Of Bugs and Beetles

As bedbugs have returned to North America, I've heard scurrilous insinuations about people having them. I thought these insinuations might have been an attempt to create a panic, because people pay more for stronger cleaning agents if they think they have bedbugs to kill. I thought they might have been an attempt to make the only confirmed infestation of which I'm aware, at the retirement project now probably forever to be known as Bedbug Towers, seem normal rather than bizarre in my part of the world. Then I heard the accusation aimed at me, and something clicked in my mind. 

Because the animals in question are so small and drab, people may be confusing bedbugs (which most of us still have never seen, and may never see) with carpet beetles (with which we've been living more or less comfortably for years. 

There are different kinds and sizes of carpet beetles. All of them are so small that, like bedbugs, they're invisible to some farsighted people. Most people with 20/20 eyesight can see these insects at the right distance, but the right distance for seeing them is not always the distance at which we encounter them. If you can see them, carpet beetles look different from bedbugs. They're usually bigger, have wing cases that are more often spotted than plain brown or black, and, most importantly, they are beetles with two separate "jaws" rather than bugs with a single needle-like snout. Carpet beetles spend their lives chomping, but can't chomp hard enough to hurt humans--they only spoil our clothes, rugs, and furniture. 

Above, magnified many times, is a common kind of carpet beetle. There are different kinds. Some are solid brown or black; some are spotted, like the one shown, but look dark at a distance. Note particularly the two little jaws. 

If you can't see the spots and jaws, or the little lines of demarcation between the three separate plates of chitin that cover the back and wings, another way to know for sure that you're looking at a carpet beetle is that the carpet beetle is likely to spread its tiny wings and fly away. Bedbugs have no wings and cannot fly.

Carpet beetles are a major nuisance to all who work with yarn and fabric, though they're harmless. (Actually the adult beetles found in houses are usually newly fledged adults, eager to use their wings to fly out and eat living plants and meet other beetles. The ugly but harmless little larvae are the ones who gnaw their way through layers of clothing in a drawer or strands of yarn in a skein.) The easiest way to get rid of them is to freeze, thaw, and re-freeze the textiles at irregular intervals. 

Below is the dreaded bedbug.

In real life it can be hard to see the details, but that striped look comes from the bedbug's being divided into segments (rather like the beetle larva) that are not covered by wings. 

Bedbugs hatch out of eggs looking similar to the way they'll look when full grown, only in miniature, and gradually grow bigger as they mature. They live on the blood of warm-blooded animals, and show no interest in fabric, though they do look for dark crevices to hide during the daytime.

If you can see these animals, a magnifying glass will tell you which kind you are seeing. Or their behavior will--the carpet beetle will fly toward air and sunshine, while the bedbug will scuttle toward a dark crevice. Bedbugs are said to have a strong odor, while carpet beetles have only a slight odor. I've never smelled bedbugs, but, y'know, they live on blood. Carpet beetles usually live on plant fibres, and smell faintly like rotting straw. If you notice a smell as you walk into a house, it's not coming from carpet beetles. In my part of the world it's not coming from bedbugs either. If it's a sweet smell reminiscent of cilantro-lime butter, it's either food seasoned with that, or the Brown Marmorated Stinkbug, an invasive nuisance species but not a predator on humans.

If you can't see the animals, a reliable, though nasty, way to tell which you have is to turn off all the lights and sit on a bed or couch for five minutes. If at the end of five minutes you're itching and breaking out in little inflamed bumps, your pests are bedbugs. If not, they're probably carpet beetles.

Bedbug bites tend to appear in places that are close to an infested bed at night. So do the clogged pores, and any swelling or infection that may form around them, associated with adult-onset acne. If you're close enough to inspect skin blemishes it's not possible to confuse the looks of bedbug bites and acne, but if you saw a glimpse of someone's bare skin from a distance it might be possible.

It might be possible to confuse the looks of bedbug bites and flea bites, since they're caused by the same kind of injury. The kind of fleas that can actually live on human blood are very rare in North America. The kind that live on dogs' or cats' blood can't live on human blood, but they don't know this until they've become desperate enough to try it, so most humans have been bitten by a few of their pets' fleas at some time in their lives. If your pet sleeps on your bed, you're likely to be flea-bitten. If your pet does not sleep on your bed, you may be able to ignore your pet's suffering until poor little Fluffy becomes so anemic that Fluffy's fleas become desperate and try biting you. At that point you will probably feel desperate enough to set off a chemical "flea-bomb," which may or may not cause immediate nasty reactions for you or Fluffy...but there are Greener ways to deal with fleas. 

For diagnostic purposes, fleas are smaller than carpet beetles or bedbugs. Dog fleas can be hard to find, even for people who can see the spots on carpet beetles. Fleas aren't particular about light but they move by hopping rather than flying or crawling. 

In practice, under current conditions in most of North America, neither fleas nor bedbugs are likely to make people seriously ill. This could change. If the kind of diseases these pests can carry had not become so uncommon, fleas and bedbugs could carry some deadly ones. Vigilance about destroying the carrier species has actually made them relatively safe--for now.

The easiest way to get rid of bedbugs, when you can do it, is to let your whole house freeze. The little horrors might be able to crawl away from a fire, but when things freeze indoors they're even colder outdoors, so the bedbugs have nowhere to go, and freeze to death in a day or two. Their weakest point, as a species, is that they don't overwinter well. This means that old houses without central heating are the kind least likely to have bedbug problems. 

I've never had a bedbug problem. I've never seen a bedbug in real life. I do, however, live with carpet beetles as a constant threat to my yarn stash, and with shoulder acne as an ongoing nuisance that's likely to become a little less conspicuous after age ninety. So, Nephews, if you hear anything about the Cat Sanctuary having bedbugs, you know that somebody has been a victim of panic...and if you see carpet beetles (they're global), you know that panic is not indicated.