‘I started itching as soon as I got into the train... It’s amazing how the mind works’
It has a torrid nocturnal existence, questionable sexual habits and a chronic drink problem.
Move over Serge Gainsbourg – France’s new enfant terrible is an insect whose initials, like the late Gallic crooner’s famed song about Brigitte Bardot, are also “BB”.
It fears the light but, in the past few weeks, the humble bedbug has gone from relative unknown to “rock star” status in France, as one flabbergasted entomologist put it, amid reports that Paris has become plagued by the nocturnal blood-suckers.
And after bringing misery to Rugby World Cup fans and attendees of Paris Fashion Week, the voracious parasites this week relished the prospect of perhaps their most satisfying gastronomic meal to date: the world’s leading bedbug experts.
Amid growing panic in the UK that the small, oval-shaped mites causing mayhem in France could spread across the Channel, pest controllers descended on the epicentre of the problem in Paris for the country’s biggest conference of the year.
Bedbugs have been spotted in hotels, cinemas and on public transport in France and this week more than 2,700 industry experts from 30 countries gathered in the Parc Floral, east of the city centre, for the appropriately named Parasitec Paris conference.
Organisers admitted they would need to “remain vigilant”, but insisted the problem was not new and that it would work with governments to “fight this scourge” with the two-day event going ahead as planned.
While no one has cancelled, one UK-based pest controller says the timing of the event was perhaps unfortunate. “There will certainly be a lot of people looking under mattresses who know what they are looking for,” he adds.
Among those was Caroline Elliott, a British dog handler.
“I started itching as soon as I got into the RER overground train from the airport after all the pictures I’d seen during the Rugby World Cup in Paris. It’s amazing how the mind works,” says Elliot, who worked in the Pyrenees as a ski patroller with an avalanche dog before deciding to branch out to bug detection. Her female flat-coated retriever is currently being trained in Scotland – a process that can take up to a year.
“I confess I did check my hotel room and had a look under the mattress,” she says with a laugh, adding that for now, happily, there was nothing to report.
However, one French pest control professional, who prefers not to be named, says he had met a distributor of bug heat treatment who “had words with hotel management” after coming across some unwanted bedfellows.
“We check as a policy,” says fellow British attendee Alexia Naylor, co-founder of the Bed Bug Foundation, a UK-based not-for-profit organisation “dedicated to raising awareness of bedbug management through improved communication and education”. They have 86 certified dog teams and 11 training schools around Europe.
Her husband and co-founder Dr Richard Naylor says he had become “fairly blasé about it, to be honest” and had only ever had one nasty surprise “in a hotel room in Portugal”.
His nonchalance is hardly surprising; the Naylors breed bedbugs via their company, Cimex Store, near Chepstow and dispatch them in stoppered vials around Europe so that handlers can hone their sniffer dogs’ sense of smell. They arrive both “dead” and “alive” so that dogs can differentiate between the two after a home has been treated.
Dr Naylor has a PhD in “beg bug ecology and dispersal behaviour” and he and his wife now have “two purpose-built test bedrooms with infra-red cameras for studying their behaviour”.
Their experiments are not for the faint-hearted. In one, Dr Naylor placed 10 bugs – five male, five female – on the floor and proceeded to sleep in the test bed, which had castors. “We didn’t think they’d make it to the bed straight away. But eight out of 10 got onto that bed and fed that first night,” he recalls. He was the meal.
Bedbugs’ life cycle has five stages and they need to suck blood to reach each one, so when you spot an adult, you can be sure it knows you intimately.
The ancient parasites were initially cave dwellers whose hosts were roosting bats, says Alexia Naylor. But when prehistoric humans moved into caves, “we started a relationship”, she adds.
It has been a case of “Je t’aime, moi non plus” ever since.
But while humans provide food for the bugs, their love interest lies elsewhere and is “how shall I put it, not politically correct,” says Dr Pascal Delaunay, one of France’s leading bedbug specialists present at the event.
Bernard Werber, insect expert and author of international bestseller Empire of the Ants, puts it more bluntly. “Bedbugs’ sex life is wild,” he says, adding that it was further proof that “nature knows no taboos, no modesty, no morals.”
They copulate up to 200 times a day; can be gay (50 per cent of relations), straight (30 per cent) and are not picky about coupling with larvae or other insect species (20 per cent of cases).
The males have syringe-like “perforating penises”, which can bore into the females indiscriminately (back, head, feet) and inject “the equivalent of 30 litres of sperm each time in proportion to their body weight.”
While most of the male bedbugs’ efforts are wasted, the sheer volume of liquid means that some of it will reach the female’s reproductive areas to ensure fertilisation of eggs, with females laying between five and 35 depending on various conditions, mainly heat.
Sex aside, the burning question at the convention – a pest control cornucopia of everything from mosquitos to rats and fleas – is whether the sudden panic about bedbugs is justified.
“You’d think we were under attack from little green men from Mars,” says Stéphane Bras, spokesman of CS3D, the umbrella French trade group for pest controllers, who it certifies with a state-sanctioned stamp of approval if they follow a training course “of between three to five days”.
“There is no invasion. It’s much more prosaic than that. There’s an upswing the world over. An hour ago, I was talking to the Japanese about bedbugs in Tokyo; they are also in New York and you have them in London.”
Did he take heed of recent reports that French intelligence was taking “very seriously” the idea that the Russians were encouraging panic to weaken Gallic morale while blaming Ukrainian refugees?
If Russian spies are playing a part, it would bring new meaning to the word bugging, he agrees.
“Who knows whether they had a hand, but all I can say is that the social media frenzy beggars belief and doesn’t reflect the reality on the ground. But bedbugs have been around longer than Russian fake news,” he adds.
They all but died out after the war due to the now-banned use of DDT but started bouncing back at the end of the 1990s, says Dr Naylor.
“By 2018, their numbers were increasing pretty rapidly. The Covid pandemic knocked them right back, perhaps by half, and now we’re witnessing a post-pandemic resurgence,” he says. “So the media hype is not really representative of the true situation, even if they are on the up. Now, however, it has become a political issue, particularly in France, but also in London.”
Dr Delaunay, considered France’s top bedbug expert, confesses that the country’s government was caught napping and that bedbugs had prospered “in the cracks between the public and private sectors”.
“We knew the problem would get worse. But in France, we’re very good at compiling reports, criticising and having rows but not necessarily acting.”
The recent media buzz has finally forced the government to get its act together, he adds. Earlier this month, it held a bedbug crisis meeting after one MP waved a vial of live bugs in parliament.
“It has at last adopted the WHO’s ‘One Health’ approach, which means joining all ministries and players to forge a united response,” he says. “We are seeing populations plateau in Australia and the US, and I am confident we will here too in a few years.”
There is, he adds, “nothing to fear” for visitors to next year’s Olympic Games in Paris.
However, other attendees complained that they now had to field dozens of calls from “neurotic customers” seeking psychological support rather than products, due to all the bedbug hype.
Alexia Naylor says anxiety over potential infestation could lead to a condition called “delusional parasitosis” where, in severe cases, patients think they can see insects crawling over their skin and become completely obsessed with cleanliness.
Those most vulnerable to this, she adds, are women over 60.
“I was once called to a plush house in London by a woman who swore she had a bedbug infestation. She refused to get off a white piece of paper and cried that it was covered in insects,” she recalls.
“All I could see was a blank page.”
Additional reporting by Neil Johnston
