of live bed bugs found in each apartment before and after treatment with DE. The average percent change in populations was unaffected by the DE treatment (1 percent increase). Because populations might be expected to continue to expand in the absence of effective management measures, DE may have slowed that increase. In five of the six units, post-treatment assessment had to be curtailed because of tenant dissatisfaction and inadequacy of the treatment. The one apartment with a satisfactory treatment outcome (Unit 1) was the first study site treated and received the heaviest application of powder while we were refining the application method. It also had the lowest initial number of bed bugs, and the tenant who traveled extensively was seldom at home. Apartments #5 and #6 received a “booster” application of DE (two weeks after the initial) when both sets of tenants complained that there had been no improvement. Both of these study sites (as well as Units 2, 3 and 4) had to be terminated and treated conventionally as per our agreement with the occupants.

Some studies have also shown that DE may actually give a bed bug extra protection by preventing more effective products like silica dust from adhering to their waxy exoskeleton.

The following graph (Pest Control Technology, 8/14) represents a direct comparison between the silica product used by GP Home Defense, and diatomaceous earth.

Small pieces of carpet were lightly dusted with each product.  The bed bugs were briefly exposed by allowing them to walk across the carpet before they were removed.  Within 24 hours, 97.5% of the bugs exposed to the silica were dead, while only 10% of the bugs exposed to the diatomaceous earth had died.  At 4 days 100% of the silica exposed bugs were dead, and only 20% of the DE exposed bugs had died.

The bottom line is that if you want to put a dent in a bed bug population, DE can help.  If you want to eradicate them, you better give me a call.  (785) 829-0644