Besides being a huge annoyance, having a bed bug infestation in a home often changes the way of life for many people.  Bed bug infestations can be long lasting as they are not always discovered during the early phases of their arrival.  They have been known to cause panic attacks, sleepless nights, isolation, and embarrassment.  Enduring the infestations has even caused some marriages to disintegrate.

In an effort to try to gain a handle on these pests, scientists around the world are working to learn everything they can about these elusive blood sucking nighttime feeders.  Researchers are hoping that gaining knowledge about the pests will give them a leg up on creating better ways to control and eliminate bed bugs so that they are no longer a problem in countries around the world.

A new study from a group of researchers from Denmark has been released according to reports on December 6, 2012 from IO9.com.  The research group is hoping that they can better under the signals that bed bugs use to communicate with each other so that better measures can be created to control and/or eliminate the little pests.

The researchers have developed a faster means of reading the chemical signals that bed bugs create bypassing the traditional methods that have previously been used.  According to reports, the researchers use “proton transfer reaction mass spectrometry to instantly analyze the gas coming off of the bugs, combined with video recording to compare what specifically might be triggering the chemical spikes at various points.”

The researchers discovered that during copulation, specific chemicals peak in bed bugs.  Their findings are that “whenever a male attempted to mount an unwilling partner — be it male or female — the target of their advances released a combination of primarily (E)-2-hexenal and (E)-2-octenal.”

Scientists believe that as they uncover additional compounds and gain more knowledge about the pests that better protocols can be set in place for controlling them.