Spit & Polish: 12 February 2012

Before the Mayan calendar, before the Egyptians, there were bedbugs - and they're still here

Okay, so last week I complained about voracious hadedas and murdered koi fish, and I thought I had got it off my chest. Then I sat down with one of my favourite magazines - Scientific American.

I am neither scientific nor American, but the magazine is so erudite and intimidating that I feel about it just as I would before a routine visit to the dentist: you won't necessarily enjoy it, but you will feel better later.

In the February edition, the cover highlights the most interesting stories in the magazine. They range from the sensible, such as "The Future of Chocolate", a chilling account of how chocolate, crime and slavery have formed a sinister alliance. There's also "What Football Does to Brains?" which could have been a mini-biography of Wayne Rooney, but wasn't.

The main cover story is "The Quantum Universe: Could foam-like fluctuations rule space at the tiniest scales?" I understand the word "universe" and because I paid close attention to the James Bond movie The Quantum of Solace, I learned that "quantum" means "the smallest unit of compassion that two people can share". Once I had grasped that, I was able to deduce that a "quantum" is the minimum amount of something.

The "foam-like fluctuations", however, still have me flummoxed.

As I read further, I found a feature-story with the headline "Sleeping with the Enemy", something we have all done at one stage or another. But this story is not about carnality - it is about bedbugs.

It struck a chord. As a child my father used to tuck me in, saying, "Sleep tight. Don't let the bedbugs bite." At that stage, I hardly knew what that meant. After he died, the saying stayed in our family.

I later discovered that it was used universally because bedbugs are a universal plague and they have been there since time immemorial.

In times gone by, beds were very different from the beds we know today. They were made of wood; they were low and very close to the floor and the mattresses were stuffed with straw, herbs or even sheep's wool. They rested on a criss-cross web of ropes or leather thongs.

Back then, there were no pesticides, so when people stuffed the hay or wool into the mattress, or the goose-down into the pillows, they did not realise that they were packing hundreds of tiny bedbugs into bed with them.

The more I read about the bedbugs in the feature written by Kenneth FHaynes, the more my skin crawled. He explained that bedbugs were alive and kicking 3500 years ago.

Just to put that into perspective, cuneiform script had just been perfected. The bugs preceded the creation of writing and here I am, still writing about them because they are still here - in abundance.

Bedbugs were around before the Mayan calendar was created, the one that is supposed to mark the end of the world later this year. If that apocalyptic prediction does come to pass, the bedbugs will probably live through it and start all over again.

I think that's remarkable and somewhat fascinating. I would love to sit down with a talking bedbug to have a chat about whether the Egyptian pharaohs really did wear golden, ritual ornaments every day of their lives. Did the bugs infest the Trojan horse that brought Troy to its knees? Did they survive Hiroshima?

These bedbugs are tough and almost impossible to kill. Haynes wrote about the resilience of the bedbug. In the 1700s, they tried to get rid of them by using gunpowder. It slowed them down for a while but as gunpowder went out of use, the bugs came back, raring to go.

As residential suburbs spread out around the cities after World War 2, the speedily-built houses were just what the bedbugs liked. The arrival of central heating provided them with the equivalent of a holiday on a tropical island. The electric blanket was next. The bugs got all fired up on the blanket's heat and assumed that the hapless sleeper was dessert.

In the 1940s, DDT was considered to be a solution and the bedbug population did, indeed, decline. Then the conservationist lobby condemned DDT, insisting that it polluted waterways, poisoned wildlife and the environment, and endangered human health. The conservationists won, and by 1970, DDT was history, but guess who staged a comeback? The bedbugs, that's who.

They are tough little buggers. They are tiny, hard to spot and even harder to kill. Haynes explained that even if you caught them and popped them into a household deep-freeze, they would survive for up to 12 hours.

That may be very interesting, but the idea of collecting tiny bedbugs, putting them into a plastic bag and popping them into my deep-freeze, next to the frozen peas and the chocolate ice cream, would be enough to send me rushing to a shrink to find out just how mad I am.

So be alert. When Scientific American warns you of a bedbug comeback, get your bed, your linen and your favourite armchair double-cleaned.

If you don't, you may find yourself watching CSI: Miami and the tingle of excitement you feel could be the bedbugs, which assume that your ankles are there to provide a perfect feast.