Here’s an interesting feature from The New York Times, about this man who works as an entomologist sine 1978 and have been collecting bed bugs, keeping them alive for as long as he can, to study them…

I now have two bed bug colonies. They both come from a population that was collected in 1971 in Fort Dix, N.J. The collector, an Army entomologist, was supplying them to researchers. The colonies live in jars. I feed them about once a month. I invert the jars on my arm and the bugs feed through the screening. It doesn’t hurt. The swelling goes down in an hour or two.

A lot of people get very itchy, and if you keep scratching, you can get a secondary infection. But at this point in time there’s no research showing that bed bugs are natural vectors of human disease.

There are about 90 species of bed bug. A few species feed only on certain bats, and at least one feeds only on swallows. Sometimes they live in people’s homes because of the host species there. Sometimes they feed on people.

The chief problem with bed bugs is this one particular species: Cimex lectularius. It seems to prefer people, but it also does well on mice, dogs, guinea pigs, birds and cats.

Sometimes pest-control companies send me insects to identify. Sometimes people will call up and say: “Oh, I found this in my bathroom. I want to know what it is.”

Of course, most the people now say: “I think it’s a bed bug. I’m really worried.” And, of course, it isn’t always a bed bug. One species of spider beetle is commonly thought of as a bed bug. The spider beetle has a big, globular body, so it looks like it’s filled with blood, but it’s not a blood-feeding insect at all.

A pest-control company once brought in slippers from an infested apartment. You could see all the eggs that had been plastered onto the soles and all the bugs that were hiding.

Read more of this at New York Times