Crazy as a bedbug

The moderator in the meeting I attended today was very animated, excited, and exclaimed, “I'm crazy as a bedbug.” Upon questioning her, she admitted at never known such an animal and had no idea where the expression came from. Well I grew up before DDT was released after WWII (that's the great war to end all wars, so the rhetoric declared) and I never met a crazy bedbug. Each was intent on sucking blood and reproducing, both of which could deserve to be labeled crazy. They do not imbed their heads in your skin, when they fill with blood they simpl let go and hide.
There were hundreds in the house we moved into which had been abandoned for years. (I was ten and possibly had faulty multiplication skills.) We moved in sometime in early spring while temperatures were freezing. Our Round Oak wood stove heated the walls and condensed the air. WOW did that bring bedbugs out of the lathe and plaster walls in that old house!
Bed bugs, Cimex lectularius, are not reptiles, needing exterior heat to move them as snakes or turtles do, but they multiply more rapidly. Sheets and clothing and bodies had to be washed often. Kerosene was what Mother used to drive them out of the old metal bed springs. She was meticulous and managed to delete most, but kerosene was not lethal. Good hygiene and pesticides cleared them from our house but they are making a comeback in the USA.
Bed bugs have been around forever, since before humans I suppose, and are mentioned in medieval European texts and in classical Greek writings back to the time of Aristotle. Adult bed bugs are about 1/4 inch long and reddish brown, with oval, flattened bodies. Bed bugs do not fly, but can move quickly over floors, walls, ceilings and other surfaces on their 8 legs. Female bed bugs lay up to five eggs a day and 500 during a lifetime. The eggs are tiny, whitish, and hard to see without magnification (individual eggs are about the size of a dust spec).
Above all, bed bugs are not crazy. They are an animal whose niche only requires some warm blood. With human and pet populations in perpetual explosion, they are likely to stick around for another long, long time.
Naomi Sherer