I’m not afraid of bed bugs like a lot of people because I know what I’m looking for. I inspect my furniture when I buy anything. I usually buy new. But I also know that, in my opinion, they are easier to get rid of because they take so long to replicate. And on a college campus, we don’t get them in massive amounts because our students do not live with us long enough, or live in spaces where they’re easy to survive without being found rather quickly.
So keep in mind, college housing, you have pretty standard, basic furniture. There’s not a lot of nooks and crannies in the furniture for a bed bug to hide. The mattresses are generally covered in, like, a plastic fabric, which they would not wanna be on. They come with our students.
It’s like — we had a girl — two years ago now — adamant that the bed bugs were from us. That, you know, she moved in, and it’s all over her stuff. And we came in with Terminix, and we actually located where the majority of them were, and it was a fabric box that she’d bought on clearance at At Home. And we were like, “Yeah, they’re in this. Like, this is where they came from. We can see the eggs still, and you had only been here two weeks, so to have this many crawling around the apartment, like — they’ve been on this container for a while.”
And she was pretty horrified. She had not noticed them because, of course, it was dark fabric box, but it was a good reminder to all of us, like, check everything you buy ‘cause you never know. But they don’t give me the heebie-jeebies because they are — I like to refer — like, when I talk to our students, they are sloths. They do not move quickly. They do not replicate quickly. It takes 10 days for one of them to mature, and at that point, they can start reproducing.
So, I think that that’s something that people need to understand. Like, they’re not like fleas. Fleas reproduce crazy fast, which is part of the reason I’m terrified of them. But bed bugs? Nah. They’re slow. They are super slow. So hopefully I’ve just educated everybody.