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.
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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