This is me subjecting my body to science. oh my gosh, by letting a bed bug eat me. That's my because for four years now, I've been wanting to make this exact video taking a deep dive through into the fascinating world of bed bugs. There's a lot of fear and myths out there regarding dealing with bed bugs, and today we're gonna debunk nearly all of them heading out in the field with the experts and running some experiments.

So if you could power through your squeamishness and spend the next few minutes here with me I Promise not only to blow your mind with some facts about bed bugs, you definitely don't know, but I'll make you a bed bugs expert knowing exactly what they look like, how not to get them, but most importantly what to do if you do get them. Because the punchline is, it's actually not that hard to get rid of them as long as you ignore all the bad advice out there and follow the surprisingly simple steps. I'll demonstrate in this video so let's get right to it and that across the country all the way to Rutgers University to visit their Urban Entomology lab which basically means bugs you don't want in your house to meet with Dr Wong The world's foremost bed bug expert and the main reason for visiting his lab was to run a bunch of experiments to test all the things you read online that people swear will get rid of bed bugs. But before we got to that I wanted to meet some of the little guys myself.

They have thousands of advances, probably more than twenty thousand. Oh my gosh, this is like the Fort Knox of bed bugs. Okay, can I pick up one of these? Sure. Okay.

I Cannot Drop this I Feel like this one probably has a full-time Headroom four or 500 in this one. I'll open it. This is my first time ever seeing a real bed bug here. we go.

If you want to use gloves, should I use gloves. Oh we always use gloves I should use gloves then. Wow! I Just gotta go for it. It's like ripping off a Band-Aid Ah gross.

Wow. Wow. Oh man. there's so many of them.

So this is what bed bugs look like I Just never knew. All right. So let me just cover some bed bug. Basics It takes a few months for them to mature from egg all the way to full grown male and female.

And in those few months they pass through these five stages of growth. You could see the relative size here compared to a credit card. And as humans, we have five senses, but they're superhuman. Antenna give them two extra senses, allowing them to detect both body heat and carbon dioxide being breathed out by a potential host.

Then once they get close, they use their sense of smell also on their antenna to lock down the exact final position of the person. Which is all to say. If you exhale your smelly, warm breath on them, they get real excited. That is crazy.

They're so stoked right now to eat. Sorry guys. Their lifespan is anywhere from three months to a year. and ideally they like to feed about once a week.

But there's this unsettling fact: we gotta feed in the vehicle league three to six months. What? Because they just don't move very much. It's highly nutritious material. So stay.

Stay in the resting stage for three to six months. And the professor says three to six months here. But for my first of five. Super Wild Bed Bug Facts: If their environment is relatively cold, they can survive up to 300 days without eating anything.

They're really flat because they are hungry. so when they're hungry and they haven't fed, they're going to be more flat, right? I'd love to get a shot of it going from flat and brown to oh. if you want to do that, you put in a arm you can see. which meant I had a decision to make.

Okay, I'll do it for science. We're gonna make a brown bed bug red so average. your feeding time is about five to ten minutes. I Feel like I'm at the Red Cross here.

let's do this. Oh my gosh, Oh oh so right now I Feel nothing so you're not very reacting to the fights, the butts sticking up in the air now. Wow yeah, it's getting bigger and there's just something about seeing another organism steal your blood that sharpens the focus and leaves one to start pondering some questions that probably should have been pre-pondered And they don't carry diseases, right? I should have asked that it doesn't 10 minutes ago and this is my second. Super Wild Bed Bug: Fact: They don't actually carry or transmit any diseases, which sort of serves as an evolutionary advantage in the world of coexisting with humans because the government doesn't really support research to eradicate them since they don't really pose a widespread Health threat when it's done.

Will it start running real quick? I Will run slowly because it's a bigger fatter. They're easily crawling the walls of this dish, by the way, right? So we tend to put the talcum powder in the interior walls so they cannot. Escape I Think we have some talcum powder? You think that the thing is the part that I'm concerned about. Oh gosh, he's moving okay.

Finish: What do I do now I Mean it's finished. Don't worry I'll put it in a dish so that means normally after. I give blood. I get juice and cookies.

and when we put my new blood buddy next to an one, that's what it would look like under the microscope that was just sitting there begging to be used. Oh my Gosh. Wow! those are my red blood cells. Boy are those bubbles even! No way.

life is amazing I Don't think I reacted right. That's good. so you're not as reactive as me. so I could put even more on my arm then you can try.

I'm taking one in the name of Science and we're gonna load up 10 bed bugs on my arm. That's one two. We've also put some DEET which they don't like to kind of make a barrier so they stay in the middle. Yes, this is like Thanksgiving there's one down there.

Can you get that one? Thanks please. Oh I Can feel them bite like if I don't look man. Okay, 11. I said 10 Professor One bonus: Oh that one's turning red already.

Could you imagine just some people who have a bad infestation just every night? Like this is what their leg looks like. They have got thousands of bites a night. Yeah, a night. they're getting bigger and bigger by the second.

Oh, you better not start mating on me. This one finished okay I Don't like your attitude. Let's get rid of this guy. Professor, Professor Professor As they finish.

I Vote them off the island I Don't want them crawling up my arm, He's full and you're off the island. Oh, and you're off the island and he's done. Peace Down to two. This is like a Mr Beast challenge.

Last to leave the arm wins a gallon of rabbit blood. Oh, we have a winner I think it's dead. Oh there he goes. And so once again, by way of comparison, here are the 11 bed bugs that just spend some quality time with me.

Verses 11 unfed bed bugs of similar ages. Alright, so they're all then feeding. There was 11 total. it took about 10 minutes, but I would have no idea they just made a meal out of me like I felt a tiny prick on one of the 11.

But other than that like it's a tricky little parasite. and I'm not alone. Half of all people have no reaction to a bed bug bite, whereas the other 50 of the population will have some kind of reaction to their saliva that will look something like this in the morning. So having survived the bloodletting, it was time to run our experiments and head into the Vault sealed by the huge wooden door.

All right. So we're here in the bed Bug test chamber and we've set up a bunch of tests in here. So for example, in these two, we have these dishes basically that can climb up the wall, then they get stuck in this trough. It's too slippery to climb out.

Inside each of these troughs, there's a little vial of this good smelling stuff that those bed bugs smells like a human. so they're going to go to either one of these. So this one in this corner is a control, whereas in this corner we have an ultrasonic pest repeller. so we want to see if this actually does anything or not.

So at the end of 24 hours, we'll come back. We'll count the number of bed bugs in this dish versus this one. There's way more in the control and this is actually doing something, but if there's a same number of each, then this is nothing more than a gimmick to seal your money. In addition to testing the ultrasonic bed bug repeller, we use an identical test setup to investigate some of the other supposed remedies to bed bugs commonly found online including dryer sheets, mothballs, baking soda, and essential oils.

And just for the sake of my curiosity, we also place this vertical Post in a dish for my Super Wild bed Bug. Fact number three out of five: the professor told me that bed bugs are attracted to Vertical objects because if you think about it, humans generally sleep at the highest elevation in any given room, so their logic is just crawl up any vertical object you see until you eventually find a warm-blooded meal at the top. So this is to mimic a bed post, and we do have an attractant in both trays. The hypothesis is that they will actually be more bed bugs in this tray because you have that vertical post and if that turns out to be true, that's pretty wild.

And in addition to those six tests, we set up some residual effects tests where we treated a surface with each of these three products you could buy at the local hardware store specifically marketed to kill bed bugs. And then finally we tested this fogger spray also specifically designed for killing bed bugs. Godspeed little Fellas! And then we set it off, leaving three dishes of exposed bed bugs at different spots in the same room. And so as a final step, we place the bed bugs at the center of each of the six trays in the bed bug.

Vault and we were underway. The experiment's all set up. we're gonna close the wooden Vault do a final bed bug check, let her run. And now that the experiments were running! Professor Wong Invited us to join him on a research visit to an apartment building nearby that had been receiving frequent reports of bed bugs.

So him and his team were going out to collect some samples and to try out some new treatment approaches. And after entering the apartment, it didn't take long to find our first culprit with bed bug here, which the professor told me was dead yeah, when in fact he was just a good faker. By the way, this is a bit of a warning that some people might find the next few minutes a little gross, so skip ahead a bit if you just want to see the results of the test. It turns out one in a thousand houses or apartments have bed bugs in the U.S today, which might above fact number four you Before 1950, it was one in three houses that had bed bugs hence the origin of the saying sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite midnight to 3.

A.M is typically their most active time and it takes a little more than 10 minutes to get to you, a little less than 10 minutes to feed as you saw with my arm, and a little more than 10 minutes to get back to their hiding spot. If you're suspicious, you're sleeping on a mattress with bed bugs. Just check under the mattress in the corners and look for bed bug poop stains like this. Just remember, this is more of an extreme case, so yours might not look quite as bad.

These two here are actually mating, which we saw quite a bit in the lab too. Which actually leads to my final super Wild bed Bug fact and buckle up because this one's a doozy. Typically in nature. in order to make a baby of a thing, you have a male which let's say is represented by this plug and a female which let's say is represented by this outlet.

And if you plug in the cord, you get an adorable little baby. And just like in pretty much all the rest of nature, female bed bugs totally have an outlet. Except male bed bugs prefer to take this approach. The scientific term for this is called traumatic insemination and just like my wall is now damaged, it actually damages the abdomen of the females, leading to significantly shorter lifespans.

Researchers aren't exactly sure why they've evolved to use this alternate approach, but it must offer some kind of overall Advantage leading females to lay up to five eggs every day. and you can see their handiwork here on that same chair we saw before. Like all insects, bed bugs have an exoskeleton. So what you're seeing here is as they grow bigger from stage to Stage, they molt and leave behind their old exoskeleton.

How bad is this infestation relative to most you see? Yeah, moderate, moderate, everyone, you tens of Salzburg To prove his point, he later sent me a video of this house with the Charming exterior, which they had treated a few months ago. The truly staggering part about this place though, was that only one person lived there. He just wasn't allergic to their bites and he just learned to live with them. Back at our thankfully moderate infestation, the professor in his team took some samples for study later and started treating the room.

Unsurprisingly, the apartments both above and below this one also had some minor bed bug issues. So if you're working to get rid of bed bugs in your apartment, just make sure you let your landlord know what's going on in case the unit next to you happens to be the primary source to prevent you from getting a second wave. And as we were wrapping up, the professor dropped a bit of a bombshell about how it was Pretty likely we had at least some bed bugs on us at this point. Even if you can see they, you may not see like yeah, they can't they can't which is why he always plays it safe.

Well actually. I have a spare clothing always when I go home I always wash it. The shoe is only for baseball shoes. What nobody told us.

We unfortunately were not told to bring, nor did we have a spare change of clothes. What have I done? So we do the next best thing by steaming ourselves, which instantly kills the bed bugs from the heat. That is, until the professor decided he should check his shoes and found this Is it alive. Yeah, he's alive.

Oh my gosh, no way. At which point, just steaming ourselves seemed wildly insufficient because apparently it's illegal in the state of New Jersey to just publicly chill in your underwear. Me and my crew hit up the local Goodwill to wait things out in style. So the next day, we headed back to the lab to check out our results in our freshly laundered clothes.

But can I just take a moment to say it's the best to hang out with bug people because they have cool door knockers and interesting magazine subscriptions. The only downside being they like to study more than just bed bugs. Oh, it smells. This is where they keep the Cockroaches and as you might recall, I really really don't like cockroaches? Yes! I had thousands of those.

Wow, that's so disgusting. Oh these are the kind I Hate. These are the American largest one in the US They're freaking antenna so that's the worst sound in the world. Wait, they have wings.

Yeah, they have wings in Florida They can fly too. but here temperature is cold so it was a little warmer. In this lab they would fly. They will fly.

So we made our way back upstairs where I felt much more comfortable Time to check the results. So this ultrasonic pest repeller did nothing. if anything, it attracted them. We had 120 bed bugs with the ultrasonic sensor over here for the control we had 101.

clearly that does nothing to repel bed bugs. And of course that confirms our hypothesis considering bed bugs don't even have ears. Not to mention that apartment we visited had a couple plugged into the wall themselves, so definitely save your money on that one. Next up was the vertical post test.

That is wild. There are so many over here by the vertical post, literally none over here on the other side and the remaining four tests all had similar results. So I'll just show the average which was around four bed bugs trapped in the dish that was surrounded by either the dryer sheets, mothballs, baking soda, or essential oils With around 26 bugs trapped in the control. These results clearly show bed bugs prefer to avoid these four items because they all have a really strong scent and bed bugs have a really good sense of smell.

but they don't do anything to kill the bed bugs. According to the professor, these act more as an annoyance, but the bed bugs would gladly walk over them if it was between temporarily having to deal with the smell and starving to death. As for the residual effect tests with the pesticides specifically engineered to kill bed bugs, it was even worse news: the spray, aerosol and fogger Bed Bug Killers all killed about 12 percent of the bed bugs after 10 days. and before you go all glass half full and think, well, 12 is better than nothing.

Our control, which was just water, also had a 12 percent mortality rate, so it's literally not better than nothing according to Professor Wong Part of the reason for these terrible results is that many strains of bed bugs have developed immunity to a lot of these chemicals over the years, and he thinks in 10 years all bed bugs will be immune. And this sort of makes sense because they're constantly undergoing localized mass extinction events when people try and spray them and only the most Hardy minorities survive each time and pass on their increasingly pesticide resistant genes. There were some chemicals that, on average, marriage, were effective in killing about 50 percent if you sprayed the bed bugs directly, but if they were just hanging out in the area you sprayed later, it's once again the same as water. The problem with this is you'll only ever see a small portion of the bed bugs you actually have, so direct spray pesticides are sort of pointless.

If your goal is to eradicate the entire population, that's the bad news. Now here's the good news. There was a superstar in our test and that was the diatomaceous earth with the nearly 90 percent mortality rate after 10 days. This stuff is just crushed fossilized shells from Tiny prehistoric aquatic organisms called diatoms.

The key here is their shells were silica based and silica is what you see in those packets you see sometimes in packages. Then you're not supposed to eat. Silk is useful because it absorbs moisture incredibly well. For bed bugs, this is a bummer because when they walk by it, it sticks to their exoskeleton as you can see here under the microscope and they die from dehydration in a matter of hours to days We're eating lunch right after this, which is a bad idea in hindsight.

The best part here is the end of the end. It's freeing this to each other in their hiding spots and since every organ is there to live, they can do it. There's also one more bit of really good news and that's Bed Bugs Die at 122 degrees Fahrenheit Like instantly. This is also 100 effective and there's no way to build immunity to it and a really easy way to get a bed bug to 120 degrees as we demonstrated earlier, is with the clothes dryer or a steamer.

Or if you want the nuclear option, you can work with professionals to heat your entire house to that temperature. Now that we have a better sense of what does and doesn't work, let's talk about what to do if you actually get bed bugs. The first thing to point out is the best way to get rid of them is to not get them in the first place. And the most common way people get bed bugs is through traveling.

So when you get to your room, here are three simple tips: First, pull back the bed sheets and check the corners of the mattress now that you know what to look for. Second, don't set your suitcase on the bed or the floor, Instead, set it on the luggage rack or for some reason you feel like you need to be extra cautious, the bathtub. And third, don't put your clothes in the hotel drawers or leave them just lying around. Whatever you you're not wearing should just stay in your luggage or hanging up on the hangers.

Alright, so you were super careful with staying in the hotel on travel, but then you got back and bought that couch on Craigslist for a smoking deal and now you got bed bugs in your home. And Professor Wong's experience. You don't actually need to spend four thousand dollars hiring an exterminator as long as you know. there's three steps for defense and three for offense.

First up, for defense, you put your bed in a bag. You can buy these mattress and box spring encasements off Amazon and once you zip them around your bed, basically seal in any bed bugs currently living inside. Just remember, they can live up to 300 days so you can't take it off for a year. And they not only trap in any current bed bugs, but they also remove all the mattress hems and clever hiding spots.

They love to use: Number two: your clothes dryer, wash and dryer. Close the sheets at least once a week more often. doesn't hurt. Importantly, you want to wash them in hot water and dry them on the highest heat setting because it's impossible for them to survive.

This number three: simplify and declutter simplify the room to take away any hiding spots by putting clutter into plastic bags or toes. They aren't interested in clean clothes, but dirty clothes smell nice to them, so it's good to also store those in a plastic bag or tote until you're ready to wash them. Also, move your bed away from the wall, so the only way they can get on the bed is by climbing up the legs. So that's the three steps for defense.

Now for the offense. Number one: Vacuum. Make sure you vacuum the bedroom floor and the bed area once a week. Just be sure to empty anything you've collected into a bag and into the trash.

At number two, we've got diatomaceous earth, which as you recall was the Superstar from our tests. You should definitely apply this around the bed, but it's especially useful in penetrating the cracks and crevices close to the bed, including a round and behind power outlets. The key is applying just a light dusting like this. if you leave it in clumps, it will actually backfire and not be as effective because they'll just navigate around it.

And finally at number three, we've got steam. A simple clothes steamer like this will do the job. And I think it's great that with all the years and money spent on creating all these synthetic pesticides, the two most effective methods for killing bed bugs are just crushed up rocks and really hot water which are by far the two most simple and natural. Use the steamer all around your bed once a week, but if you find some think you want to treat you can't steam or put in the dryer, You can put it in a bag and then put it in the freezer for three days and that will also kill them.

Professor One said, if you have a small infestation and you just noticed them, then using these three defensive and offensive steps will totally take care of the problem without needing to spend money on an exterminator. However, if you've got a lot of bed bugs and you've had them for a long time, been getting professional help is probably a good idea. The entire house heating option takes about eight hours and it's the most. Sure Fire Way to totally eradicate every bed bug along with any eggs all at once, but it can cost up to four thousand dollars depending on the size of your place.

Now that you're playing both defensive offense and things are looking good, stick these traps under the bed legs so you can monitor and have some peace of mind that they are in fact totally gone. Alright, that's it. You're a bed bug expert now! I'm hopeful that at least some of you will have renewed appreciation for the fascinating natural world around us and everyone else can just congratulate yourself on making to the end while soaking in a bathtub of Listerine This is the world's largest frisbee launcher and I invited my nephews out to demonstrate just how much more accurate it is than their mere human cells. Wow! And that frisbee launcher, of course is just a scaled up replica of this handheld version, which also happens to be insanely accurate with all six rapid fire shots.

Then there's this coin spinner that also gives you superpowers. this time to spin a coin better than any mere human that is awesome. And then of course a mega version which I also used to dominate my nephews. Yeah, yeah, and if you want to watch both of those Mega build videos, you can find them over on the Crunchlabs YouTube channel.

Because this is Crunchlabs, it's an actual place with a tennis ball cannon, the world's longest, Hot Wheels track, secret passages, and a bunch more inventions. It's where we not only build all the Creations for my YouTube channel, but most importantly, it's where we design these monthly Crunch Slaps build boxes to help you think like an engineer too. It says it right there on the box. So you get the box that has the handheld frisbee launcher or that handheld coin spinner delivered right to your door.

But then when you open it up, there's a link to a video where you not only build it alongside me, but I teach you all the juicy physics of how the toys work. And the best part of it all is every month we randomly select one box to slip in the Platinum ticket if it happens to be your box. Oh my! God And you're coming out right here to Crunchlabs to design with me and my team for a day. So if you want to unlock a whole world of possibilities of thinking like an engineer of learning how to create and build whatever you can dream up, go to Kirkslabs.com and order your buildbox subscription today.

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