Seattle’s New Craze is the Bed Bug

Seattle bed bug incidents, via Bed Bug Registry

Last week I fanned the flames of bed bug hysteria without being able to offer solid numbers on the extent of Seattle’s infiltration by the pests. (No, don’t mention it. Happy to.)

The Bed Bug Registry lists 76 reports in Washington over the past two years, but I was hoping for something more Seattle-centric.

Happily, Daniel Valenti, Seattle branch manager of the pest control specialists Terminix, had an actual statistic for me. His office has seen a 57 percent increase in calls about bed bugs since last year–with the caveat, though, that the more press bed bugs get, the more they get blamed for every bite people notice.

Still, it’s probably better to rule out bed bugs than wait to see what happens. (“Think you have bed bugs?“) Valenti says a single pair of breeding bed bugs can develop a brood of up to 1,000 in just three months. Each female bed bug can lay hundreds of eggs in her life, and those eggs take only six to ten days to hatch. To make sure they get every last one, Terminix actually does two follow-up treatments, two weeks apart.

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It’s not just hotels where these little hitchhikers show up. Valenti says they travel to clothing stores (first- and second-hand), furniture stores, and even movie theaters. Usually a pesticide is applied in a chemical application, but in some cases where better living through chemistry isn’t appropriate, a super-heated steam suffices to kill the bugs and their eggs.