Nobody talks about bedbugs, but we should

By Kathleen Stocking

Sun contributor

You won’t get bedbugs from reading this. (You might get them from not reading this.)

Since we all grew up with the nursery rhyme, “Sleep tight. Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” and were told they didn’t exist anymore, we thought bedbugs were mythical. What did a bedbug even look like? A mosquito? A beetle? And ant? No one knew because, pretty much, there weren’t any.

A bedbug looks like a small reddish brown fighter jet, like the kind they have at the Cherry Festival, the Blue Angels, but smaller, like a sesame seed, with little vestigial wings. Yes, bedbugs could once fly, long ago when no human being would have been alive then to see them. Bedbugs were here before we were and, unnerving as the thought is, might be here after we’re gone.

Bedbugs were all over Europe 400 years ago. The Europeans brought them to America. The bedbugs didn’t spread that fast. There weren’t any big cities. Bedbugs like cities.

And by the time we had big cities, we had DDT, Dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane. You may recall DDT. It’s use began in the 1940s and was effective. It was used until the 1970s when people figured out that it caused birth defects. And not just in the bald eagles, that fierce symbol of spirit and strength we like to see on our money, but all living creatures.

Home remedies for bedbugs, like putting mint oil in your mop bucket water, and putting lavender sachets in drawers seemed to work, or people thought so.

But travel increased the spread – check the seams of your luggage. And hotels have now started using bedbug resistant mattress covers. Bedbugs can hide in your clothing, your hair, your shoes. Basically anywhere.

A magnifying glass and high-powered flashlight are necessary to check small dark areas, like baseboards. Once bedbugs are established, and they multiply rapidly, they are very hard to get rid of and can hibernate without food for a year.

They cannot survive without you.

So if your home is infested and you can leave for a year, they’ll probably be dead by the time you get back, especially if there’s a long winter with temps below 30. But who can afford to leave their home for a year? Most of us only have one. And even if you had many houses, your home could become reinfested. All it takes it one. Bedbugs are a problem that must be addressed in situ, for the most part, in the place your blood-filled body lives.

Bedbugs, as the name would imply, are in your bed. They like you sleeping. They are nocturnal. You cannot feel them biting because they inject a tiny bit of anesthetic.

Most people do not know what bedbugs look like. They have never seen one. On the off chance they wake up in the middle of the night and see a bedbug, if they don’t know what it is, they will kill it or brush it aside and forget about it.

This is where the problem starts. Bedbugs took the advice to “be fruitful and multiply” to heart many millions of years ago. Bedbugs breed. And they will breed in the seams of your mattresses, behind your baseboards, and in between the pages of your books.

Many people feel bedbugs, like anything unpleasant, are a taboo subject. But problems are not solved by not addressing them. And information helps us deal with fear of the unknown.

Heating the entire house to 118 degrees with a big machine is expensive—and it works. Sealing small things in plastic for three days works because bedbugs cannot live without oxygen. If you have one bedbug, you can probably deal with it with home remedies. If you have a massive infestation, because you didn’t know you had them because you didn’t know what they were, treating the problem will be expensive.

When the global bedbug infestation first started, and people were too confused or embarrassed to talk about it, there was little information. Thirty years ago, Wikipedia didn’t have information on bedbugs. Of course, 30 years ago we didn’t have Wikipedia.

Bedbugs, on the other hand, have always been with us.

Acclaimed Leelanau writer Kathleen Stocking is author of three books: Letters from the Leelanau (University of Michigan Press, 1990),The Long Arc of the Universe (Stocking Press, 2016), and From the Place of the Gathering Light (Leelanau Press, 2019)