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Bed bugs like colours - especially red and black




Bed bugs like colours – but only some colours. Bed bugs are blood-sucking parasites that live on human blood, and they like warm beds. But a new study revealed that they have a preference for coloured sheets, and they have a preference for different types of beds.

A study in the Journal of Medical Entomology in April 2016 (BBC News, 26 April 2016) showed that bed bugs like black and red, but hate yellow and green, and that they prefer fabric and wooden beds, but hate plastic and metal beds.

Researcher Corraine McNeill, assistant professor of biology in the Department of Science and Mathematics at Union College in Lincoln, Nebraska, and colleagues from the Department of Entomology and Nematology at the University of Florida, conducted experiments with bed bugs. McNeill placed bed bugs in Petri dishes (alone or with a group of bed bugs) with different coloured shelters made of cardboard. The shelters (called harborages) were small tent-like structures that the bed bugs could hide under. The researchers used gloves to eliminate their body odour getting onto the cardboard harborages.



One group of bed bugs were fed within 1-2 days of the experiement, and another group of bed bugs were not fed (they were starved for 7-10 days). The bed bugs had a choice of eight colours: lilac, violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, and black. A single bed bug was placed in the middle of the Petri dish and given 10 minutes to make a choice of colour. For each bed bug, new coloured harborages were used so that any scent of the previous bed bug was eliminated. The experiment was replicated 40 times with male and female bed bugs in both categories (fed and unfed).

Instead of choosing colours at random, the bed bugs selected black and red more often. The main reason that bed bugs like red, McNeill thinks, is because bed bugs are red and red sheets may seem to be other bed bugs. But they don’t really know for certain – nor do they know why the bed bugs like black but dislike yellow and green.

The study also showed that what bed bugs like, including their colour preference, depended on the stage of their life cycle, their gender, and how hungry they were.

The next step is to conduct further studies on other factors, such as human body heat and pheromones, and carbon dioxide levels. Oh, and the researchers haven’t used real bed sheets yet – only laboratory equipment of Petri dishes and coloured cardboard – so they will continue with their experiments.




http://jme.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2016/04/20/jme.tjw033

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-36128646

MARTINA NICOLLS is the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).


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