How a Leafy Folk Remedy Stopped Bedbugs in Their Tracks

Megan W. Szyndler and Catherine Loudon/University of California, Irvine — Hooks on the bean leaf exploit thinner areas in the bedbug's exoskeleton to trap it, scientists have discovered. The more the bug struggles to raise its legs to free itself, the more stuck it gets.

By FELICITY BARRINGER
Published: April 9, 2013

Generations of Eastern European housewives doing battle against bedbugs spread bean leaves around the floor of an infested room at night. In the morning, the leaves would be covered with bedbugs that had somehow been trapped there. The leaves, and the pests, were collected and burned — by the pound, in extreme infestations.

Now a group of American scientists is studying this bedbug-leaf interaction, with an eye to replicating nature’s Roach Motel.

A study to be published Wednesday in The Journal of the Royal Society Interface details the scientists’ quest, including their discovery of how the bugs get hooked on the leaves, how the scientists have tried to recreate these hooks synthetically and how their artificial hooks have proved to be less successful than the biological ones.

At first glance, the whole notion seems far-fetched, said Catherine Loudon, a biologist at the University of California, Irvine, who specializes in bedbug locomotion.

(More here.)