Bed Bugs- What You've Been Told is Totally False

this is me subjecting my body to science oh my gosh by letting a bed bug eat me that's my because for four years now I've been wanting to make this exact video taking a deep dive through into the fascinating world of bed bugs there's a lot of fear and myths out there regarding dealing with bed bugs and today we're gonna debunk nearly all of them heading out in the field with the experts and running some experiments so if you could power through your squeamishness and spend the next few minutes here with me I promise not only to blow your mind with some facts about bed bugs you definitely don't know but I'll make you a bed bugs expert knowing exactly what they look like how not to get them but most importantly what to do if you do get them because the punchline is it's actually not that hard to get rid of them as long as you ignore all the bad advice out there and follow the surprisingly simple steps I'll demonstrate in this video so let's get right to it and that across the country all the way to Rutgers University to visit their Urban entomology lab which basically means bugs you don't want in your house to meet with Dr Wong the world's foremost bed bug expert and the main reason for visiting his lab was to run a bunch of experiments to test all the things you read online that people swear will get rid of bed bugs but before we got to that I wanted to meet some of the little guys myself they have thousands of advances probably more than twenty thousand oh my gosh this is like the Fort Knox of bed bugs okay can I pick up one of these sure okay I Cannot drop this I feel like this one probably has a full-time Headroom four or 500 in this one I'll open it this is my first time ever seeing a real bed bug here we go if you want to use gloves should I use gloves oh we always use gloves I should use gloves then [Music] wow I just gotta go for it it's like ripping off a Band-Aid [Music] ah gross wow wow oh man there's so many of them so this is what bed bugs look like I just never knew all right so let me just cover some bed bug Basics it takes a few months for them to mature from egg all the way to full grown male and female and in those few months they pass through these five stages of growth you could see the relative size here compared to a credit card and as humans we have five senses but they're superhuman antenna give them two extra senses allowing them to detect both body heat and carbon dioxide being breathed out by a potential host then once they get close they use their sense of smell also on their antenna to lock down the exact final position of the person which is all to say if you exhale your smelly warm breath on them they get real excited that is crazy they're so stoked right now to eat sorry guys their lifespan is anywhere from three months to a year and ideally they like to feed about once a week but there's this unsettling fact we gotta feed in the vehicle league three to six months what because they just don't move very much it's highly nutritious material so stay stay in the resting stage for three to six months and the professor says three to six months here but for my first of five Super wild bed bug facts if their environment is relatively cold they can survive up to 300 days without eating anything they're really flat because they are hungry so when they're hungry and they haven't fed they're going to be more flat right I'd love to get a shot of it going from flat and brown to oh if you want to do that you put in a arm you can see which meant I had a decision to make okay I'll do it for science we're gonna make a brown bed bug red so average your feeding time is about five to ten minutes I feel like I'm at the Red Cross here let's do this oh my gosh oh oh so right now I feel nothing so you're not very reacting to the fights the butts sticking up in the air now wow yeah it's getting bigger and there's just something about seeing another organism steal your blood that sharpens the focus and leaves one to start pondering some questions that probably should have been pre-pondered and they don't carry diseases right I should have asked that it doesn't 10 minutes ago and this is my second Super wild bed bug fact they don't actually carry or transmit any diseases which sort of serves as an evolutionary advantage in the world of coexisting with humans because the government doesn't really support research to eradicate them since they don't really pose a widespread Health threat when it's done will it start running real quick I will run slowly because it's a bigger fatter they're easily crawling the walls of this dish by the way right so we tend to put the talcum powder in the interior walls so they cannot Escape I think we have some talcum powder you think that the thing is the part that I'm concerned about oh gosh he's moving okay finish what do I do now I mean it's finished don't worry I'll put it in a dish so that means normally after I give blood I get juice and cookies and when we put my new blood buddy next to an one that's what it would look like under the microscope that was just sitting there begging to be used oh my gosh wow those are my red blood cells boy are those bubbles even no way life is amazing I don't think I reacted right that's good so you're not as reactive as me so I could put even more on my arm then you can try I'm taking one in the name of Science and we're gonna load up 10 bed bugs on my arm that's one two we've also put some DEET which they don't like to kind of make a barrier so they stay in the middle yes this is like Thanksgiving there's one down there can you get that one thanks please oh I can feel them bite like if I don't look man okay 11. I said 10 Professor one bonus oh that one's turning red already could you imagine just some people who have a bad infestation just every night like this is what their leg looks like they have got thousands of bites a night yeah a night they're getting bigger and bigger by the second oh you better not start mating on me this one finished okay I don't like your attitude let's get rid of this guy professor professor professor as they finish I vote them off the island I don't want them crawling up my arm he's full and you're off the island oh and you're off the island and he's done peace down to two this is like a Mr Beast challenge last to leave the arm wins a gallon of rabbit blood oh we have a winner I think it's dead oh there he goes and so once again by way of comparison here are the 11 bed bugs that just spend some quality time with me verses 11 unfed bed bugs of similar ages alright so they're all then feeding there was 11 total it took about 10 minutes but I would have no idea they just made a meal out of me like I felt a tiny prick on one of the 11 but other than that like it's a tricky little parasite and I'm not alone half of all people have no reaction to a bed bug bite whereas the other 50 of the population will have some kind of reaction to their saliva that will look something like this in the morning so having survived the bloodletting it was time to run our experiments and head into the Vault sealed by the huge wooden door all right so we're here in the bed bug test chamber and we've set up a bunch of tests in here so for example in these two we have these dishes basically that can climb up the wall then they get stuck in this trough it's too slippery to climb out inside each of these troughs there's a little vial of this good smelling stuff that those bed bugs smells like a human so they're going to go to either one of these so this one in this corner is a control whereas in this corner we have an ultrasonic pest repeller so we want to see if this actually does anything or not so at the end of 24 hours we'll come back we'll count the number of bed bugs in this dish versus this one there's way more in the control and this is actually doing something but if there's a same number of each then this is nothing more than a gimmick to seal your money in addition to testing the ultrasonic bed bug repeller we use an identical test setup to investigate some of the other supposed remedies to bed bugs commonly found online including dryer sheets mothballs baking soda and essential oils and just for the sake of my curiosity we also place this vertical Post in a dish for my super wild bed bug fact number three out of five the professor told me that bed bugs are attracted to Vertical objects because if you think about it humans generally sleep at the highest elevation in any given room so their logic is just crawl up any vertical object you see until you eventually find a warm-blooded meal at the top so this is to mimic a bed post and we do have an attractant in both trays the hypothesis is that they will actually be more bed bugs in this tray because you have that vertical post and if that turns out to be true that's pretty wild and in addition to those six tests we set up some residual effects tests where we treated a surface with each of these three products you could buy at the local hardware store specifically marketed to kill bed bugs and then finally we tested this fogger spray also specifically designed for killing bed bugs godspeed little fellas and then we set it off leaving three dishes of exposed bed bugs at different spots in the same room and so as a final step we place the bed bugs at the center of each of the six trays in the bed bug Vault and we were underway the experiment's all set up we're gonna close the wooden Vault do a final bed bug check let her run and now that the experiments were running Professor Wong invited us to join him on a research visit to an apartment building nearby that had been receiving frequent reports of bed bugs so him and his team were going out to collect some samples and to try out some new treatment approaches and after entering the apartment it didn't take long to find our first culprit with bed bug here which the professor told me was dead yeah when in fact he was just a good faker by the way this is a bit of a warning that some people might find the next few minutes a little gross so skip ahead a bit if you just want to see the results of the test it turns out one in a thousand houses or apartments have bed bugs in the U.S today which might above fact number four you before 1950 it was one in three houses that had bed bugs hence the origin of the saying sleep tight don't let the bedbugs bite midnight to 3 A.M is typically their most active time and it takes a little more than 10 minutes to get to you a little less than 10 minutes to feed as you saw with my arm and a little more than 10 minutes to get back to their hiding spot if you're suspicious you're sleeping on a mattress with bed bugs just check under the mattress in the corners and look for bed bug poop stains like this just remember this is more of an extreme case so yours might not look quite as bad these two here are actually mating which we saw quite a bit in the lab too which actually leads to my final super wild bed bug fact and buckle up because this one's a doozy typically in nature in order to make a baby of a thing you have a male which let's say is represented by this plug and a female which let's say is represented by this outlet and if you plug in the cord you get an adorable little baby and just like in pretty much all the rest of nature female bed bugs totally have an outlet except male bed bugs prefer to take this approach the scientific term for this is called traumatic insemination and just like my wall is now damaged it actually damages the abdomen of the females leading to significantly shorter lifespans researchers aren't exactly sure why they've evolved to use this alternate approach but it must offer some kind of overall Advantage leading females to lay up to five eggs every day and you can see their handiwork here on that same chair we saw before like all insects bed bugs have an exoskeleton so what you're seeing here is as they grow bigger from stage to Stage they molt and leave behind their old exoskeleton how bad is this infestation relative to most you see yeah moderate moderate everyone you tens of Salzburg to prove his point he later sent me a video of this house with the Charming exterior which they had treated a few months ago the truly staggering part about this place though was that only one person lived there he just wasn't allergic to their bites and he just learned to live with them back at our thankfully moderate infestation the professor in his team took some samples for study later and started treating the room unsurprisingly the apartments both above and below this one also had some minor bed bug issues so if you're working to get rid of bed bugs in your apartment just make sure you let your landlord know what's going on in case the unit next to you happens to be the primary source to prevent you from getting a second wave and as we were wrapping up the professor dropped a bit of a bombshell about how it was pretty likely we had at least some bed bugs on us at this point even if you can see they you may not see like yeah they can't they can't which is why he always plays it safe well actually I have a spare clothing always when I go home I always wash it the shoe is only for baseball shoes what nobody told us we unfortunately were not told to bring nor did we have a spare change of clothes what have I done so we do the next best thing by steaming ourselves which instantly kills the bed bugs from the heat that is until the professor decided he should check his shoes and found this Is it alive yeah he's alive oh my gosh no way at which point just steaming ourselves seemed wildly insufficient because apparently it's illegal in the state of New Jersey to just publicly chill in your underwear me and my crew hit up the local Goodwill to wait things out in style so the next day we headed back to the lab to check out our results in our freshly laundered clothes but can I just take a moment to say it's the best to hang out with bug people because they have cool door knockers and interesting magazine subscriptions the only downside being they like to study more than just bed bugs oh it smells this is where they keep the Cockroaches and as you might recall I really really don't like cockroaches yes I had thousands of those wow that's so disgusting oh these are the kind I hate these are the American largest one in the US they're freaking antenna so that's the worst sound in the world wait they have wings yeah they have wings in Florida they can fly too but here temperature is cold so it was a little warmer in this lab they would fly they will fly so we made our way back upstairs where I felt much more comfortable time to check the results so this ultrasonic pest repeller did nothing if anything it attracted them we had 120 bed bugs with the ultrasonic sensor over here for the control we had 101. clearly that does nothing to repel bed bugs and of course that confirms our hypothesis considering bed bugs don't even have ears not to mention that apartment we visited had a couple plugged into the wall themselves so definitely save your money on that one next up was the vertical post test that is wild there are so many over here by the vertical post literally none over here on the other side and the remaining four tests all had similar results so I'll just show the average which was around four bed bugs trapped in the dish that was surrounded by either the dryer sheets mothballs baking soda or essential oils with around 26 bugs trapped in the control these results clearly show bed bugs prefer to avoid these four items because they all have a really strong scent and bed bugs have a really good sense of smell but they don't do anything to kill the bed bugs according to the professor these act more as an annoyance but the bed bugs would gladly walk over them if it was between temporarily having to deal with the smell and starving to death as for the residual effect tests with the pesticides specifically engineered to kill bed bugs it was even worse news the spray aerosol and fogger Bed Bug Killers all killed about 12 percent of the bed bugs after 10 days and before you go all glass half full and think well 12 is better than nothing our control which was just water also had a 12 percent mortality rate so it's literally not better than nothing according to Professor Wong part of the reason for these terrible results is that many strains of bed bugs have developed immunity to a lot of these chemicals over the years and he thinks in 10 years all bed bugs will be immune and this sort of makes sense because they're constantly undergoing localized mass extinction events when people try and spray them and only the most Hardy minorities survive each time and pass on their increasingly pesticide resistant genes there were some chemicals that on average marriage were effective in killing about 50 percent if you sprayed the bed bugs directly but if they were just hanging out in the area you sprayed later it's once again the same as water the problem with this is you'll only ever see a small portion of the bed bugs you actually have so direct spray pesticides are sort of pointless if your goal is to eradicate the entire population that's the bad news now here's the good news there was a superstar in our test and that was the diatomaceous earth with the nearly 90 percent mortality rate after 10 days this stuff is just crushed fossilized shells from Tiny prehistoric aquatic organisms called diatoms the key here is their shells were silica based and silica is what you see in those packets you see sometimes in packages then you're not supposed to eat silk is useful because it absorbs moisture incredibly well for bed bugs this is a bummer because when they walk by it it sticks to their exoskeleton as you can see here under the microscope and they die from dehydration in a matter of hours to days we're eating lunch right after this which is a bad idea in hindsight the best part here is the end of the end it's freeing this to each other in their hiding spots and since every organ is there to live they can do it there's also one more bit of really good news and that's bed bugs die at 122 degrees Fahrenheit like instantly this is also 100 effective and there's no way to build immunity to it and a really easy way to get a bed bug to 120 degrees as we demonstrated earlier is with the clothes dryer or a steamer or if you want the nuclear option you can work with professionals to heat your entire house to that temperature now that we have a better sense of what does and doesn't work let's talk about what to do if you actually get bed bugs the first thing to point out is the best way to get rid of them is to not get them in the first place and the most common way people get bed bugs is through traveling so when you get to your room here are three simple tips first pull back the bed sheets and check the corners of the mattress now that you know what to look for second don't set your suitcase on the bed or the floor instead set it on the luggage rack or for some reason you feel like you need to be extra cautious the bathtub and third don't put your clothes in the hotel drawers or leave them just lying around whatever you you're not wearing should just stay in your luggage or hanging up on the hangers alright so you were super careful with staying in the hotel on travel but then you got back and bought that couch on Craigslist for a smoking deal and now you got bed bugs in your home and Professor Wong's experience you don't actually need to spend four thousand dollars hiring an exterminator as long as you know there's three steps for defense and three for offense first up for defense you put your bed in a bag you can buy these mattress and box spring encasements off Amazon and once you zip them around your bed basically seal in any bed bugs currently living inside just remember they can live up to 300 days so you can't take it off for a year and they not only trap in any current bed bugs but they also remove all the mattress hems and clever hiding spots they love to use number two your clothes dryer wash and dryer close the sheets at least once a week more often doesn't hurt importantly you want to wash them in hot water and dry them on the highest heat setting because it's impossible for them to survive this number three simplify and declutter simplify the room to take away any hiding spots by putting clutter into plastic bags or toes they aren't interested in clean clothes but dirty clothes smell nice to them so it's good to also store those in a plastic bag or tote until you're ready to wash them also move your bed away from the wall so the only way they can get on the bed is by climbing up the legs so that's the three steps for defense now for the offense number one vacuum make sure you vacuum the bedroom floor and the bed area once a week just be sure to empty anything you've collected into a bag and into the trash at number two we've got diatomaceous earth which as you recall was the Superstar from our tests you should definitely apply this around the bed but it's especially useful in penetrating the cracks and crevices close to the bed including a round and behind power outlets the key is applying just a light dusting like this if you leave it in clumps it will actually backfire and not be as effective because they'll just navigate around it and finally at number three we've got steam a simple clothes steamer like this will do the job and I think it's great that with all the years and money spent on creating all these synthetic pesticides the two most effective methods for killing bed bugs are just crushed up rocks and really hot water which are by far the two most simple and natural use the steamer all around your bed once a week but if you find some think you want to treat you can't steam or put in the dryer you can put it in a bag and then put it in the freezer for three days and that will also kill them Professor one said if you have a small infestation and you just noticed them then using these three defensive and offensive steps will totally take care of the problem without needing to spend money on an exterminator however if you've got a lot of bed bugs and you've had them for a long time been getting professional help is probably a good idea the entire house heating option takes about eight hours and it's the most Sure Fire way to totally eradicate every bed bug along with any eggs all at once but it can cost up to four thousand dollars depending on the size of your place now that you're playing both defensive offense and things are looking good stick these traps under the bed legs so you can monitor and have some peace of mind that they are in fact totally gone alright that's it you're a bed bug expert now I'm hopeful that at least some of you will have renewed appreciation for the fascinating natural world around us and everyone else can just congratulate yourself on making to the end while soaking in a bathtub of Listerine this is the world's largest frisbee launcher and I invited my nephews out to demonstrate just how much more accurate it is than their mere human cells wow and that frisbee launcher of course is just a scaled up replica of this handheld version which also happens to be insanely accurate with all six rapid fire shots then there's this coin spinner that also gives you superpowers this time to spin a coin better than any mere human that is awesome and then of course a mega version which I also used to dominate my nephews yeah yeah and if you want to watch both of those Mega build videos you can find them over on the crunchlabs YouTube channel because this is crunchlabs it's an actual place with a tennis ball cannon the world's longest Hot Wheels track secret passages and a bunch more inventions it's where we not only build all the Creations for my YouTube channel but most importantly it's where we design these monthly crunch slaps build boxes to help you think like an engineer too it says it right there on the box so you get the box that has the handheld frisbee launcher or that handheld coin spinner delivered right to your door but then when you open it up there's a link to a video where you not only build it alongside me but I teach you all the juicy physics of how the toys work and the best part of it all is every month we randomly select one box to slip in the Platinum ticket if it happens to be your box oh my God and you're coming out right here to crunchlabs to design with me and my team for a day so if you want to unlock a whole world of possibilities of thinking like an engineer of learning how to create and build whatever you can dream up go to kirkslabs.com and order your buildbox subscription today foreign [Music]

Channel: Mark Rober

Views: 16,326,662

Keywords:

Id: 2JAOTJxYqh8

Length: 23min 46sec (1426 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 04 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/Iranoul75]

Excellent video. Maybe we all knew, but it’s a good video. They didn’t talk about cimexa (recommended in this subreddit). Is cimexa a kind of diatomaceous earth or it’s something else?

[u/bijig]

One in 1000 households in the US have bedbugs, that is a lot. No wonder they keep spreading.

[u/Billism]

I just finished watching it. This should be pinned.

[u/dudimash]

I got itchy while watching the video

[u/entsult_bugs]

Hi Changlu and Mark. We bed bug researchers know each other. A friend of mine had written a book on blood feeders and one chapter is on bed bugs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9z_LtDx5-4&t=4s

And here's a video of one climbing up glass and onto a plastic vial. No tarsal pad like some roaches have at the base of the tarsal claws for climbing smooth surfaces. They have a wrist pad that aids in climbing smooth surfaces.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOAfxqxLptc

You were able to show in part of the video that bed bugs clean themselves. They are using a fine comb at the distal part of the first tibia to clean the antennae and also clean the stylets in their beak.

When using encasements, you might want to use duct tape on the metal bedframe so you don't tear the encasement material.

[u/madthumbz]

Came here to post this.

I think the DE efficacy was exaggerated and ignored the safety concerns about it. He also refers to it as 'just crunched up rocks'. Professionals will want it removed before they come in, and most people will end up with professionals eventually.

Encasements aren't as great as he makes them out to be. There are other hiding places on beds, and I've had one nest where the zipper gets covered, and noticed activity along the seems especially along the bed frame. They also easily get holes and tears.

I like that he touched on temperatures and lifespans. - So many come here and declare they can live a year without a host ignoring that it's in a precisely controlled lab environment.

[u/1950sunlimited]

“Me and my crew hit up the local goodwill/bedbug trading center to wait things out in style.”

[u/distortionwarrior]

I'd like to correct the context behind his statement of 1 in 1000 homes is infested with bedbugs. The infestations are usually clustered into cities and neighborhoods, so there is a very high concentration in certain areas, and very sparse in other areas. For instance, Wyoming has almost zero bedbugs (and nearly zero densely populated cities), but they are a literal and legally declared epidemic in San Diego and Coronado where apartment life is common. They are so common that they are super hard to wipe out, they just go a house or two down and then come back in a season or two.

[u/spyrenx]

Challenge: watch the video without immediately showering after. Ick.

Although I do wonder at the suggestion of using the luggage tray. I get that it reduces surface area in contact with the rest of the room, but he also showed that bb's like to explore higher elevations.