What’s scarier than a bed-bug in your bed? How about a bed-bug that can’t be killed with insecticides? Researchers are now finding that bed-bugs found in apartments and homes are becoming immune to the insecticides that are provided to kill them. Researchers used pyrethoid insecticides to solve the issue of the infestations that were building in apartments, but to the dismay of the researchers, most of the bugs withstood direct sprays from the pyrethoid insecticides. The talk of the bed-bugs becoming immune to the sprays prompted an experiment.

The experiment was between bed-bug samples collected and maintained in a laboratory for thirty years and one group of twenty years, and four different colonies from apartments. When sprayed with the pyrethoid insecticide, the laboratory bed-bugs who were never before sprayed were decimated completely, while the four colonies of apartment bed-bugs experienced little to no mortalities. The scary thing about that is that the four colonies were immune to sprays that were two-hundred to three-hundred times the recommended dosage prescribed by the companies who produced the insecticide.

The interesting realization that derived from this particular experiment was that when one of the bed-bugs from the lab set and another from the field set mated, the offspring were only partially immune to the pesticide, which showed that the immunity of the field bed-bugs is a genetic trait, which is passed along through latter generations.

It’s a growing problem, but a lot of factors that deal with a seemingly useless bed-bug fight could be that bed-bugs can hide anywhere, and maybe you’re just not getting all of them. Hopefully, the issue with immunity to pesticides will be solved before they take over the Earth! Or maybe just your bed…

You can read the full testing information from the University of Kentucky here.