Science: Insect Front

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The bedbug is harder to poison. Unlike the roach, it is an epicure: it feeds on human blood. A loathsome, wingless insect, it is light brown and flat before feeding, swells up and turns mahogany afterward. Chief difficulty in fighting bedbugs : housewives hate to admit their presence. Though the common bedbug hurts little except family pride, a relative known as the "kissing bug" transmits Chagas' disease (a deadly parasitic disease originating in Brazil) to human beings. A Lethane spray is the most effective bedbug poison.

Country Visitors. By far the most damaging insect, and most at home in modern civilization, is the clothes moth. It has been known to eat house insulation as well as clothes, rugs, etc. (it is destructive in the larval stage only). Best weapons against the moth are sunlight, moth balls or flakes, paradichlorobenzene. Chemists have recently developed effective new methods for permanent mothproofing of wool — for postwar use.

The hardest insect to control is the ant. Manhattan is infested with small red ants; they often nest in buildings instead of in the ground, eat sweets, meat, greasy garbage. The most successful poison against them is thallium sulfate baited with sugar — but all prewar supplies of thallium sulfate came from Germany and France.

Technology has been a boon to the silverfish. This swift, slithery, scaly insect, less than half an inch long, is an old inhabitant of forests, where it nests under stones and in the bark of dead trees. But it has recently migrated to the city in prodigious numbers because of its fondness for a modern product: rayon. It also likes linen, starched cotton, flour. Unlike the moth, which feeds slowly, the silverfish is a ravenous eater, can make lacework of a shirtfront in a few hours. It is also very hard to starve out ; a well-stuffed silverfish can go as long as ten months without food. Recently an entomologist, having failed to get very far with poison, devised an ingenious silverfish trap: he put flour in a glass jar, taped the outside of the jar. The silverfish easily climb the adhesive tape to get at the flour, but the inside glass walls of the jar are too slippery for them to climb out.

Veteran exterminators are interested but not enthralled by the idea of such war-born insecticides as DDT (TIME, June 12). They are inclined to think bugs will survive DDT, too.