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New bed bug monitor #2: the CDC 3000

nobugsonme — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 04:16:55 +0000

We heard some time ago that there was more than one bed bug monitor in development. Nightwatch is expected to ship mid-November.

But a second bed bug monitor, the CDC 3000, or Cimex Detection Case, so named because it comes cleverly packed into a portable (!) non-descript black handled case, will be launched in a limited fashion at this week’s National Pest Management Association meeting in Washington. It won’t be released on a broad scale until the new year, according to Sean of the Bed Bug Resource, who goes more into detail here on what we can expect from this second device.

You can also read more about the CDC 3000 here.

Both devices have the potential not just to detect whether you have bed bugs, but to capture them. We hope to have access to data on the CDC 3000 soon. And once the Nightwatch is released, I hope we will start to see some comparative test data.

Exciting times for Bedbuggers. Things are looking up.

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Bed bug trap on its way, finally

Winston O. Buggy — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:03:47 +0000

While most claims of an effective bed bug trap have to date been much ado about nothing, a new product which seems to be the real deal is only a month or two away.

The trap I am talking about is the NightWatch by Biosensory, Inc.

In the past, this innovative company has produced an effective mosquito product and some other units which use inhibitors or attractants or both. This new unit attracts bed bugs via CO2 heat and a 7-part kairomone lure. The results have been studied for over a year by independent housing authorities and respected individuals and now the trap is scheduled for distribution early October.

The price for a unit which covers a 16×16 room will be around ~~$400~~ [editor's note: we're not sure of the price at this time]. Overnight, the trapped bed bugs will be contained in a pit which you empty each morning. This trap sounds like a great step forward but remember they themselves state that the unit is for detection, monitoring and as part of an Integrated Pest Management program. In addition the manufacturers state, “If the premises have not been treated with additional EPA-registered insecticide(s) and/or steam heat, this protocol should be considered.”

Having been involved in trying to develop a prototype trap not associated with this one, as well as having dealt with bed bugs from an educational and control standpoint, I think this will be a great tool in the war against bedbugs. Sleep tight.

Editor’s note: Thanks, Winston!

Winston O. Buggy is the pseudonym of a bed bug professional. Read more about the science behind NightWatch here.

Update 10/5/2008:

Editor’s note: Sean of the Bed Bug Resource points us to a Canadian distributor offering pre-orders. (I don’t know anything about the store, personally.) For $100 CA or $95 US down (out of the total cost $400 CA / $380 US), they say your Nightwatch trap will ship when released (11/15 is the expected date). They will be sold to anyone, apparently. The protocol on the Nightwatch website does appear to be something laypeople could do.

Note: They haven’t been released yet so we can’t really say much about them (but I do know someone with bed bugs, if Nightwatch wants to send me one to review (hint, hint!)

The data looks promising, but read all the info. on the Biosensory site, and caveat emptor.

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Bed bug aggregate pheromone traps “within two years” says Dr. Gerhard Gries

nobugsonme — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:00:20 +0000

This Globe and Mail article is about Vegas, Care Pest and Wildlife Control’s bed bug dog, based in Burnaby, British Columbia.

But it includes a section on the status of bed bug aggregate pheromone research being undertaken by Dr. Gerhard Gries of Simon Fraser University:

Understanding how insects communicate with each other is the key to developing effective new tools in the fight to eradicate bedbugs.

Simon Fraser University professor Dr. Gerhard Gries, an expert in insect chemical ecology, is investigating how bedbugs use airborne chemical compounds called pheromones to communicate.

Not only have Prof. Gries and his collaborators identified this compound, they now know how to manufacture pheromones in a laboratory.

“A synthetic replica of this message, made of very harmless chemicals, can be put into a trap and placed in a room with a potential infestation, and if any insects appear, you know there are bedbugs in the room.”

The SFU-developed pheromone traps have been patented and will soon undergo testing. If all goes well, they will be in the toolboxes of Vancouver exterminators within two years.

We’ve heard more than one team is working on bed bug pheromone traps.

Whoever wins the race to the working bed bug trap will have a lot of happy customers.

Not to sound ungrateful, but I sure hope it takes less than two years.

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Another bed bug trap in the works

nobugsonme — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 13:42:17 +0000

So far, there is no accurate bed bug trap available for sale, though we have heard various teams are working on them (including some researchers who are trying to produce a trap using aggregate pheromones to attract bed bugs).

This article from the Press of Atlantic City is a general “introduction to bed bugs” article that we see all the time in local papers.

But it contains this interesting tidbit. At a recent Multi-Family Housing Conference in Atlantic City, NJ, Richard Cooper announced that,

He’s also developing a long-sought tool in the fight: a bedbug trap to determine if a location is infested.

Cooper told the conference that a test of the trap in an occupied dwelling unit with no signs of bedbugs caught seven of them in a 12-hour period. In a vacant unit, where the bedbugs were dormant with no people to feed on, the trap captured 500 in 12 hours.

That’s very promising news indeed. Trying to detect bed bugs in many cases is very difficult. I hope these traps are available to the public swiftly.

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More bed bug research: Stephen Kells at the University of Minnesota

nobugsonme — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 03:40:55 +0000

Richard Shin reports for The Pioneer Press on research being done by Stephen Kells on bed bugs at the University of Minnesota.

Kells is at least one of the entomologists working on making an effective bed bug trap.

Alas, “we’re quite a distance off” from a monitoring trap, Kells said.

Eventually, it will be a wonderful invention.

It was interesting to hear how Kells got into bed bug research:

Kells first encountered a bedbug in about 2000 while working in the pest-control industry in Canada.

He dipped it into insecticide. The beast lived for four days and laid eggs.

“At that point, I knew we were in trouble,” he said.

Kells decided to study the insects further in an academic setting. He came to the University of Minnesota 3 1/2 years ago and set up a lab devoted to bedbug research.

About 2,000 bedbugs live there, housed in jars, where they crawl around pieces of filter paper that vibrate and twitch with their constant motion.

They eat Red Cross-donated human blood that’s beyond the expiration date, heated to body temperature.

Kells built a special platform he calls a bedbug arena, where he can observe the behavior of individuals when exposed to stimuli like heat. Part of his research is funded by the Propane Education Research Council, which wants to know whether propane-heaters can be used to kill the insects.

Another set of experiments involves attaching bedbug antennae to tiny electrical probes to see what kind of chemical compounds the antennae are tuned to receive. This might help develop the lure — maybe the carbon dioxide that sleeping humans exhale or the fatty acids on our skin — for a bedbug monitoring trap.

I am trying to envision the little tiny electrodes on the little tiny antennae. I also was fascinated by the bed bugs eating expired Red Cross blood, since all the other times we’ve read about researchers feeding their own bed bug colonies (as Lou Sorkin does) or having their grad students do it. I suppose it would be difficult to support 2,000 bed bugs.

The article also talks about the differences between captive bed bug colonies, and “wild” bed bugs, and it cites Harold Harlan, former Army entomologist (and author of the Armed Forces bed bug guide), as the source of Kells’ colony:

Bedbugs are a lot more resistant to poisons than they used to be. It takes 1,200 times the amount of insecticide to kill recently captured bedbugs than it takes to kill individuals from bedbug colonies that have been in captivity for more than 30 years, Kells said.

That captive colony was maintained by Harlan, who collected about 600 individuals from a barracks at Fort Dix, N.J., in the early 1970s. They were a novelty at the time, Harlan said. Over the years, he kept the colony alive in jars, letting it grow into the thousands, by allowing the bugs to feed on his legs.

“I’ve had them escape a few times in my house,” he said.

He had to leave the colony untended for a year when he was deployed in Vietnam and couldn’t find anyone willing to be a food source. When he came home, enough had survived to rebuild the population. Now his pets have become a resource for researchers.

I have a hunch this is where we got the information that bed bugs could survive, unfed, for a year. (We still aren’t sure where the “18 months” rule came from.)

Thanks to all the bed bug researchers, and universities, foundations and private companies that fund their work.

And thanks to the Pioneer Press for an informative article!

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Good news: bed bug aggregate pheromones

nobugsonme — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 08:38:54 +0000

A pest control professional confirmed for us today the reports Parakeets heard about bed bug aggregate pheromones being developed.

We’re told that within 2-3 months, assuming the red tape is cut swiftly enough, glue traps should be available for sale which use a bed bug pheromone to attract bed bugs to aggregate there.

This is very exciting: if bed bugs could be detected quickly, perhaps even in the absence of any signs or symptoms, well, maybe every infestation could be treated in its infancy.

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