Saw this gorgeous satin moth at work and I love her even though this is an invasive species and the caterpillar/larval form are ridiculously destructive of local trees. She’s just. So fluffy. 😭
If you go to libraries and if you shop at Thriftbooks (both of which I recommend) then you may already know this fact. But if you don’t, let me enlighten you;
These places are breeding grounds for BED BUGS.
No this is not me telling you to stop. No this is not me calling that places dirty or gross. This is just the consequence of book sharing. Because these books trade hands and houses in a wonderful and perfect system of intellectual freedom. And I think that’s beautiful. But when a book trades houses that many times it’s prone to pick up something. That something is usually bed bugs.
Due to their natural structuring, books are ideal homes. And once a book returns to the library or the warehouse, these bedbugs wiggle out and find more places to burrow and breed.
And here’s another fun fact. Unlike ants, bed bugs are not social insects. They don’t like each other. So if you think you can just put down a single trap and catch them all, you’re wrong. They don’t work like that. If you poison one, it won’t go home and do a secret handshake with a hundred other of its friends. It’ll just die. If you kill one, you’ve only killed one.
Why am I telling you this? To scare you? To ward you away? Of course not. I’m just here to make sure you’re aware AND to introduce you to something that could save you a shit ton of grief.
The moment you bring the book home or take it out of its packaging, PUT THAT FUCKER INTO THE FREEZER.
NO. THAT’S NOT A JOKE. MOVE THE LEAN CUISINE OUT OF THE WAY AND POP THAT SUCKER INTO THE FREEZER!!!
Extreme cold and extreme heat kills bed bugs. And since we’re not Trump and holding book burnings is generally looked down upon, we do the next best thing. Freeze it. No, it won’t damage the book. A few days in there will only leave it cold and bug free. But if you’re worried, pop it into a large Ziplock before you do.
Read safe and stay bug free, my bookish friends! 📚📚📖
Holy shit that’s good advice
Take it from a survivor…. Bed bugs are a world of grief you want no part of.
Freezing things is actually an official museum-approved way to kill bugs!
It needs to have an internal temperature of -20C for four days to kill anything living in it, if you want to be specific.
Some ways to identify if something has bed bugs in it, or has had bed bugs:
One: there will be little brown/black spots on it. In a book, they’ll particularly be close to the spine, usually on the inside of the cover or within the first and last few pages. Bed bugs usually hide in the spine, and it’s easiest for one to crawl between the pages closest to whatever surface the book is set down on. (Yes. Even a closed book. These fuckers can make themselves flat.) On clothing or furniture, check seams and under cushions.
Two: The smell. Go smell a sprig of cilantro/coriander. Got that scent in your head? Good. Bed bugs smell mostly like that. A little more oily/musty, but basically cilantro. Particularly when squished, but honestly even a lone living bed bug has that distinctive smell. So, get up close and personal with the item. If it smells suspiciously like musty cilantro, it’s likely there are bed bug(s).
Three: Look for shed skins. They’re generally pale yellow in colour and kinda apple seed shaped.
Oh, heat also works to kill bed bugs. Sustained temps over 113F/45C will kill them. If you heat something to 118F/48C for 90 minutes, not only will you kill all the bed bugs, but you will also kill any eggs that may be on the item. Which means you can leave it bagged – preferably in black plastic – and either outside or in your car with the windows up on a hot day (depends how hot it is, obviously). Or you can put the item in the clothes dryer, if suitable. (I’ve also had some success with using the oven, but that comes with like a million caveats so I am not comfortable casually recommending it on Tumblr.)
Oh, and if it’s something you own and you’re willing to wait, they do sell bed bug poison. Basically you pop the poison filled thingy in a bag with the infested item(s) and wait out the time recommended by the manufacturer. Takes a couple weeks, generally, but if you’re leery about heat or cold treatment for whatever reason, or have more items you think may have bugs than you have freezer space and it’s too cold to stick it outside, it works. (But if you skimp on the time I will personally come to your house and smack you upside the head because do you wANT POISON IMMUNE BED BUGS BECAUSE THAT IS HOW YOU MAKE THEM.)
Oh and yeah if you’re using cold it’s gotta be at least 0F/-20C for 4 days. So I’d recommend checking your freezer’s temperature before going this route. They aren’t generally set that cold, but can usually be adjusted.
Last summer I went over to a friend’s house who had had bed bugs, sat on his bed, and then went back to my house. He’d told me about the bed bugs previously, and had made sure to not have anyone over ‘til they were taken care of. But he found a few after that, which made me incredibly paranoid after hearing about everything he had to do to get rid of them. I did some research of my own after that, so I have a few things to add to this that haven’t been mentioned.
1) Bed bugs feed only on blood. The common type feeds specifically on human blood. So if you have them, they’ll be going after you or other people in the house. From what I understand, they’re not very likely to go after pets. They can survive for a number of months without feeding.
2) IIRC, they generally prefer soft fabric-y stuff for nesting material. So not just bed mattresses, but pillows, (under the) carpet, clothes, stuffed animals. Paper or woody stuff also seems like a habitat of choice, which is why they’re found in books, and sometimes furniture close to beds, and box springs.
3) If you do have a bed bug infestation, it can take a while to become noticeable. As I understand it, if it’s gotten to the point where it’s noticeable (AKA you’re finding signs of bed bugs), it’s been there for a while, probably at least a couple months (this has to do with the time frames of the stages of bed bug life and breeding/laying eggs). Sometimes, people show symptoms like marks from bed bug bites, but some people don’t get those symptoms.
4) Even if you do bring a (few) bed bug(s) into your home, it may not develop into an infestation. For an infestation to develop, there must be a pregnant female bed bug. It can’t be a male, and it can’t be a non-pregnant female. Of course, the chance of an infestation occurring increases with the number of bed bugs, but if you’ve brought only a few into your home, an infestation may not develop for the reason just mentioned.
5) Initially, bed bugs pick a single site to start a colony. They hide there during the day, and leave at night to find food. The colony is typically very near to a food source, so they don’t travel far from it. As mentioned in previous posts on this thread, signs of bed bugs are things like dark reddish stains from bed bug droppings, darker colored droppings themselves, the smell (which I’ve heard described as slightly sweet when it becomes stronger), shed skins and, of course, actual bed bugs (dead or live). As the number of bed bugs increases, the colony becomes larger, and eventually bed bugs will start to migrate from the initial colony to find a place to form a new colony.
6) For treating things that you suspect may have bed bugs, in addition to the methods mentioned in previous posts on this thread, you can put things in the dryer and run it on high heat for a long cycle. This should be hot enough to kill any bed bugs and bed bug eggs. It’s probably best to only do this with things that can safely withstand the heat and the tumbling around. I’ve only done this with fabric-y stuff, not woody stuff like books.
7) If you’re not comfortable with just checking yourself, an exterminator can check for bed bugs. Alternatively, bed bug sniffing dogs are starting to be used. I’ve read that such dogs are more accurate than human inspectors. A key concern for using dogs, however, is the potential for false positives. Depending on how they are trained, sometimes these dogs are rewarded with food (even in the form of their normal meals in some cases) or toys in their training, which can lead them to respond as though there are bed bugs even when there aren’t so they can get the reward. So if you want to use a pest company that utilizes bed bug sniffing dogs, it’s important to know how their dogs are trained. If possible, I’d also recommend using a company that utilizes more than one dog in a search, which reduces the possibility of false positives.
Hopefully these points will further help people identify a bed bug infestation and/or alleviate some concern about whether you have an infestation. I was lucky and didn’t bring any bed bugs back with me from my friend’s house, but I definitely understand how stressful and anxiety-provoking the thought of having to deal with an infestation can be, because of everything you have to do to get rid of them and make sure they’re really gone, especially since they can be very resilient.
If i remember correctly, they’re mini-swarming to warm that fucker up and make him die of heat stroke
They literally heat him up to about 1 degree less of the temperature that they can die from. Thank you college lol
Those are Japanese honey bees. They intentionally lure the Japanese hornet in because they evolved and adapted to their game, because otherwise the Hornet just marks the spot with her pheromones for her sisters to raid later. Japanese hornets are also so big that they overheat more easily so Japanese bees literally developed a strategy around it’’s one most exploitable vulnerability. And it takes about 3 hours for 20-30 Hornets to destroy a 30-40,000 population of bees. And it’s pure, brutal massacre. Other honeybees haven’t developed that strategy.
That will not help save the bees at all. They need the excess honey removed from their hives. That’s the beekeepers entire livelihood.
Seriously refusing to eat honey is one of those well-meaning but ultimately terrible ideas. The bees make way too much honey and need it out in order to thrive (not being funny but that was literally a side effect in Bee Movie). Plus that’s the only way for the beekeepers to make the money they need to keep the bees healthy. Do not stop eating honey because somebody on Tumblr told you too.
excess honey, if not removed, can ferment and poison the bees. even if it doesn’t, it attracts animals and other insects which can hurt the bees or even damage the hive. why vegans think letting bees stew in their own drippings is ‘cruelty-free’ is beyond me. >:[
the fact that we find honey yummy and nutritious is part of why we keep bees, true, but the truth is we mostly keep them to pollinate our crops. the vegetable crops you seem to imagine would still magically sustain us if we stopped cultivating bees.
and when you get right down to it… domestic bees aren’t confined in any way. if they wanted to fly away, they could, and would. they come back to the wood frame hives humans build because those are nice places to nest.
so pretending domestic bees have it worse than wild bees is just the most childish kind of anthropomorphizing.
If anything, man-made hives are MORE suitable for bees to live in because we have mathematically determined their optimal living space and conditions, and can control them better in our hives. We also can treat them for diseases and pests much easier than we could if they were living in, say, a tree.
Tl;dr for all of this: eating honey saves the bees from themselves, and keeping them in man-made hives is good for them.
✌️✌️✌️
Plus, buying honey supports bee owners, which helps them maintain the hives, and if they get more money they can buy more hives, which means more bees!
I tell people this. About the honey and what to do to save bees. I also have two large bottles of honey in my cabinet currently. Trying to get some flowers for them to thrive on. Support your bees guys
… uh guys… the whole “Save the Bees!” thing is not about honeybees. It’s about the decline of native bees almost to the point of extinction. Native bees do not make honey. Honeybees are domesticated. Taking measures to protect honeybees is as irrelevant to helping the environment as protecting Farmer John’s chickens.
To help save native bees, yes, plant NATIVE flowers (what naturally grows where you live? That’s what your bees eat!), set up “bee hotels,” which can be something as simple as a partially buried jar or flower pot for carpenter bees, and don’t use pesticides. Having a source of water (like a bird bath or “puddles” you frequently refresh) is also good for a variety of wildlife.
Want to know more about bees that are not honeybees?
Every place has different types of bees. Every place has different types of plants/flowers. Those hyped-up “save the bees” seed packets that are distributed across North America are garbage because none of those flowers are native in every habitat. Don’t look up “how to make a bee hotel” and make something that only bees from the great plains areas would use if you live on the west coast.
This is every bee that has been observed and uploaded to the citizen science network of iNaturalist. You can filter by location (anywhere in the world! This is not restricted to the US!), and you can view photos of every species people have added. Here’s the page for all bees, sorted by taxonomy, not filtered to any specific location [link]. Have you seen a bee and want to know more about it, but you don’t know what kind of bee it is? Take a picture, upload it to iNat, and people like me will help you identify it–and it will also become part of the database other people will use to learn about nature!
Some native Texan bees I’ve met!
A sweat bee! [link to iNat]. These flowers are tiny, no larger than a dime.
A longhorn bee! [link to iNat] I don’t know where they nest, but I often find them sleeping on the tips of flowers at night (so cute!)
Meet your local bees! Befriend them! Feed them! Make them homes! Love them!
This is one of the native bees I met in Arizona! This handsome man is a male Melissodes sp., AKA a type of long-horned bee. I saved him when he was drowning in a puddle.
I love him
This is a great post all in all but I’d just like to note that colony collapse syndrome is definitely a thing, so domestic honeybees are absolutely in danger as well
Europen Honey Bees are an invasive species in the US and compete with native bees.
Native bee populations are specifically evolved to pollinate certain native plants. Most are unlikely to have a significant effect on the pollination of the non-native crops that people need to grow to survive. It’s true that honeybees will compete with native bees as well, and can be classified as an invasive species, but so long as native bees are supported and native flora is maintained, there is no reason why they shouldn’t be able to coexist. And while there’s a whole different argument to be had about the negative effects of growing nonnative crops at all, if they fail, as they likely would without the honeybees that a large percentage of farmers keep to pollinate their and other local crops, the effects on humanity will be catastrophic
Lest people think I am anti-honeybee (no? I love honeybees?? They are precious??), the above is correct. Like it or not, the way we grow our food (much of which is not native to where it’s farmed) absolutely requires pollinators like honeybees. We would have a hugely massive food crisis on our hands without honeybees.
But, because so much $$$ is tied into the continued production of food, governments and food production companies will do whatever they can to mitigate the effects of colony collapse and other honeybee health issues. What can you do to help honeybees? Buy and eat food. Easy, right?
What is being done to protect native bees? Well,
1) Scientists and researchers are feverishly trying to get them listed as protected species and absolutely failing (see @thelepidopteragirl’s post about colleagues of hers: [link]).
2) Scientists and researchers are trying to get pesticides known to have devastating effects on bees and other pollinators banned and absolutely failing ([link]).
3) Scientists and science communicators (like me now, apparently) are trying to spread this information about native bees and their importance so more people can do little things like plant native flowers (lookup North American species for your zip code here: [link]), change how often they mow their lawns ([link]), and vote out the assholes who are profiting by destroying our environment ([link]). Success on this one: TBD, and by people like us.
As a gift to the honeybee lovers out there, please accept this photo of one making out with a stinkhorn mushroom:
^An excellent post on the complexities of the “Save the Bees” movement
Everyone who’s ever thought insects are gross, ugly or scary should see this bee and know that almost basically all arthropods will feel dirty and clean themselves this way.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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