The Good Blog
The Good Blog - Help Your Health─── 20:00 Sun, 28 May 2017
Scientists discover bedbugs are total colour snobs, so which colour sheets should you buy? By Jack Boulton Roe
Full disclosure; if reading/thinking about creepy crawlies makes you uncomfortable or you get that phantom itchy skin thing, which can’t be explained properly by the way, then do yourself a favour and skip this. Go ahead, we won’t be offended.
Still here? Right, time to talk about bed bugs then!
Every now and then you read about a study and can’t help but think ‘Why didn’t these scientists have anything else to do that day?’ and this is most definitely one of them.
A paper recently released in the Journal of Medical Entymology went to great lengths to see if colour had any effect on a bed bug’s behaviour, because – and I’m guessing here – the lead researcher lost a bet to one of their colleagues.
The study involved placing beg bugs alone into petri dishes and giving them a choice of differently coloured shelters or harborages to determine which colours they would prefer to scurry along to.
Allowing for fluctuations caused by different stimuli, with adjustments made in the gender of the critter, whether or not they had been fed, and if they were on their own or in groups, the trend was for a preference for red shelters.
In conversation with the BBC, one of the scientists said the initial hypothesis for the preference was perhaps to do with blood.
“We originally thought the bed bugs might prefer red because blood is red and that’s what they feed on,” Dr Corraine McNeill said.
“However, after doing the study, the main reason we think they preferred red colours is because bed bug themselves appear red, so they go to these harborages because they want to be with other bed bugs.”
So, the little guys like to hang out in groups, noted. Interestingly, the bugs really did not dig on the action of either green or yellow, which – according to McNeill – is in keeping with a trend of results thrown up by other, similar experiments conducted on bloodsucking insects such as mosquitoes and sandflies.
It was suggested that the bugs’ distaste for the lighter colours in the spectrum would be an instinctive response to them being easier to detect in bright spaces.
The caveat here, and a decent reason not to go out and buy all-yellow sheets, is that the experiment was conducted in a brightly lit laboratory, whereas bedbugs, much like tiny ninjas, do their best work at night – meaning the colours in a real-life setting would be harder to detect.
Still, for the sake of pretty much everything anyone holds dear, give the red sheets a miss, eh?