I always check the mattresses, headboards, and nightstands for bed bugs in hotels. At least exterminators are getting better at getting rid of them – as long as you choose one with experience. My cousin got them and it involved a huge amount of cleaning - and then more recently one of our tenants got them. That was a doozy, as she couldn’t afford to launder all her clothes as asked. We wound up paying some company hundreds of dollars to do it for her. It took 3 treatments, but knock on wood, I think it’s been over 6 months without a bug.
I, too, always do a bedbug check as soon as I arrive in my hotel room. Husband is a little OCD about cleanliness so he’s always been in the habit of pulling back bedspreads and sheets, checking bathrooms, etc. anyway. I also will thoroughly check tripadvisor reviews to make sure there are no reported past invasions.
Yeah, I always search the name of the hotel plus bedbugs before I travel. Also I will no longer stay in a Holiday Inn because in every hotel I have looked up, there have been reports of travelers finding bed bugs and management either pretending they’re not there or blaming the traveler. The response of the hotel to a problem matters.
But back to an earlier comment about getting rid of bed bugs and mosquitos - they’re not talking about doing something that would poison the bugs. They’re talking about propogating a gene that would sterilize them (at least, that’s what they’re thinking about for disease-carrying mosquitos). Bed bugs would be a really interesting population to experiment on, since they wouldn’t really affect ecosystems and their populations don’t mix freely.
There is at least one theory circulating that the reason Zika has mutated to be so nasty is due to the introduction of the genetically modified mosquitoes that were supposed to produce non-viable but some survived and DID reproduce and bad things followed. (Sorry, genetics us not my strength but the article is in the Zika babymoon thread)
What did bedbugs munch on before humans came along?
hayden it is well known dinosaurs slept in beds and bedbugs actually led to their extinction…humans are next.
joking aside that was a great question I actually never thought about! I found this own Wikipedia
“Bed bugs are obligatory hematophagous (bloodsucking) insects. Most species feed on humans only when other prey are unavailable”