So, you’ve got some time off work, college or school and you want to get in the open air and enjoy it. Maybe even go on vacation. What a good idea! But what happens when you get where you are going? The mosquitoes come out to get you.
Bed bugs are making a massive revival in the West. They were practically wiped out in the Fifties due to the widespread use of DDT, which has subsequently been proscribed. It took them forty to fifty years to recover, but in 1995 they started their comeback. In 2004, there were 82 instances of bed bugs in New York, but only five years later, in 2009, that figure had mushroomed to 10,985.
There is a wide-ranging feeling that most indoor insects are pests, but interestingly many of them play a necessary function in the ecological system. Lots of insects serve as food for birds and other insects; hence the complete depletion of any insect species would prove undesirable for the growth of other helpful species on Earth.
This people of New York used to be concerned about the growing population of rats that was pestering their city, but these days they have something else to be concerned about. Bed bugs have invaded New York in a big way, a very big way. In 2004, there were 82 reported accounts of bed bugs in New York, in 2009, there were 10,985. That is a huge rise by anyone’s standards.
Bed bugs are a growing source of aggravation, especially in the developed Western world, because bedbugs were largely wiped out there by the late 1950’s. This means that most people under 50 years of age had probably never seen a bedbug until after 1995, when they made a big return. Their numbers are still increasing quickly, so a lot people are turning to thinking about killing bed bugs.
The problem with general insect repellent is that no one insect repellent will ward off all insects. There are so many different species of insects that nothing will stop them all, so you have to know which pests you want to deter.
Most people have an exaggerated hatred of insects. In particular people who live in towns and cities. People who live in the country are a little more tolerant of them. But why are we like that with insects?
There are in fact quite a few types of bed bug, but the one that most people mean by ‘bedbugs’ is Cimex lectularius. Other species of bedbugs will extract human blood, but normally only if their favoured host, like poultry, is not around.
There is a method of making humans poisonous to mosquitoes. In fact, scientists and doctors have suspected that it was possible to make us toxic to mosquitoes for 25 years, but there has not been enough evidence to prove it. Now scientists are more certain of the idea.
The summer is the season for barbecues, backyard parties, lounging in the backyard or bathing in the pool. It is also the time for insects, normally of the flying variety. Flies and mosquitoes can become everything from mildly annoying to downright perilous. So what can you do to protect yourself in the garden during the summer?