We've all come across pesky bedbugs at least once in our lifetime, and most of us have dealt with these tiny intruders with drastic overhauls of furniture and clothing or copious amounts of chemicals. There's another way to get rid of them, however - one that hails from Eastern Europe. Bean leaves.
That's right, simple bean leaves. Eastern European housewives have been sowing their floors with bean leaves at night, which seem to snag these critters in their tracks, much like a Shaka Zulu-esque fly trap. As bedbugs have become increasingly resistant to many modern forms of treatment, a group of scientists have decided to study why bean leaves work so well in impaling bedbugs, and have published their findings in the Journal of the Royal Society of Interface.
It seems that tiny hooks on the bean leaves - more specifically known as trichomes - exploit a very specific weakness in the bedbugs' armors. While most of the bedbug seems to be mechanically plated, the bean leaves' trichomes are able to snag a bedbug where it becomes vulnerable while walking.
"The areas where they appear to be pierceable are not the legs themselves. It's where they bend, where it's thin. That's where they get pierced." study co-author Catherine Loudon, a biologist at the University of California, Irvine, told The New York Times.
Once caught on the hooks, the bedbugs struggle wildly to get out, and in the process, impale themselves further.
The scientists are so confident in their findings that they are developing a synthetic surface with a trichome interface similar to the bean leaves. In fact, the team already has a patent for the technology pending.
"It would be our greatest hope that ultimately this could develop into something that could help with this horrible problem," Loudon said.