Bed Bug History

When we consider that mankind developed from a single microbe, then it is possible to believe that even the horrendous bed bug has a history also.

If you take the trouble to read some ancient history of the World’s first civilizations, you can read between the lines that the bed bug was despised even then.

That the bed bug is a survivor we already knew, but the fact that it has survived more than a few thousand years is a tribute to its resilience.

In the fragile balance of nature, there is a place for almost every variety of bug or insect. Yet the thinking person would find it very difficult to find any reason why a bed bug should have a place in history or in the present.

For that matter there is no viable reason for the bed bug to exist at all, yet it does and appears to have been around for as long as man walked or crawled the planet.

The question is where did the bed bug originate and how did they manage to spread themselves across the face of the planet. It is more than likely that they found themselves aboard cargo ships that traversed the planet in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Who knows, maybe Christopher Columbus brought some with him to America on the Mayflower!

Bedbugs were probably a way of life for people up until the mid nineteenth century, when in general the standards of domestic cleanliness were not too high and bed bugs were just one of the many infestations going around.

As standards of cleanliness increased as well as public awareness of the dangers of bed bugs, steps were taken to destroy all kinds of pests that invaded people’s homes unchecked since then.

The use of DDT, an all purpose pesticide became commonplace in the middle of the twentieth century. Not too refined, DDT was effective, probably too much so.

There is no doubt that spraying DDT was a major deterrent in the spread of the bed bug around the World, but the side effects of DDT were too much for the more sophisticated people of the World to bear as the twentieth century drew to a close.

The unpleasant side effects of having your home sprayed with DDT was just not worth the aggravation caused by a few bed bugs, and it began to be used in extreme cases only, and was eventually banned.

Nowadays bed bugs do exist and still represent a problem for 21st century society. Standards of cleanliness in the home have increased and it is much more difficult for them to find that ideal environment in which they thrive.

In the relatively few cases where bed bugs still manage to cause an infestation there are more sophisticated methods that can be employed to destroy them. Chemicals used today by pest control experts are more subtle and mostly effective.

In some extreme cases, the infestation is so deep that items of furniture, not only beds, as well as carpets may need to be taken away and destroyed, as it the only way for the family to rid themselves of their unwanted guests.

For the future, mankind will have to live with the fact that the bed bug will probably always be around. Not serving any practical purpose in nature’s chain, apart from being a pest.


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