For almost four decades, Carolyn Klass toiled in a lab at Cornell University identifying insects. For a $25 dollar fee, people from all over the world would send her pests they wanted identified, and in recent years business was booming because of the bedbug renaissance. Klass would examine each specimen and reply back with a thoughtful note, such as:
The sample letter A contained one fly, very squashed, but I believe it may have been a phorid fly. If you see more of them (like a few a day), then I would suspect they could be breeding in the gelatinous material that accumulates in a drain... Sample B contained the head and thorax of a cockroach. The remainder of the insect is not present, and the legs have been broken off... Nothing in these samples is a bedbug.
The New Yorker has a cute report from the lab during Klass's final days, and the profile features one particularly haunting bedbug revelation: bed bugs can infiltrate your bed by dropping from the ceiling like friggin Green Berets. (They're attracted by body heat.) "It would take a lot for them to be dropping on your head from the ceiling,” Klass cautions. "But, yes, they can climb walls."
Now Klauss is retiring, and Cornell may drop the pest identification service altogether. (You can call here to verify.) Rutgers also offers the service, but they charge a whopping $95 for out-of-state customers. Of course, you can hire an exterminator to come and verify, but as Klass points out, a university's diagnosis is "unbiased."
