Bedbugs and insecticide resistance

If you have bedbugs, or cockroaches, for that matter, I wonder if it would help to buy a pet gecko? Or some small insectivorous animal. I'm assuming a reptile would be better than a mammal because most small mammalian insectivores have to eat constantly. Naturally you would have to feed and water it whether or not it was eating bugs, on the same principle that steadily feeding a barn cat makes for a better mouser.

Barton, many house cats will eat insects, although I don't know if they could eat enough of them to clear out an infestation.

Quite true, catgirl. We had a brother/sister pair of cats (recently deceased at 18 yrs) that would hunt crickets. When the cats were abt a year old, we lived in a house that sat on land with a huge cricket population. Somehow, the crickets would get into the forced air ducts that ran thru the crawlspace. At night, we and the cats could hear them chirp once and a while as they moved thru the ducts to the floor vents. The cats would gather round the vents and grab the crickets as they emerged. The crickets were large enough that there was quite a loud crunching sound as the cats bit into them.

I'm a city government employee- rental housing inspector- in a midwestern US city. Bedbugs have recently made a return here. I consulted with an exterminator on what to do about the outbreak- he explicitly blamed "environmentalists" and legislators who had banned the use of DDT and other chemicals by making it illegal to use them "in a manner inconsistent with their labeling." He gave me a DVD to watch which addressed treating bedbug infestations. In the introduction, the presenter, an elderly entomologist, reminisced somewhat fondly of the days when cyanide was used to treat infestations.

Barton, we have Indonesian house geckoes in our house.

They're not pets, they just moved in.

I've hardly seen a cockroach in years and haven't bothered spraying for them.

I don't know how they'd fair in a more temperate climate though.

We had an infestation about eight months ago of these horrible things (they came from our neighbours through the party wall of our terrace house ), and it took over 3 months to finally get rid of the things (hopefully). Frankly, we would have bought a gecko, DDT, cyanide or a small nuclear weapon to get rid of them. They are foul, and very very difficult to get rid of.

One poster to 'Bug Girl' asked 'So what level of paranoia is appropriate for bedbug resistance â tinfoil-hat or hide-in-the-bunker?'. My answer would be 'both'. More research now, I say. And nuke 'em in the meantime - whatever it takes.

There is a reason the Hammock was invented by the South American Natives. Biting-Bugs.

A good hammock is really quite comfy.

Zoecon sell the IGR Gentrol, and it is quite effective for control of bedbugs and cockroaches and has been available for quite sometime. However, Gentrol only effects the nymphs, and the adults have to be knocked down with an insecticide. If you want knock them flat dead quickly, the nerve-agents such as Parathion, Malation and Dursban can be used, butthese overkill and are used in the case of a severve infestation. Carbaryl is non-volatile and persistance insecticide of low mamalian toxicity and effective control for crawling insects.

Precor can used be for effective control of fleas and dust mites.

I suspect there is a bedbug-disinformation cycle at work here, similar to the DDT disinformation cycle that Lambert blogged about a few yeas ago: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2006/01/disinfocycle.php Or perhaps it's all part of the same cycle. At any rate, nearly every news story I read on bedbugs makes passing mention to the "fact" that supposedly DDT wiped out bedbugs in the US right after WWII. I've looked high and low (websites of the WHO, EPA, CDC, pubmed searches, etc) for scientific and/or medical sources that would confirm this (apparent) canard, and found nothing. I'm starting to suspect that this disinformation was cooked up by the same folks who brought us the DDT-eliminated-malaria-from-the-US-myth.

I've got a mate who's experienced a bedbug infestation recently. Having a cat about his home reduced his choices of insecticide, some of the usually mammal-safe poisons not being well tolerated by cats.

In the end he went with deltamethrin, which unfortunately scatters the critters thanks to its repellant nature.

A verdict on success is still pending, but there have been no small bedbugs in some time and the occurences of larger bedbugs have been in the range of 1 a day, or less.

He frequently visits me, so I'm a bit paranoid about getting bedbugs here as well. I'm itchy just reading this post.