Bedbugs are disgusting, dangerous, vile pests. They spread disease and discomfort wherever they go, and they’re becoming harder to kill. So we need any advantage we can get, and it looks like we just got one.
A recent study made little paper tents for bedbugs out of different colors, and then put them in the center of this bedbug pavilion and gave them ten minutes to see which ones they preferred to hide under. While there was, alas, no one color that completely drove the little monsters away, there were two that tended to lure them; black and red, that is, the color of well-fed bedbugs. They tended to avoid, although not completely, green, yellow and white, so if you hate them, well, enjoy figuring out what matches with those.
The colors may be more useful for engineering traps than anything else; the study’s author are careful to note that just swapping out colors won’t make you immune to the pests. Any sort of color-coding would need to paired with another way of killing the little monsters, like tiny little robots with flamethrowers. They also note they’re not completely ruling out getting décor and clothes in these colors if you’ve got severe bedbug paranoia, but they’re not saying it’s OK, either. On the other hand, if you’ve been looking for an excuse to get rid of the black bedding your significant other has had since college, now you finally have an excuse to burn it.
(via CityLab)
