That has gotta be the biggest bed bug I have ever seen!

I am sorry but if I see bed bugs I will be the first to try and find DDT or some other powerful pesticide. I don't care what the law says I will go nuclear on the bugs.

A friend of mine had a bedbug infestation in her apartment thanks to a bunch of bats living in the attic of her building. She said she used a flashlight at night to look at the walls for bugs and, once she confirmed they WERE bedbugs, she moved her bed away from the edge of the wall & then wound duct tape (sticky side out) on each of her bedposts (near the floor). It kept the little critters from eating her up at night while she waited for her landlord to do something about it.

This Bed Bug Summit is a farce. How can it be deemed legitimate if no invitations were extended to representatives from the bed bug community?

@summerbee: A more patient soul than I. There would have been an awful temptation to give him 24 hours to let me know what he was doing, then moving to a hotel and submitting the bill to him while either a) the problem was fixed or b) I could find a new place.

If I'm not going to have kids, can't I just spray a little DDT spritzer on my mattress each day?

@TEW: Nuke 'em from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Okay, cats or no, that's one adorable picture.

Call it the Twilight phenomenon.

Lucy, what do bed bugs have to do with the recent surge of girls drooling over pale emo tween vampires who shop at Hot Topic? I'm having trouble seeing it.

As for bed bugs, I fight back with a guard service:

@summerbee:
According to [www.ext.colostate.edu] all that was needed was getting rid of the bats- if they did indeed come from the bats. The Bat Bugs(Cimex pilosellus) cannot survive on humans alone. Get rid of the bats, the bugs will follow (or die).

Oh come on DDT hasn't been around for years and only now it is becoming a 1st world problem? I wonder what the cause is... cheap global travel or dirty global travel.

Maybe we need to get old school with the delousing powder upon entry to 1st world countries...

If i've got them they only bite my A-hole. Every morning my finger is stinky.

@summerbee:

Here is a bed bug guide to follow for tenants.

Where can I get DDT? Just in case...

We were recently exposed to bedbugs -- at a *restaurant*! We were on vacation, and unfortunately, we didn't even know they were bedbugs at the time. We had just returned home when my wife developed the telltale maddening rash from the bites. When we researched bedbugs, we quickly realized, "Hey, remember those weird bugs crawling on us at the restaurant? They were bedbugs!"

We spent days stripping our bedding and washing all our clothes in hot water and putting our shoes in the freezer and vacuuming everything else in a desperate bid to prevent an infestation. It was a lot of work, but we haven't had a problem since, thank goodness.

The best (worst?) part: We called the restaurant, Lulu's Surf Club in Waikiki. I talked to the manager. He said, "Oh yeah, we know about it. We have an exterminator who comes every two to four weeks to do an inspection and treatment. Every hotel and restaurant on Waikiki is infested. Bye now."

We then called the hotel we'd stayed at and told them we may have introduced bedbugs into the room. To their credit, they freaked out. We feel bad, but then again, it was their concierge that had recommended we dine at Lulu's.

So we will never go back to Lulu's Restaurant and Bar aka Lulu's Waikiki Surf Club, not even the ones in Kona or on Maui. We'll never go back to Waikiki, even, it was that traumatic.

@TEW: "I don't care what the law says I will go nuclear on the bugs."

Good luck with the buying of banned pesticides part. :P

@mxjohnson: [yelp.com]

Please.

I think we should use nukes in the fight against bed bugs.

It's the only way to be sure. ;-)

don't bother clicking on the Harvard School of Public Health link, they're schilling for pest control companies.

I wonder how much www.orkin.com paid HPS?

@SpongeSteveSquareDave_GitEmSteveDave: Emo kids, like bedbugs, are so annoying that they keep you up at night, wishing they were dead.

Bed bugs are a bad problem in Toronto as well and I had a trying experience with them a few years back as well. My apartment became infested with them and since my landlords didn't make any real effort to get rid of the roaches and mice that plagued us for years (I can't afford to move), I didn't even bother telling them that I had bedbugs and went straight to the city inspector with my complaint. The landlords had an exterminator in my apartment within a week and haven't had a problem with them since(I hope that I'm not speaking too soon) but I still have roaches & mice!

Thanks. I will never sleep again.

the banning of DDT has also indirectly allowed millions of Africans to die from malaria. why exactly is it banned again?

I got bed bugs at a crappy Days Inn "hotel" outside of Richmond, VA during the NASA-VCU FIRST Robotics tournament (I'm a mentor). I follow good hotel etiquette and I keep my luggage on the holders, never on the floor or beds and I keep them closed while I'm there, only opening them to take out clothes when I need them. The bed bugs did not follow me hope, thankfully :)

As my mom always says, "No good deed goes unpunished."

And, yes, I notified the management, et al.

I vote the bedbug as NYC's Official Insect!

@taffy:

Another option: Discuss the problem with the Landlord Tenant Board (after telling the LL you'll be doing this if he doesn't solve the problem). This type of infestation is illegal (especially the mice, I believe bed bugs are also on the list of infestations that are the landlord's responsibility).

If they can't convince the LL to fix the issue, the LTB (not you directly) has the power to collect rent from you and withhold it from the LL until he solves the problem. They can also authorize you to spend the money on appropriate action yourself (such as extermination). You'd be amazed what a couple of missed mortgage payments will encourage the LL to do... :D

But don't do anything until the LTB authorizes it, obviously, since that's ground for being booted.

@bilups: Well, we needed some method to tag a certain demographic before there were SUVs, Big Gulps and 50-gal beer bellies so that they could identify themselves.

@Trai_Dep: Be careful. Those roaches are tough.

My apartment building was searched for bed bugs earlier this year. I guess they were somewhere in the building. Luckily they didn't get into my apt.

@Eyebrows McGee (on Twitter: LPetelle): Shouldn't be too difficult to find the precursors. Chloral, chlorobenzine, sulfuric acid are all pretty useful industrial chemicals with other purposes than just DDT. Just heat and eat*. The stuff was first synthesized in the late 19th century.

* well, maybe not eat.

@kateblack: My wife wrote a review on tripadvisor.com. Six weeks later, Lulu's sent her a message, inviting us back for a free meal. (Such a generous offer to make from 2,000 miles away!)

Even if they paid our airfare and put us up in a hotel, we still wouldn't go back to Waikiki, much less Lulu's Surf Club.

I don't mind bugs. Shoot, I raise crickets and fruit flies and caterpillars and mealworms. But put me in a room that might have bedbugs and I will not sleep. I'll turn on all the lights and stand on a chair with a can of Raid in one hand and a loaded handgun in the other.

National Geographic:

In case anyone wants to know more.

@bbagdan: You might have pinworms. Or someone you live with is playing "stinky finger" while you sleep. :)

@TEW: Populations in the US are generally resistant to DDT now.

@LesterGaze: Exactly what I was thinking. It tells you nothing to do accept call pest control. And thats where special interest lobbying has brought us today folks.

@bilups: Because it's EXTREMELY toxic to a lot of things other than bugs. From wikipedia:

DT is toxic to a wide range of animals in addition to insects. It is highly toxic to aquatic life, including crayfish, daphnids, sea shrimp and many species of fish. It is less toxic to mammals but cats are very susceptible, and in several instances cat populations were significantly depleted in malaria control operations that used DDT, often leading to explosive growth in rodent populations.[33] DDT may be moderately toxic to some amphibian species, especially in the larval stages. Most famously, it is a reproductive toxicant for certain birds species, and it is a major reason for the decline of the bald eagle[6], brown pelican[34] peregrine falcon, and osprey.[1] Birds of prey, waterfowl, and song birds are more susceptible to eggshell thinning than chickens and related species, and DDE appears to be more potent that DDT.[1]

@mxjohnson:

"I'll turn on all the lights and stand on a chair with a can of Raid in one hand and a loaded handgun in the other."

Thanks alot, now I have that vision stuck in my head. lol

@bilups: You should check your claims before you go around repeating them. DDT is not "banned" in Africa or South America. It is used for mosquito control in malarial areas, with the WHO's blessing. See [www.nytimes.com]

You can purchase mattress, box spring, and pillow encasements for your home to deal with an infestation, and to prevent one if your apartment neighbors are infested. I found some on eBay that were a great deal and worked so we could sleep again!

@ratnerstar:
Ha! Nice Aliens quote!

@SpongeSteveSquareDave_GitEmSteveDave:

Bite your head off, man.

When I lived in Europe I picked up either fleas or bed bugs at a hostel (never figured out which one). Luckily after spending days washing all of my clothes and vacuuming my mattress the little critters were gone. Still, it's disgusting, and after that experience, I will never return home from a trip without immediately showering and washing all my clothes. Deal with those things once, and you'll do as much as you can to avoid ever having to deal with them again.

@mxjohnson: Hawaii has a lot of bugs. At least there were no gigantic flying roaches...they are the things I do not miss about home.

@chocolate1234: I sympathize with your experience. The critters and the great lengths to eradicate them left this one somewhat scarred. Knowing they are feeding is one thing. Being awake during their initial invasion and waking during the time they feed en masse is Unleaded Nightmare Fuel.*shudder*

The Hotel Carter has become a chain?

@econobiker: I don't mean to sound snarky, but you have no idea just how hard these buggers are to kill. The DDT theory is mostly based on this — ie that since it was so horribly toxic it was the only thing that could kill them easily, and that presumably it has taken a long time to leach out of the system, and then for bedbug populations to recover. I don't know if that's true or not, but my experience suggests it's quite plausible.

I spent 2 joyless months living with them, during which the house was sprayed and "bombed" (a cloud of poison is set off in each of the affected rooms). Two days later I found a sick survivor slowly making his way across the floor, and I collected him in a black 35mm film container to prove to the landlord that we needed a second treatment (he agreed).

Fast-forward 6 weeks as I'm preparing to move out. I forgot about the canister, sitting amidst clutter on my dresser, and opened it to find the critter still crawling around. SIX WEEKS! Sealed! (maybe not air-tight but close)

This was winter, so I left my little nemesis out on the front porch in his little black plastic home, there to pass the night in temperatures reaching -12ºC (~10°F).

The next morning I opened the container to find, finally, that he wasn't moving. Ah! I thought, let's not be hasty! So I put him in my pocket (in the container) to warm up for an hour. An hour later, the f*&Der was running around like nothing had happened.

In the end, I torched him to death with a torch-style lighter, then flushed him down the toilet.

And I felt good.

I had bed bugs once (with the standard three bites). They tore up my legs for a month before I figured out what was biting me.

I eventually got rid of them by sleeping with the lights on for an entire month. I noticed a visible reduction in bites about three days in.

Dear mxjohnson,

I am the manager you spoke with at Lu Lu's. I completely sympathize with all the precautions you were made to take when returning home from Hawaii. It's frustrating to say the least. During our conversation, I sincerely apologized and informed you of the ongoing bed bug problem in Waikiki. I also informed you Lu Lu's and other hotel properties were taking every preventative measure (constant exterminations, deep cleanings, etc.) to eliminate the problem.

Regarding our conversation, your post is unfair and inaccurate. I do not think it's fair of you to twist the demeanor of our phone exchange to make it look like I claimed "everyone's infested" and gave you a "just deal with it" attitude. I completely understand this was a major inconvenience for you, but I don't think that justifies an inaccurate portrayal of our discussion on a major website.

You were definitely passing through Hawaii when the problem was growing, but I can assure you Lu Lu's and many other properties have eliminated the bed bug problem Waikiki was experiencing for a few short months. In fact, not a single bed bug report in months. So, we are actually doing exceptionally well considering this whole bed bug situation is a nationwide/worldwide issue. (See links below)

In the end, there are no more bed bugs at Lu Lu's and I have spoke to others in the industry that are sharing the same success. I hope this will help clear things up and hopefully improve your opinion of LuLu's and the entire Waikiki area.

Your comments are always appreciated.

Aloha,

Nick Prioletti

http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/ci_12141082?source=rss

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/5154193/Bed-bug-epidemic-amid-rise-in-foreig
n-travel.html

http://www.bedbugcentral.com/news/index.cfm/epa-posts-documents-from-nationa
l-bed-bug-summit