Do you want to know what bugs me? Bed bugs and their bites! The reason I’m writing this post is that I’ve been seeing a lot of crappy information on the internet. Part of that has to do with people’s obsession with the formulation and the shape of bed bug bites. If you’re too lazy and you don’t want to read the post, here’s the down and dirty. It’s pointless! It means nothing. Neither I nor a doctor can identify a bug by the bite on your body. Everybody reacts differently. You could react differently at different stages of your life, different health levels, or blood pressure. There is even a study that says that bed bug bites can show up to three years after they’re gone. That’s terrible!
For years we read that they bite in a line. Sure I’ve seen it, but not very often. The reason they say bed bugs bite in a line (you’ll have a big line on your arm) is because of how they feed. Bed bugs don’t get on you and feed necessarily. They can but they would rather walk up to you on the bed, stand on the bed, and just suckle at your arm right there. Easy peasy! When they’re done, they drop off and head back to their hole. So you can imagine if you’re lying asleep, with your arm sitting on the bed, and they walk up, standing on the bed, that they would bite in a line. It does happen sometimes! The problem is that most people (unless they’re really dead tired and work as long as I do) move around a lot. They move to scratch, they roll over, they get up to go to the bathroom. So even if you do see that line, it doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t identify it is a bed bug. All any kind of bite tells you is that you need to figure out what’s going on, but you cannot look at the bite. I know there are a bunch of you right now saying you can look at a bite and tell if it’s a mosquito or a chigger. No, you can’t. Unless you have a big hole in your leg and it’s rotting, then it’s a Brown Recluse, which is not very common around here, by the way. Everybody says they are, but they’re not in Tennessee. The other one would be Rocky Mountain spotted fever (from a tick bite) with the ring around the bite site. There are a couple of indications like that, but between ants, bed bugs, or mosquitos, you don’t have a clue. You’re going to swear that you do, but I promise you, you don’t. If you go to a doctor and he says, “Oh that’s a spider bite because it has two little holes right next to each other,” you need to fire his butt because he doesn’t know what the heck he’s talking about. Let him do the doctoring and let me do the bugging.
The latest silliness I saw was saying that the bed bugs bite in a zig-zag pattern. They could not show a picture example of more than 3 bites or a cluster where we might be able to connect the dots and make a zig-zag. So, let’s think about this for a minute. Remember how I told you they feed? They walk up to you, stand on the bed, and feed. More than likely this person rolled over a little bit and one got them higher and then rolled over again and another bug got them lower. It still doesn’t tell you that it’s a bed bug. You cannot go by the bites. If you have a bunch of bites, you need to get an inspection and let someone who knows what they’re talking about look at it. Get off of Facebook talking to the other idiots who have no clue what they’re talking about. That’s when people start actually hurting themselves because Sally Jane and Suzy Jo and Billy Bob decided to get on Facebook and say, “Oh I heard tea tree oil!” and, “put this on your skin!” or “Spray the house down with that!” I’ve got story after story of people hurting themselves, having to go to the doctor for real problems, making the bug problem worse, hurting the dog (even killing the dog), hurting the cat, even hurting the kids. If you’re really interested in why people just swear that these things work, there’s an interesting article on my blog called “Old Wives Tales” and that’ll explain why they’re all full of poo.
So, bed bug bites… A lot of them look similar, but you can’t tell. I can’t tell. A doctor can’t tell. Whatever pattern they’re in means absolutely nothing. I saw on the top 3 pest control company in the country’s website “how do I identify bed bugs?” They talked about lines and zig zags… Wow… Not to toot my own horn, but that’s why I’m running circles around these guys because they don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t have a passion for it as I do.
So you want to know what bugs me? Bed bugs! But I love to kill ‘em!
