22 December 2009

Building Better Bed Bug Bufuddlers

[R]esearchers have come up with a new low-cost, homemade bed-bug detector.

To lure the bugs out of hiding, Wan-Tien Tsai of Rutgers University in New Brunswick put dry ice into an insulated, one-third-gallon jug, the kind available at sports or camping stores. Adding 2.5 pounds of dry ice pellets and not quite closing the pour hole allowed carbon dioxide to leak out at a bug-teasing rate for some 11 hours at room temperature, she said.

She stood the jug in a plastic cat food dish with a piece of paper taped on the outside of the dish as a ramp up to the rim. The bowl’s steep, slippery inside, with an added dusting of talcum powder, kept bugs from crawling out again.

In tests in real apartments, the homemade setup detected bed bugs as well, or better, than did two brands of professional exterminating equipment[.]


From here.

Wan-Tien Tsai is clearly the MacGyver of bed bugs.

2 comments:

Kevin Dickson said...

I watched the TV show "Hoarders". Bedbugs seem to always appear in homes like these.

Careful not to screw it shut!

Anonymous said...

I also saw that show.

Has anyone actually tried this?

I read on Bedbug.com also to buy mattress covers to cheaply prevent bed bugs - Does that work?