'They don't bother me at all': The man who chooses to sleep with bedbugs for science

A scientist has chosen to sleep with bedbugs for the past five years – and says the bites “don’t bother him at all”.

Entomologist Dr Richard Naylor breeds thousands of bedbugs to test pest control products from all over the world and allows himself to be the test subject.

On a “feeding day”, which happens around twice a week, he straps some of his 50-60,000 bugs to his arm and gets on with his work. He then sleeps with them on nights when he needs to test out new devices or repellents.

“I must have been bitten millions of times by now, so I stopped reacting a long time ago. I get a red patch on my arm after the bugs have fed, but it disappears after about half an hour,” he said.

Naylor explained that he needed to sleep with the bugs to test if new sprays and repellents worked.

“If there is no-one sleeping in a bed, the bedbugs just sleep, they just go on standby. And so I can’t test anything in the test bedrooms without there being a host in there,” he added.