Bedbugs, that is. There are approximately seven species of bedbugs (Cimex spp.) that will feed on humans. Bedbugs are small nocturnal creatures that feast on human blood, then scurry into hiding in order to digest their meal. Many cities are reporting a vast increase in the number of bedbug bite cases in recent months. Why? Most believe it’s because of the increase in travel (the little buggers hide in luggage for a free trip to your house) and the decrease in pesticides once used to control them. Bedbugs not only bite and raise ugly, itching welts; at the beginning of the 20th century it was found that bedbugs were the diffusing agent for smallpox!
In 1962, Rose Wilder Lane wrote a letter in which she remembered bedbugs encountered at a hotel in Delphi:
Blow out the light and the onrush of… bedbugs was heard. Before you could scratch a match, the whitewashed ceiling was black – and I mean literally black – with the bugs… While the lamp burns, you order four dishes, set one leg of the bed in each, and fill the dish with kerosene. Over the lower sheet on the bed you spread evenly a layer of Keating’s powder: when ready to sleep, you roll yourself deftly in the upper sheet, tucking in its ends to make a neat package of yourself… The final last fold, held open, lets you blow out the light and, quickly, quickly, you roll that and lie on it. All snugly wrapped up, lying in Keating’s powder and in wrappings more or less smeared with it, on which the bugs patter down like rain from the ceiling. But I have slept many nights so, and often in the morning found that not even one survivor had penetrated the wrappings.
Pretty disgusting! Keating’s Powder, by the way, was widely advertised over one hundred years ago as being “unrivalled in destroying every species of offensive insect, and is perfectly harmless to the smallest animal or bird.” The active ingredient in Keating’s Powder was pyrethrum, an extract of a species of chrysanthemum native to southeast Asia. Pyrethrins are still used today.
Special thanks to Mumpsmaster, who tracked down the November 4, 1962, bedbug letter from Rose Wilder Lane to Jasper Crane. See The Lady and The Tycoon: The Best of Letters Between Rose Wilder Lane and Jasper Crane, edited by Roger Lea MacBride. Published in 1973 by Claxton Printers, Ltd., Caldwell, Idaho.
