Meet researcher who subjects himself to being bitten by thousands of bedbugs

He has been bitten more than a million times since he began studying the insects in 2001, but says his body no longer reacts to their bites.

Naylor breeds bedbugs to test pest control products, sprays and insect repellents, sometimes sleeping overnight in an infested room to study their behaviour.

Richard Naylor, an entomologist, straps up to 60,000 bedbugs to his arm twice a week while they suck his blood.

He puts them in a pot and then straps the hungry bedbugs to his arms with elastic bands while he continues his work, MetroUK reports.

“The bugs live in pots and the pots have metal lids, and I just elastic band them to my forearms or sometimes legs if I need more space, and they feed for a few minutes and I can’t really feel anything. After about ten minutes, when it looks like they’re all crawling back up the paper full of blood, then I swap them over, and I can feed thousands of bugs like that in not very long.”

He breeds these insects to test pest control products from around the world. At times, he needs to test out new devices or the effectiveness of insect repellents; he sleeps with them all night in a suite in his garden.

Naylor, the owner of the not-for-profit organisation Bed Bug Foundation, says he’s been bitten over a million times.

“I don’t react to the bites anymore. Apparently it takes something like 40,000 bites to stop reacting to bed bugs,” he says. “And that for me was more than a decade ago. So I haven’t reacted for a long time. Over time, your immune system just stops reacting to it.”

“For most people, it’s something like an angry mosquito bite, a bit more severe than a mosquito bite. But gradually it gets less and less, and I don’t get any swelling or inflammation anymore now.”

The need to test the bug bites on himself, Naylor explains, is because the insects do not move when there is no host around for them to feast on.

“I can’t really test products on bed bugs without there being a host in the room because their behaviour completely changes. If there’s no one around, bed bugs just sleep, they don’t move around, or they’re triggered by carbon dioxide from our breath and by our body heat – their behaviour is very tied to ours,” he explains.

“I can’t test traps and sprays in a room without a person because the bed bugs don’t do anything. Humans have been carrying bedbugs around for as long as humans have been in civilisation.”

Naylor says he has been studying the insect since 2001, and his wife, Alexia, who is a biologist herself, has never complained about this part of his lifestyle. They work together to research insects and run product trials, mostly for canine detection teams that spot hotel infestations.

“I have kept tarantulas, scorpions, reptiles and other unusual pets since I was a child, so Alexia knew, at least to some extent, what she was letting herself in for! We have been together since I was 16, and back then my bedroom was filled with animals,” he narrates.

“So by now Alexia is quite accustomed to living with me. I don’t recall if she was even particularly surprised when I floated the idea of building a bedbug testing facility in the garden. She shares some of my interest in bed bugs and the natural world generally, although she doesn’t sleep in the test rooms.”

“I have infested the family home four times in about 25 years. I think that’s not too bad, given that we work with them almost every day.”

He acknowledges that his job horrifies people when he tells them about it.

“I’ve talked to people in South America in malarial zones, and they’re far more horrified by bedbugs than by the mosquitoes that have the potential to make them very sick or kill them,” he said.