Bedbugs becoming resistant to insecticides Tweet Pin It Email RSSS

Romero says non-chemical solutions now being looked at by the pest control industry include heat, vapour, and encasement methods of killing bed bugs, but he also acknowledges there’s no quick fix to the resistance phenomenon they’ve discovered. Basically, we only have ourselves to blame.

Prof. Troy Anderson from the Virginia Tech College of Agriculture and Life Sciences said that chemicals that people are using are not working as effectively as designed therefore people are spending money on products that are not worth.

Be careful which insecticide you buy, as the bed bugs have developed a resistance against some of them.

As suspected, a very small amount managed to kill those that had been in isolation while those collected from the wild, so to speak, had a much higher resistance. For instance, it only took 0.3 nanograms of a substance called acetamiprid to kill 50 percent of the non-resistant bedbugs from Harlan’s lab, but it took more than 10,000 nanograms to kill 50 percent of the MI and Cincinnati bedbugs. Isolated insect took 2.3 nanograms while the others took 1,064 for MI bed bugs and 365 for the Cincinnati ones.

The researchers suggest that feeding “stimulates detoxification enzymes responsible for insecticide resistance”, which may explain why a bed bug’s survial increases with bloodmeals. Time to figure out a new solution, it sounds like.

Similarly, super bed bugs from Cincinnati were 163 times harder to kill when using imidacloprid, 33,333 times sturdier against acetamiprid, and 358 times less at risk when being exposed to dinotefuran.

Researchers examined two classes of chemicals that are often paired together to treat bed bugs – neonicotinoids, or neonics, and pyrethroids.

Bed bugs are a bunch of menace to our beds, and love to cause us all sorts of troubles and sleeplessness.

To come to this conclusion, researchers from Virginia Tech and New Mexico State University evaluated an isolated colony of bed bugs, harvested by scientist Harold Harlan of the U.S.’s Armed Forces Pest Management Board.

Comparing results from the nonresistant lab bedbugs and the ones from MI, the Michigan ones were 462 more resistant to imidacloprid, 198 more resistant to dinotefuran, 546 times more resistant to thiamethoxam, and 33,333 times more resistant to acetamiprid.

In order for the research team to see if this resistance is spread to other substances, they applied imidacloprid as well.

One possible explanation for this lowered vulnerability among this isolated group is the fact that bed bugs learn to release protective enzymes when exposed to insecticides.

However, researchers clarified that the study doesn’t conclude that bed bugs all over the country and the rest of the world are now immune to chemicals. It may be that the colony had already developed this strategy before 2008, when it was taken to the New Jersey facility.