How to inspect your hotel room for bed bugs

I thought I would make use of my travel time to put together a new Ask An Entomologist post: a little primer on how to check your hotel room to see if there are bedbugs.

It may just be because I go to entomology conferences where there are lots of presentations about bedbugs in hotels, but I’ve developed bit of a paranoid routine that so far has worked to let me sleep happily, and not bring any uninvited guests home.

For facts about basic bedbug biology, I’ll refer you to this excellent publication from the University of Kentucky.  So–on to the searching.

Step 1:  Look online and see if bedbugs have been reported where you are going. Do this when you’re considering where to stay and before you book a room.  The Bedbug Registry is a handy place to start, but many other online reviews will have a mention of bed bugs if they are present.

Step 2: Leave your luggage by the door when you arrive. If it turns out that the room is infested, why go all the way in?  Luggage is one of the known ways that bed bugs are moved from place to place.  So try to avoid picking up any hitchhikers.

Step 3: Case the Joint. Pay special attention to the bed, bed frame, and any headboard.  These are the prime spots you’ll see signs of an infestation.  Bedbugs hang out near their food source–you.

Bedbugs don’t live on people permanently like lice. They are active at night, and need a place to hide during the day.  Headboards fastened to the wall next to the bed (common in many hotels) are a great place for a flat little insect to stay.

After feeding, they poop,  creating tell-tale brown stains of your clotted blood. You typically won’t see the bugs–they are fairly tiny and can scurry quickly–but you will see these stains.

This second photo shows a severe example of what you are looking for.

Step 4: Take things apart.  Start by pulling the bed away from the wall, if possible.  A flashlight is handy for shining behind headboards and under beds.

Inspect the headboard and wall behind the bed. Any spots there?

Strip the bed, right down to the mattress and bed springs. You have to see what’s underneath the clean sheets and mattress pad to know what’s been there. Lift the mattress and box springs up and look underneath.  If it’s a platform bed, inspect carefully under the springs and around the base.

Pay special attention to the seams of mattresses and the boxsprings.  These are spots the bugs like to hide in.

Step 5: Check everything else that could potentially harbor bedbugs. What the hey, you’re already paranoid, why not?

Start with bedstands near the bed, and then check couches, drawers and furniture, and other items that are near the bed.  Bed bugs can live in amazingly tiny cracks and crevices.

I also check the closet if it has a luggage rack like this one.

Step 6: Check the next morning. The last check is to look on your sheets when you get up the next morning. If you see little blood stains on your sheets, or tiny rusty spots….beware.

Reactions to bed bug bites vary widely, from no reaction at all to lots of swelling and redness.  You may be one of the people that doesn’t react with itching to the bed bug bites, so the presence of bites isn’t always a reliable check.  Typically bed bugs leave bites in groups of three–but so do fleas, so that isn’t always definitive.

So there you go.  This isn’t a foolproof method, but it does let me sleep in peace. And so far, I’ve not seen anything that would keep me up.

September Garden Report

As I mentioned a week or so ago, I’m off into the wilderness again–this time to the Black Rock Forest in NY.  I’ll be attending the OBFS Annual Meeting from the 16th to the 21st.  It’s going to be really pretty, and there will be nice people, but I’d much rather be home enjoying the last few days of summer.

I have some scheduled posts for while I’m gone, but expect the pace to slow a bit.

To begin the slowing down: The September Garden Report!

The scarlet runner beans I planted to make the garden prettier turn out to grow too fast to be practical for green beans. I’d have to pick every day to try to get actually useful edible bean pods! I just let them grow and get huge, and the result is these very pretty dried purple beans.

I also tried canning for the first time this year–I got a massive pressure canner for a steal at Amazon.

The result wasn’t that pretty, but we’ll see how it tastes.  I tried both a raw pack method, and then briefly stewing and then packing.  The raw pack looks better, but the cooked tomatoes used more of the quart jar’s space.

Look for a December taste test post–and hopefully, there will be no follow up food poisoning post.

What are your favorite canning recipes?

Tomorrow: How to inspect your hotel room for bedbugs.

Go speak your piece…

You might have seen this post at Pharyngula: A Michigan pharmacist is braying his refusal to carry birth control pills–because they prevent the implantation of a fertilized embryo, he thinks the pill is an “abortifacent.”

This happens within the context of US Health and Human Services deciding that it’s just dandy to permit health providers to refuse to provide care based on religious or moral objection. This would include providers receiving federal funds.

This is a clear violation of the separation of church and state, as well as a threat to anyone seeking reproductive health care.  Birth control and family planning are a hard-won right for women and men in the US.

You might want to visit Mike Leavitt’s blog and leave him a comment.  The comments so far are almost universally in support of this butt-headed policy, alas.

There is a limited amount of time to comment before the policy is implimented, BTW.

Mosquito 86

Hanna at This Garden is Illegal recently reviewed a product called the Mosquito 86:

“As was pitched by the representative of the company, the Mosquito 86 is “a new, innovative way to eliminate mosquitoes in a manner that has previously only been offered through professional mosquito and pest sprayers that use commercial sized foggers or truck-mounted systems.”

I.E. It is commercial grade pesticide.”

First, I want to know why I’m not getting cool free stuff to review! *pouts*

Second, I have to say that this product sounds suspiciously like a portable version of this mosquito mister.  It uses a low mist of permethrin.  I don’t have a problem with the pesticide itself (it’s safe in low amounts), but this method seems to have some of the same problems as the misters. Primarily, Non-target impacts. It kills everything around, not just mosquitoes.

So bees, butterflies, parasitic and predatory insects, etc. would be killed along with whatever mosquitoes were in the area.  If the spray/fog is applied just in the yard, when mosquitoes are present, I can live with that.

I suspect, though, that it will be used prophylactically, and that will lead not only to non-target effects, but increased potential for insecticide resistance.  And not just resistance in mosquitoes, but all the pest insects exposed.

It is really a pain to not be able to frolic outdoors without dealing with mosquitoes.
But personally, I’d either stick with DEET, take steps to prevent mosquitoes, or invest in one of these devices for large area control. At least you are only killing the animal you mean to kill.

I’d rather be in my screened-in porch, or wearing my non-stylish mosquito repellent clothing, than have a barren landscape.

Related Posts:

• ACMA statement on mosquito misters
• Mosquito prevention
• Mosquito repellent clothing: does it work?
• What’s the best way to repel mosquitoes?

Also, don’t miss Hanna’s awesome tomato tasting posts!

Michigan Monsoon

Ugh. We’ve had over 3 inches of rain today, and 2 more are  expected.
The roof is leaking.
The hot water heater is leaking.
The CD player just broke.
Most of the plants in the garden have been blown over or drowned.

It is not a good day.

The Customer isn’t always right

A little something for the weekend…..

Those of us that work with the general public know that while people are probably perfectly lucid, there also are some that are clearly utter blocks of wood above the neck. Case in point:

“Customer: “So, they eat special food just for guinea pigs?”

Me: “Yeah, there is a food that we sell that is specially customized to their needs, but you can also feed them rabbit food.”

Customer: “A guinea pig is a reptile, right?”

This is from the Website “The Customer is Not Always Right” which is funny, addictive, and often appalling.  It’s similar to the Overheard sites.  (This one, BTW, is from Michigan.  And this one is for my sister the librarian.)

I meet people like this every day.  BTW, Michigan State is now home to this guy, who studies scientific knowledge and society. From that profile:

“Dr. Miller’s data reveal some yawning gaps in basic knowledge. American adults in general do not understand what molecules are (other than that they are really small). Fewer than a third can identify DNA as a key to heredity. Only about 10 percent know what radiation is. One adult American in five thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth, an idea science had abandoned by the 17th century.” [emphasis mine]

I was amazed when I first started teaching introductory biology at the college level at how many students could not explain correctly why we had seasons.  Or night and day.

Sigh.

In which I hit the Big Time

I think this is only topped by being linked to by News of the Weird.

I was a “Blog of the Day” in the Boston Metro!

w00t!

I also had a really great day at the bird sanctuary, although I did discover it is, in fact, possible to have a camel toe in waders.

95th Skeptics’ Circle!

Yep, it’s up over at the Skeptic’s Dictionary! Check out the latest revelations of Nostradamus.

Sort of.

Since I’ll be quite busy Friday learning to band geese (or at least being pooped on by geese), I’ll also throw in this photo of a wonderful topiary apparently on the A8. (Photo by MacBern)

I love Wallace and Gromit! If you haven’t seen the DVD set…what are you waiting for?

Why we failed on Malaria

Yeah. What he said:

“The war against malaria in tropical countries was fought and lost in the 20th Century on the basis of faulty intelligence, a ‘dodgy dossier’ which argued that the same methods used to tackle the disease in temperate countries would also work in the tropics.

Eradication failed in almost every tropical and sub-tropical country, because tactics that had been proven to work in countries such as the USA, Greece and Italy were also deployed in tropical countries, despite the existence of evidence that they would they not work, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa….

‘The failure to eradicate malaria in tropical countries, where the parasite is now at its strongest, and the mosquitoes are doing very well, thank you very much is, in part, due to the miscalculation that a one-size-fits-all approach would be effective in every setting – a miscalculation that could have been avoided if we had heeded the evidence from Africa over half a century ago’, he adds.

I just had to point this out, since it’s very similar to what I have said in the past about attempts to revive DDT use. It’s a simplistic assumption that ignores the fact that environmental, mosquito vectors, and insecticide resistance factors are different in each ecosystem.

Just because you have a hammer, that doesn’t mean everything is a nail.

Do those mosquito zapper things really work?

Ideally, you’d like to go outside and fire up the grill, or weed in the garden, without having a hoard of ferocious mosquitoes circling your head. Unfortunately, it usually doesn’t work out that way.

There’s a huge amount of devices on the market that claim to kill mosquitoes, or drive them out of your yard. So far, all but one kind of these has turned out to be bogus.

Ultrasonic Repellers Are Worthless

Electronic devices that claim to repel mosquitoes by emitting high frequency or ultra sounds are ineffective. Period.

They also appear to have some negative effects on pets, who can hear ultrasound or high frequency ranges.

A review of 16 peer-reviewed papers in 2000 found that not a single one of the ultrasonic devices tested had an effect. An additional review in 2007 also found that newer ultrasonic repelling devices were…newer. And completely useless at repelling mosquitoes.

Unfortunately, the number of fraud convictions for those peddling these devices has been small, mainly because there isn’t much public outcry.

Zappers kill the wrong bugs

Electrocuting bug zappers that use ultraviolet light to attract insects kill beneficial insects, such as beetles and moths, not mosquitoes. Mosquitoes are not strongly attracted to UV light, but many pollinating insects are.  A key study from some time ago lays it out pretty starkly:

Frick, T. B. and D. W. Tallamy. 1996. Density and diversity of nontarget insects killed by suburban electric insect traps. Ent. News 107(2): 77-82:

“Of the 13,789 insects counted, only 31 were biting flies. Nearly half of the insects collected were nonbiting aquatic insects such as caddisflies and midges. More importantly, 1,868 predators and parasites (13.5%) were destroyed within 27 families of predators and nine families of parasitoids.”

That’s 0.2% of the total insects fried that were actual biting species of flies.  The rest were insects important in ecosystem functioning and pollination.  Please. Do. Not. Use. These. Devices.

Some more recent work suggests that these devices, when used indoors, can be a significant source of food contamination as fried bug parts and bacteria fly out of the zapper.

What devices do work to drive away mosquitoes?

Mosquitoes find you mainly by following your breath–specifically, CO2 (carbon dioxide)–and your body heat. So, the more you flap your arms and wave the mosquitoes away, the more of them will find you. Curses!

The only devices that have been consistently been shown to work over a large area are one of several brand name mosquito traps–the best known is the Mosquito Magnet. Like its name suggests, the trap actually doesn’t drive the mosquitoes away, but lures them into their death.

These traps attract mosquitoes with a combination of carbon dioxide (some traps use propane) and octenol (another chemical attractant). The combination of heat and exhaled gasses makes the trap seem like a big juicy mammal to the mosquitoes.

Sounds great! But–it’s not as easy as buy one and plug it in. You have to carefully consider where you put it. If you stand downwind of the mosquito attractor, you are between it and the mosquito. They are likely to stop on you for a snack. From the American Mosquito Control Association:

“Please be cautioned against putting too much faith in traps as your sole means of control. These traps represent an evolving technology that is a most welcome addition to our mosquito control armamentarium. Their potential is great, but shouldn’t be overestimated. It is unclear whether the traps attract mosquitoes into an area where humans may then provide a stronger source of attraction.”

And for bonus points, use “armamentarium” in another sentence.

Unfortunately, the cheapest of these devices I’ve seen is about $300. While they do perform well in tests, the kinds of mosquitoes they capture varies widely. In an area where there is mosquito-borne disease, this could be a problem if you’re catching the wrong species of mosquitoes.

These are new devices, and as research continues, hopefully new information will be forth coming.

Lastly, some of the claims for these devices can be a little over the top. Multi-acre control is just not going to happen. Protecting your backyard, though, is quite possible.

Related posts:

• ACMA statement on mosquito misters
• Mosquito prevention
• Mosquito repellent clothing: does it work?
• What’s the best way to repel mosquitoes?