When bed bugs started creeping back into America, stowaways in the luggage of international travelers, hotels took the first hit. Soon bed bugs started cropping up in houses and apartments, hitchhiking their way in on the clothing and in the suitcases of business travelers and vacationers. Until this summer, however, bed Boston Bruins Tim jersey bugs were rarely heard of in U.S. retail stores or commercial office buildings.
More recently, bed bugs began leaving the comfortable sanctuary of American bedrooms and showing up at schools, libraries, hospitals and other high traffic areas. This summer, the first reports of bed bugs in retail stores and a slew Boston Bruins Tim jersey of workplace infestations caused panicked Americans to see bed bugs lurking around every corner. It was like turning the clock back to our great-grandparents' day when bed bugs were an everyday fact of life.
Bed bugs typically inhabit bedrooms, preferring to hide close to their preferred food source - the blood of sleeping humans. Entomologists say the
University of Kentucky entomologist and national bed bug expert Michael Potter has called bed bugs the most serious insect threat of the 21the century and the most difficult to control. Slightly smaller than an apple seed, these nocturnal, blood-sucking parasites are adept at hiding in minute crevices, easily transported to new locations and able to survive for a year without feeding. Incredibly prolific, a single pair of bed bugs can produce 300 offspring and 1,000 eggs in three months. Hatching in about a week, larvae begin reproducing within a month. In just a few months, a single pair of bed bugs can spawn an infestation numbering in the hundreds of thousands.
Not attracted by dirt or filth, bed bugs target human blood, on which they must feed before molting or reproducing. Adept hitchhikers, these blood-sucking parasites are spread by their victims, riding into office buildings with co-workers, visitors, venders, maintenance staff and deliverymen - An equal opportunity pest, in the past year bed bug infestations have been found in former President Bill Clinton's Harlem office, the Sirius XM Radio studio of shock jock Howard Stern, U.N. headquarters, the Ronald Reagan building in Washington D.C., IRS offices in Philadelphia and Kentucky, two Abercrombie & Fitch Hollister stores, Victoria's Secret, the Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, AMC Times Square movie theater, the Empire State Building, and the corporate offices of Time Warner, Google, CNN, The Wall Street Journal and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services offices in Rockville, Maryland, to name a few.
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