Animals: Cimex Lectularius

Bedbugs are worth 12½¢ apiece, or 2½¢ more than grasshoppers. This valuation was announced last week when the University of Pittsburgh paid a bill for laboratory insect specimens. No sooner had the news been published than the University began receiving shipments of bedbugs. Many people who had hitherto ignored the bedbug acquired an academic curiosity about him, wondered just what he was.

"Bedbug" is an intimate name for a small incredibly vicious insect of the hemipterous family Cimicidae. He is oval, fat, wingless and rich brown. He has piercing suctorial mouth-parts. The bedbug of Europe and U. S. is cimex lectularius; his more obese cousin, cimex rotundatus, infests the Orient. It is at night that he marauds, hiding in crevices in daytime. He confines his activities to man, whose blood he sucks, upon whose body he makes his permanent home. Among the bedbug's relations is the singing cicada, who lives on plants and, sucking, makes merry music. Unrelated is the louse but often cooperate. As the bedbug prefers an uncleanly environment, he is taboo as a subject of polite conversation.

The tenacity of the bug is proverbial.

One record tells of a bedridden observer who watched the futile efforts of one of the insects to climb upon the bed from the floor. At length the bug crawled up the wall, moved out across the ceiling and dropped on its destination.