Dark Banquet

by Bill Schutt

  “Hmmmm,” I said, not smelling much of anything.

  “I always thought they smelled like citronella,” Lou continued. “Nowhere near as strong as those yellow citronella ants, but there’s a definite similarity.”

  I leaned over and took a somewhat larger hit, checking first to make certain we hadn’t inhaled a hole in the mesh. They did smell like citronella.

  The scientist motioned to my note pad. “This is important,” he said. “There are Web sites and articles out there reporting that bed bugs don’t have a smell. That’s untrue—especially when they get riled up.”

  I nodded, as I took some notes. Strangely, rather than the smell of bed bugs or their lack of smell, I’d been struck by the idea that someone other than myself had actually sniffed those citronella ants. Each summer when I was a kid, the quarter-inch-long insects would swarm within the sidewalk cracks in front of my house. They had a distinctive odor, and as soon as I caught wind of it, I’d break out my action figures and start fishing for ants with a piece of straw. The enraged ants would emerge, a dozen or so at a time, clamped by their powerful jaws to the NEST THREAT that appeared like clockwork each year to poke at the entrance to their colony. And just like Lou’s bed bugs, the angrier the citronella ants became, the stronger the scent they produced.

  The entomologist’s voice jerked me back into the present. “In all likelihood, bed bugs release many different pheromones.”

  Besides chemical messages like the aggression pheromone produced by the citronella ants I’d hassled as a kid, other substances released by the bed bugs functioned to make them less palatable to predators.*96

  “Humans can only discern one of these pheromones,” Lou continued, placing his colony down on the table. “Dogs, on the other hand, have a much more sensitive sense of smell, and some are actually being trained to detect bed bug infestations.”*97

  At a lecture sponsored by the New York Entomological Society, several nights later, I learned that researchers were working to identify the bed bugs’ aggregational pheromone—the chemical signal that would lead to the formation of loose groups by the bed bugs as they gathered in their nooks and crannies between meals. By isolating the specific chemical that caused bed bugs to aggregate, scientists hoped to learn more about this behavior—information that could be used to develop more effective eradication methods.

  There were around seventy-five people present in the audience that night and they seemed to be a mix of pest-control types (there to pick up half a New York State Department of Environmental Conservation credit for their attendance) and city dwellers, either interested in bed bugs or traumatized by them to various degrees of twitchiness.

  The lecture was titled “Good Night, Sleep Tight, Don’t Let the Cimex lectularius Bite,” and the first speaker was Dr. Jody Gangloff-Kaufmann, a former doctoral student in entomology at Cornell and currently working for New York State’s Integrated Pest Management program. Together with her cospeaker, Gil Bloom (a faculty member at the City University of New York), she had been tracking the current outbreak of bed bugs in New York City since early 2001.

  According to Dr. Gangloff-Kaufmann, bed bugs originally lived in caves and fed on bats. Once humans (and other mammals) began inhabiting these caves, the opportunistic parasites began to feed on them as well. At a certain point, some bed bugs became associated rather exclusively with humans.*98

  The first literary reference to bed bugs can be found in Aristophanes’ play The Clouds (423 BCE). A century later, in Historia Animalium, Aristotle assured readers that “bugs are generated from the moisture of living animals, as it dries outside their bodies.”

  Monograph of Cimicidae, by Robert Usinger, is the closest thing to a bed bug bible. In his book, Usinger describes how bed bugs were not only present in Greece by 400 BCE but that the Greek physician Dioscorides was advising patients to eat them. For example, a recipe that called for mixing seven wall lice with meat and beans was used as a treatment for malaria. By “holding the beans,” one could counteract the venom of certain snakes.†99 For those who preferred to take their ectoparasites with a chaser, Dioscorides also prescribed downing the bugs with wine or vinegar as means of expelling horse leeches (presumably from a patient’s throat). Additionally, difficult or painful urination (a condition called dysuria) was treated by mashing up some of the insects and inserting them into the stricken orifice. Even sniffing them (the bed bugs, that is) could revitalize a woman who had fallen into a swoon from “strangulation of the vulva.”

  Medicinal uses for bed bugs, most of them cribbed from the ancient Greeks, were described in 77 CE by the Roman Gaius Plinius Secundus (better known in modern times as Pliny the Elder).*100

  Quintus Serenus was another Roman savant and the author of an early medical text. Here, the author clearly demonstrates how his savant status had been attained in fields other than poetry writing:

  Shame not to drink thee Wall-lice mixt with wine,

  And Garlik bruised together at noon-day.

  Moreover a bruis’d Wall-louse with an egge, repine

  Not for to take, ’tis loathsome, yet full good I say.

  Serenus does fare slightly better in this next description of an alternative Roman thirst quencher (actually cracking several Top 100 lists of “poems about consumption of bloodsucking insects”).†101

  Some men prescribe seven Wall-lice for to drink,

  Mingled with water, and one cup they think

  Is better than with drowsy death to sink

  With no reports on any actual medical benefits derived from eating, drinking, sniffing, or inserting bed bugs, it appears that their medicinal use was yet another instance of treatments that were nearly as bad as the maladies they were meant to alleviate (see chapter 4).

  A Treatise of Buggs, written by John Southall, was the first book devoted completely to bed bugs. Published in 1730, it offers readers a tantalizing peek at early pest control, as well as some insights into race relations.

  During a visit to the West Indies in 1726, the author was puzzled after encountering “an uncommon negro” with hair, breast, and beard “as white as snow.” The old gentleman was also puzzled by his encounter with the author, noticing that his “Face and Eyes were much swelled with Bugg-Bites,” and he wondered why “white men should let them bite,” rather than doing “something to kill them, as he did.” Presumably having no good answer for that one, Southall accepted “a Calibash full of Liquor” and directions to apply the stuff around his bedroom. The results would have sent a chill down Lou Sorkin’s spine:

  The instant I applied it, vast numbers did, (as he told me they would) come out of their Holes, and die before my face.

  (John Southall, A Treatise of Buggs, 8)

  After waking up bite-free, the author showed his gratitude by immediately hatching a plot to separate the freed slave (now referred to as “my Negro”) from his secret recipe. Southall broke out the good stuff, enticing the Jamaican with “one piece of beef, some biscuits and a bottle of beer,” after noting how “all Negroes being greedy of Flesh, when they can come at it.” As the day progressed, the brew flowed freely until “all the bottles we emptied of beer were fill’d with liquor.” Southall, however, remained sober enough to make notes about ingredients, quantities, and procedures, and after returning to England he marketed the pesticide along with his services as an early pest-control specialist. Unlike his long-forgotten Jamaican “business partner,” Southall did not divulge the secret ingredients of his elixir—which he christened Nonpareil.*102

  Southall also endeavored to determine just how bed bugs came to England, and in doing so he shows off his modest side, informing the reader how he overcame “difficulties, which might have discouraged a less enterprising Genius.” The great man consulted “as many learned, curious, and ancient men” as he could find, affirming that before the Great Fire of London in 1666, bed bugs “were never noted to have been seen.”

  They were then so few, as to be little taken notice of; yet a
s they were only seen in Firr-Timber, ’twas conjectur’d they were then first brought to England in them; of which most of the new Houses were partly built, instead of the good Oak, destroy’d in the old.†103

  (John Southall, A Treatise of Buggs, 17)

  Southall’s interviews supported the claims made in several early European dictionaries and encyclopedias that bed bugs did not exist in London prior to the Great Fire but were subsequently carried to England in timber imported from the American colonies. Years later, documents would reveal that the bloodsucking pests had actually been recorded in England since 1583 (nearly one hundred years before the famous London blaze).

  Miffed Americans returned fire in the eighteenth century by nicknaming the tiny bloodsuckers “red coats” and insisting that their own bed bug problems had arrived from Europe with the early colonists. In this regard, the Yanks were apparently correct since entomologists now believe that Cimex lectularius spread from an origin somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean region, across much of the world, via human colonization and overseas trade.

  Finally, Southall set out to describe bed bugs for his readers—with decidedly mixed results:

  A Bugg’s Body is shaped and shelled, and the Shell as transparent and finely striped as the most beautiful amphibious Turtle; has six legs most exactly shaped, jointed and bristled as the Legs of a Crab. Its Neck and Head much resembles a Toad’s. On its Head are three Horns piequed and bristled; and at the end of their Nose they have a Sting sharper and much smaller than a Bee’s. The Use of their Horns is in Fight to assail their Enemies, or defend themselves. With the Sting they penetrate and wound our Skins, and then (tho’ the Wound is so small as to be almost imperceptible) they thence by Suction extract their most delicious Food, our Blood.

  (John Southall, A Treatise of Buggs, 19)

  Currently, scientists recognize around seventy-five species in the family Cimicidae, but only three of them regularly feed on the blood of humans: Leptocimex bouti, which also preys on bats in western Africa and South America; Cimex hemipterus (sometimes known as the tropical bed bug), which feeds on poultry and bats in the New and Old World tropics (including Florida); and Cimex lectularius, the common bed bug, which preys on humans, bats, poultry, and other domesticated animals just about anywhere in the world.

  Reflecting their worldwide distribution, Robert Usinger listed over sixty native names for bed bugs. Besides “red coats” and “heavy dragoons” (after the scarlet-coated British cavalry), additional English nicknames included “mahogany-flat,” “B. Flat,” and “scarlet ramblers.” “Norfolk Howard” was a goof on the aristocratic family name of the Dukes of Norfolk, and in the first half of the twentieth century, the blood-filled hordes were known as “the Red Army.” Bed bugs have also been referred to as “chinch bugs,” probably because chinche is the Spanish word for bed bug. Unfortunately, this has led to some confusion since the name chinch bug has also been appropriated by the lygaeids, a related family of soil-dwelling insects notorious for the damage they inflict upon grasses and grains.

  During my visit with entomologist Lou Sorkin, I asked him about the old perception that bed bugs were found only in association with hobos, seedy motels, and filthy conditions.

  He shook his head. “That’s been the mind-set for quite some time, but in the old days, only people who had money could heat their homes, so that’s where you’d find the infestations. And once central heating took off, so did the bed bugs.”

  I glanced over at the colony. The jar was sitting on Lou’s worktable, and now that the creatures within it weren’t being warmed, breathed on, or sniffed, most of the miniature horde had retreated back into the shadows of their cardboard harborage.

  The bug man went on to explain how increased temperatures not only attracted bed bugs and amped up their activity, but it also sped up their life cycle. “Higher temperatures lead to faster maturation to the adult, reproductive stage.”

  I would later learn from Dr. Gangloff-Kaufmann’s presentation that a combination of high temperature (85°F) and high humidity could condense the bed bugs’ entire life cycle into a period of three to four weeks. She explained that initially this might sound like a good thing, because the pests died more quickly, but they could also crank out a new generation in less time—leading to an overall increase in population size.

  “So can cooling down an infested home get rid of bed bugs?”

  “Not really,” Lou said, shaking his head. “Lower temperatures can slow down their maturation process but it also increases their life span.”

  Like other insects, when bed bugs are chilled their metabolic rates decrease.

  “Nymphs can go for months and months without feeding and adults can live without a blood meal for a year or longer.”

  Well, here was a clue I hadn’t read about on Web sites or in the rash of recent newspaper and magazine articles on bed bugs. Rather than becoming a plus in the war against them, the creatures’ adaptive response to low temperatures presented a significant problem: bed bugs could survive for months with no food, in empty (and presumably unheated) apartments. Harkening back to the enormous amount of misinformation on bats, the ability of bed bugs to survive prolonged periods without their human hosts apparently led to a fairly common belief that they could feed on juices extracted from wood and paper, or even digest wallpaper glue. “Paste they love much,” declared self-proclaimed genius John Southall in his Treatise on Buggs.

  I guess it might have been almost comforting to think that these tiny home invaders were munching glue or savoring newspaper ink. Comforting that is, compared to a pair of grim realizations that not only did bed bugs maintain a strict diet of blood, but unlike exotic vampires like bats and leeches, these hardened city dwellers were living (and feeding) right here among us.

  Okay, so we already know that bed bugs are arthropods, like crabs and spiders, but let’s get a bit more specific, starting with the question, what are “bugs”?

  Bed bugs and their fellow cimicids belong to a large suborder of insects known as Heteroptera. These, in turn, belong to an even more inclusive grouping, the order Hemiptera. Although some hemipterans do feed on blood, many don’t. Aphids, for example, the enemy of farmers and gardeners everywhere, feed on plant sap and cause serious damage in the process.

  But no matter what they feed on, to be a card-carrying hemipteran, you need to have a needle-sharp, dual-channeled proboscis. After piercing the skin (or rind) of whatever it is they happen to feed on, hemipterans inject saliva through one channel of their proboscis. Compounds within the saliva begin the process of digestion, and almost immediately, the bugs start snorking up partially digested food through the other channel.*104

  In addition to bed bugs, the Heteroptera contain a parade of insects with nasty-sounding names like stink bugs, squash bugs, and water scorpions. Assassin bugs (Reduviidae) are another notorious family of hemipterans. Unlike their bed bug cousins, though, some assassin bugs can transmit serious ailments to the humans they feed upon. In fact, these insect vampires (also known as cone-nosed bugs or kissing bugs) deposit feces containing the parasitic flagellate Trypanosoma cruzi onto their victim’s skin. Itching the bug bite rubs the infected excrement into the wound, allowing the parasite to enter the bloodstream. From there it can invade organs like muscles. In severe cases, the ailment is known as Chagas’ disease, in which the parasites can cause serious damage to nerves of the gastrointestinal tract and the electrical conduction system of the heart. Charles Darwin was, in fact, bitten by assassin bugs in South America, and it’s been suggested that Chagas’ disease may have been responsible for the lifelong health problems he experienced upon his return to England.

  Although bug can refer to diseases like influenza, as well as just about any insect or small arthropod (e.g., spiders and ticks), only heteropterans are considered “true bugs” by entomologists. This is because they all share some rather specific anatomical characteristics. For example, many insects have two pairs of wings (forewings an
d hind wings). In most heteropterans, the forewings are hard at the base and membranous toward the tip (hence their name, from the Greek for “different wings”). One take-home message is that “all bugs are insects but not all insects are bugs.”

  Strangely enough, although bed bugs share anatomical, developmental, and behavioral similarities with other heteropterans, they don’t have functional wings. The posterior wings of cimicids are absent and the anterior pair is vestigial. Vestigial organs are nonfunctional remnants of structures that were functional in the ancestors of that organism. For example, blind cavefishes (belonging to the families Amblyopsidae and Characidae) have tiny, functionless eyes. By all indications, these sightless swimmers evolved from ancestral species that could see. Presumably, some of these fish migrated into new environments (caves), where they eventually lost their visual senses in much the same manner as other troglodytes like blind salamanders and some cave crickets. The sightless eyes that remain result from portions of the fishes’ genetic blueprint (its DNA) that have remained unchanged from the ancestral versions. As a result, these old sections of DNA are still cranking out remnants of the old anatomical features—even though they don’t function anymore.*105 In bed bugs, one pair of stubby functionless wings (hemielytra) is all that remains of what were probably two working pairs of wings in bed bug ancestors. Presumably, the loss of wings occurred as these ancient bugs evolved a lifestyle in which birds and bats spread them from place to place, thus rendering their own wings unnecessary.

  Speaking of bugs, the English word bug apparently derives from the Welsh bwg. In its original form, bug (or bugg) referred to a ghost or hobgoblin, which is how it appeared in the Coverdale Bible (1535) and in several works by William Shakespeare (including Hamlet).†106 In the 1622 play The Virgin Martyr, bug appears to have been used for the first time to describe an insect infestation (“We have bugs, Sir!”). Until then, wall lice and Cimices had been used to describe Cimex lectularius.