Sleep tight
Burn the sheets: bed bugs are coming
By: Web Master
Issue date: 1/22/08 Section: News
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Bed bugs have been found in residence halls on campus, in apartment buildings and in hotels in the College Station area. Texas A&M is infestated with Cimex Lectularius, or the common bed bug, a creature that was thought completely eliminated in the 1940s and 1950s. Officials and students are forced to evaluate how the pest spreads itself, how humans spread it and how to curb the proliferation.
In order to know the enemy, it is important to know how it reproduces. According to A&M's Center for Urban and Structural Entomology, or CUSE, bed bug copulation involves a rather violent process called traumatic insemination. This happens when the male stabs the female in the abdomen with his genitalia to release sperm.
Entomologists say that this evolved from the female's resistance to copulate with the males. The females will produce around 200 eggs during their lifetime, averaging three to four eggs a day, CUSE reported.
Bed bugs live for several months, allowing for several generations to pass in a year. Life spans depend on the availability of warm, sleeping human bodies. Bed bugs puncture the skin, anticoagulants in tow, and feed for the three to 15 minutes it takes to fill them up.
In addition to the bed bug's feeding schedule, their means of transporting include baggage, clothes, furniture and linens. International travel to locations where bed bugs were not wiped out by Dichloro-Diphenyl-Trichloroethane, or DDT, in the early 20th century is a possibility for the influx. CUSE found that the U.S. never completely eliminated the pest.
The Center traced bed bugs back to sleeper cells of bed bugs in poultry farms in Texas and Arkansas. It is common to find bed bugs in residence halls, apartments and hotels. These spaces are hot beds because of the density of the living situations. The bed bugs can travel elsewhere, but the close quarters of hundreds of warm, carbon exhaling human bodies attracts them.
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