The Common Bedbug (Cimex lectularius) 

Dear Readers, I apologise for getting your week off to such a squirmy start, but I am reading a lot about bedbugs at the moment, and as other insects are pretty hard to find in sub-zero temperatures I thought I’d have a chat about these little chaps.

Plus, I have a personal story to tell. During WW2, my mother and gran were evacuated to Slough. After their first night (they were sharing a double-bed – my Mum was only six) they both woke up to find themselves covered in little red blotches. The following night they turned on the light to see lots of little reddish creatures crawling up the wall. Well. They pulled the bed away from the wall, begged some bowls from the lady of the house and filled them with water, and then each leg of the bed in a bowl. Apparently this was enough to fox the bugs, but even if it hadn’t been, Mum and Nan were somewhat stuck. In the end they decided to go back to the East End and take their chances with the Luftwaafe.

So, first up, what is a bed bug? It’s a parasitic insect, and the family Cimicidae has over 100 species, only 3 of which prey on humans. The insects need a meal of blood every 3 to 7 days, and spend the rest of the time hiding while they digest it: this means that they need to have a regular supply close at hand. The first Cimicids evolved to feed on the blood of bats or birds, which return to the same roosts every night, but once humans were no longer nomadic some species evolved to feed on us. There is a theory that as birds and bats nest in the roofs of human habitation, it was but a short crawl for a bed bug to discover us. When a bed bug isn’t feeding, it’ll be hiding – sometimes in a corner of the mattress, but also under plaster in a wall or in a crack in the floor (which must have been the case with Mum and Nan’s experience) The cue for a hungry bed bug to get active is a rise in temperature – in some other parasitic insects, such as midges, the CO2 in the breath can also be a signal and it’s thought that this might be the case with bed bugs too.

Many Cimicids can survive for up to a year without feeding however, which is handy when your host might hibernate (as with bats), migrate (as swallows do) or move house (us pesky humans). However, the current upswing in bed bug numbers, after they were practically eradicated in the UK, is down to a variety of factors.

Firstly, many bed bugs are now resistant to chemical treatments. As many of those treatments were carcinogenic and destructive of other organisms, this is probably all to the good. You can now get rid of a bed bug infestation by sealing a room and heating it to 55 ° C, though you run the risk of furniture etc being damaged by the heat.

Some pest controllers point out that the rise in bed bugs could have been exacerbated by the decline in cockroaches, because the latter eat the former. Even in our houses there’s an ecosystem which we’re constantly interfering with.

Secondly, we do so love our international travel now, and our clothes are ideal harbouring places for bedbugs from overseas. Even the poshest hotels may now have a bed bug problem. This is probably an excellent reason for unpacking and getting your clothes in the wash the instant you arrive home, however jet-lagged you are.

Thirdly, second-hand furniture (especially stuff with soft furnishings) can harbour bedbugs. Clothes from charity shops should be largely ok as they’re washed and steam-cleaned before going on sale.

And finally, there’s transport. There have been exciting photos of a bed bug on someone’s trouser leg while travelling on the London Underground, and Sadiq Khan has sought to reassure people. The suggestion was that the pesky bug came from Paris, but I am fairly sure that we have a lot of home-grown ones. One pest controller suggests that you should never sit down on public transport, which would be excellent for the core muscles, but not so good if you’re carrying a massive backpack.

There is a real sense of shame about bed bugs, as there is about parasites of any kind, but, as with head lice, there is no suggestion that bed bugs favour dirty conditions – all they need is a person, and they don’t care at all about your income, your social status or your level of education. Furthermore, although the bites can be irritating, bed bugs transmit no known diseases, unlike mosquitoes or fleas or lice (though a very bad bed bug infestation can cause anaemia).

In his wonderful book “House Guests, House Pests”, Richard Jones describes how in 1944 his father, then aged 14, bought a secondhand bed and manhandled it through the streets of London on a borrowed costermonger’s barrow. When he discovered bloodspots on the sheets the next day, his father and mother set about stripping down and dismantling the bed, eradicating the vermin and giving everything a good wash, before putting it back together and having no further trouble. As he points out, this would have been completely normal. We have been living with insects and other invertebrates for a very long time, and nothing that we do will ever make for a completely bug-free environment. While I can understand completely why no-one wants to share their homes with bed bugs, I think it does help to be a bit more pragmatic and a bit less squeamish about our house guests. Our homes are ecosystems in their own right, with the equivalents of miniature deer and tigers stalking about in the crooks and crannies. Let’s give some of them house room!