David Ralph Hoffman, owner of Merlin’s Pest Control, says if you don’t know someone who has had a bedbug problem, you don’t live in Cincinnati. At Merlin’s they rate their horror stories on a scale of 1 to 10. The worst was an apartment occupied by someone who bragged about the last time he’d had a bath (not recently). The apartment was also occupied by about 100,000 bedbugs, Hoffman says, kept in check only by an equal number of German cockroaches. “The one we had that we call our 9.5, the gentleman was a World War II vet and pale, sick, dying, grumpy as hell—and we found over 50 bedbugs in the hat he was wearing.”
Columbus has international companies and an international university. Thanks to its world travelers and increased media attention it’s become a sort of hotbed for the national bedbug discussion, according to Bob Eunice, owner of
Precision Pest Inspections. The answer to solving the bedbug riddle isn’t easy in Columbus, or anyplace, but education goes a long way. “The educational aspect of this—I can’t emphasize it strongly enough.
There’s many situations where somebody will call an exterminator and the guy has very little conversation with the occupants and a week down the road they still have a problem,” says Eunice. “It takes time to bond with the people, work with the people, and if we’re all on the same page and it’s a team effort it’s a solvable problem.”
Linda DeVelasco, owner of Bed Bug Solutions was laid off from her job of 21 years at the height of the country’s economic meltdown. Her fiancé, who works in the hospitality industry, handed her an article one day on bedbug-sniffing dogs. DeVelasco started doing her homework—dogs, it turns out, are not only useful for sniffing out bombs and drugs. Now, a year and a half after her company was founded, DeVelasco is thriving off of Chicago’s bedbug economy. “If there were eight days in a week I could work them all,” she says. “It really started picking up for me [at the] end of March and it has been nonstop ever since.” Dogs, though, are really only useful for residents and companies who merely suspect they have a bedbug problem. “The worst case I’ve ever seen they didn’t need me and the dog. I opened the door and they were just falling off the ceiling.”
Nam Y. / AP Photo
A 69-year-old retired minister preserving rare books for Denver’s libraries ended up inadvertently destroying dozens of the very books he was trying to save—because his apartment building was infested with bedbugs. Roger Goffeney would check out books, some hundreds of years old, scan the pages, and return them to the Denver Public Library. "Some of the bedbugs fell out of those materials that had been returned," said spokeswoman Celeste Jackson. Three dozen books had to be destroyed, and the library sent Goffeney a bill for $18,000 for fumigation and the cost of the books. "I have no intention of paying a dime," he told reporters.
An outbreak earlier this month in the Riverfront apartments in Detroit prompted a bit of community outrage as the high-rise complex billed as “the height of downtown living” fell to a bedbug infestation. “We have people paying anywhere from $1,000 a unit up to $3,500 to live here in the luxury of Detroit and this is how we're treated?” griped one resident, George Williams. According to Orkin, bedbug calls in the metro area increased 180 percent between 2008 and 2009. "The problem has grown in a huge way. We were rarely seeing cases five years ago. Today, we are seeing several thousands over the course of the year," said Russell Ives, president of regional exterminator Rose Pest Solutions.
“[Bedbugs] have been very constant for the past three to four years...I don’t know if there’s an increase,” says Stuart Harper, owner of Atek Pest Management. “We get between 50 to 100 calls for bedbugs a week… On a weekly basis we will see at least one unit where you have blood smears on the walls from residents trying to kill them with their bare hands or shoes. You’ll see them walking across the ceilings.” Harper has been working with Advanced Pest Engineering to monitor a colony of bedbugs to see how the pests will react to different conditions. “When we first got the colony, it went nearly four months before their first feeding. Out of about 100 bugs, about half remained and laboratory colonies are typically weaker.”
“I don’t have time to discuss all of the memorable infestations because that would go on for hours,” says Barry Beck, chief operating officer of Assured Environments. But, Beck mentions one case of a client who owned one million square feet of office space. When Assured checked the space for bed bugs, the pests were found in only four small areas. They later figured out that a single person shared the four work spaces and had tracked the bugs in. “For five and a half years we’ve been treating for bedbugs in the city. The combination of world travel caught up with us even though domestically we haven’t had a problem since the early ‘60s.”
“In Philadelphia, bedbug extermination has not been on the service menu of pest control companies for very long,” says Michael Colonglone, president of BugOut K-9 Inspectors. Colonglone warns that customers in Pennsylvania may not be as attuned to what bedbugs look like, and he has heard of residents mistaking ants or mosquitoes for bedbugs. "There aren’t as many pest control companies in Philadelphia as there are in other cities.”
Dayton’s most infamous bedbug case came last year, when 180 residents of a downtown apartment complex called Biltmore Towers had to be relocated for a weeklong fumigation process. “It’s a very, very tough bug,” Jay Moran told the Dayton Daily News. “What’s going to kill an ant isn’t going to kill a bedbug.”
“It has increased every year for the past four or five years. It’s been an epidemic here,” says Bob Kluver, owner of Allpest Exterminators. "There are so many people living in such a small confined area. It’s hitting everybody, from the high income to the low income, and from the five-star hotels to the rinky-dink motels. It’s just spreading all over…we probably get about 15 to 20 calls a week, and we’re a small company.”
Greg Pease / Getty Images
