Drink Up: Bed Bugs Hate Alcoholics

Ugly suckers, aren't they?

Eat Captain Morgan, Stupid Insects

As if we really needed another reason to have a drink, a new study reveals that bed bugs -- those nasty little critters that infest your house and bite for blood -- have a very low tolerance for alcohol.

Read: Kids Getting Drunk By Using Vodka-Soaked Tampons

Researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln have discovered that Cimex lectularius, better known as the common bed bug, has a particular dislike for human blood that has a high concentration of alcohol.

Led by Ph.D. candidate Ralph Narain, the graduate students mixed concentrated alcohol into several samples of blood from a local blood bank. The resulting samples were measured out to contain blood alcohol contents (BAC) of .010, .025, .05 and .10 and a control sample with no alcohol.

(For those who don't know, 0.008 is the legal driving limit. A BAC of .03 is enough to get you pretty drunk, a .07 will make you blackout, and a .1 is Charlie Sheen on a weekday morning.)

Read: Binge Drinking Is More Common Than You Think

Narain and crew then served the various samples up to bed bugs, then measured their weights and behaviors.

According to the results, the bugs that fed from highly concentrated blood ate significantly less than those that ate from blood with no alcohol. Not only that, they laid far fewer eggs.

But don't go chugging a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 just because you woke up with an itchy shin this morning. The researchers point out that, though boozy blood is off-putting to bed bugs, it doesn't completely prevent them from feeding. And all it takes is a few of them to ruin your nights.

In other words, who's up for a drink?

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