Mystery Bug Bites
From James Donahue’s Journal
In our first spring at the Hale Road house, after it got warm enough, Doris and I began raising the windows to our downstairs bedroom and letting the cool night air in. We liked to read before we went to sleep, so we had reading lights on night stands on both sides of our bed.
It was after we began having our window open that we started getting strange bites that not only itched but they swelled up and stayed around a few days, so we knew they were not mosquito bites. We suspected fleas. Doris searched the room with great care but found no trace of any insect that might be biting us. She was reacting worse to the bites than I was and appeared to be getting more of them. It was getting so bad we decided we had to fumigate the house.
We first tried a standard bug spray in our bedroom. After the room cleared, we went to bed that night and woke up with more of these mystery bites. What could this be? Doris’s brother Wayne suggested that we bug bomb the entire house. We went to the local Ace Hardware and bought big bug bombs that were enough to kill every living creature in the house. We put all of the food away, covered all of the dishes, closed all of the doors and windows and fired up bombs on all three floors of the house.
Then we left for the day.
That night we came back in, scrubbed down the tables, counter tops, washed any dishes that might have been exposed, changed all of the bedding, and finally went to bed. And again, we got bites. It was a most frustrating problem.
Now Doris was going over the house with a magnifying glass. And she discovered something very interesting on the bedroom window sill, which had been painted pure white. There were a few tiny black specs lying on the sill. When she looked at them carefully under the glass, she found that they were the bodies of tiny little insects. We collected a few of them, placed them in an envelope, and the next day I took them to the local Cooperative Extension Service operated by Michigan State University. They informed me that we were infested by a small biting insect known among the Native Americans as “no-see-‘ums.”
We found that these insects weren’t in the house but living in a large bush just outside our bedroom window. The bush was closer to Doris’s window than mine, so she was getting more of an attack than I was. The bugs could fly and were so tiny they could go right through the window screens of a house. When we opened our windows at night and turned on the lights, we invited them in for a nightly feast.
Wayne brought a can of DDT powder and treated our bush. And that was the end of our problem.
From James Donahue’s Journal
In our first spring at the Hale Road house, after it got warm enough, Doris and I began raising the windows to our downstairs bedroom and letting the cool night air in. We liked to read before we went to sleep, so we had reading lights on night stands on both sides of our bed.
It was after we began having our window open that we started getting strange bites that not only itched but they swelled up and stayed around a few days, so we knew they were not mosquito bites. We suspected fleas. Doris searched the room with great care but found no trace of any insect that might be biting us. She was reacting worse to the bites than I was and appeared to be getting more of them. It was getting so bad we decided we had to fumigate the house.
We first tried a standard bug spray in our bedroom. After the room cleared, we went to bed that night and woke up with more of these mystery bites. What could this be? Doris’s brother Wayne suggested that we bug bomb the entire house. We went to the local Ace Hardware and bought big bug bombs that were enough to kill every living creature in the house. We put all of the food away, covered all of the dishes, closed all of the doors and windows and fired up bombs on all three floors of the house.
Then we left for the day.
That night we came back in, scrubbed down the tables, counter tops, washed any dishes that might have been exposed, changed all of the bedding, and finally went to bed. And again, we got bites. It was a most frustrating problem.
Now Doris was going over the house with a magnifying glass. And she discovered something very interesting on the bedroom window sill, which had been painted pure white. There were a few tiny black specs lying on the sill. When she looked at them carefully under the glass, she found that they were the bodies of tiny little insects. We collected a few of them, placed them in an envelope, and the next day I took them to the local Cooperative Extension Service operated by Michigan State University. They informed me that we were infested by a small biting insect known among the Native Americans as “no-see-‘ums.”
We found that these insects weren’t in the house but living in a large bush just outside our bedroom window. The bush was closer to Doris’s window than mine, so she was getting more of an attack than I was. The bugs could fly and were so tiny they could go right through the window screens of a house. When we opened our windows at night and turned on the lights, we invited them in for a nightly feast.
Wayne brought a can of DDT powder and treated our bush. And that was the end of our problem.