In the 3 1/2 years it's been open, Jurys Boston Hotel has never found bedbugs on its premises, nor have its guests complained about being bitten. Still, the luxury hotel in the Back Bay began dispatching a bedbug-sniffing dog to each of its 225 guest rooms last year.
And when the canine detective barked, after detecting the suspicious scent of the itch-inducing insects or their eggs, the hotel fumigated two rooms and burned the mattresses.
"At the first sign or suggestion of a problem, our reaction would be to treat the room with chemicals, no questions asked," said general manager Stephen Johnston, who calls the dog in every three months.
Hotels are intensifying their efforts to quash the wingless insects, which were nearly eradicated in the United States a half-century ago but are again becoming a nuisance.
Scientists aren't sure why bedbugs - which hitchhike to new homes on luggage and clothing - have been resurging, but they suspect the proliferation of international travel and the dwindling potency of insecticides.
Bedbugs don't signal unsanitary living conditions or transmit diseases, but hotels don't want to be bitten by bad publicity when upset guests vent on blogs or online social networks.
Reliable data are hard to find, since public agencies aren't notified about infestations. But the exterminator Orkin Inc. said it treated buildings for bedbugs in 48 states in 2005, up from 43 states in 2004 and 35 states in 2003.
Orkin's branch serving hotels and other nonresidential buildings in Greater Boston reported that it sprayed, steamed, and vacuumed bedbugs 25 percent more per month in 2007 than in 2006, on average.
Still, the American Hotel & Lodging Association estimates the percentage of guests who encounter bedbugs is minuscule, given that 4 million people sleep in lodging establishments nightly.
The association's chief executive, Joe McInerney, said he doesn't believe the insects - which can thrive for a year between one-bite meals on the blood of living hosts - were almost wiped out when the pesticide DDT was widely used after World War II.
"You always had it, but nobody reported it," said McInerney, who has worked in the lodging industry for more than 45 years.
Now, the word about bedbugs gets out in other ways.
According to an online survey of 1,052 travelers in the United States that Acromatics conducted for Orkin in April, half said they would gripe about being bitten to at least five people. It's also easy to complain to a large audience through websites like TripAdvisor.com, where customers can post reviews about hotels and motels.
But some travelers don't stop at complaining - they sue. That's what Jonathan and Lori McLelland of Ringewood, N.J., did after allegedly suffering bedbug bites during a two-night stay at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel & Towers in October. The Park Plaza did not respond to repeated requests for a comment.
Jurys isn't the only hotel to take a proactive approach to bedbugs. The Omni Parker House brings in an insect-sniffing mixed Labrador from Advanced K9 Detectives LLC, the same Milford, Conn., firm that Jurys and about 10 other Boston-area hotels use. The Omni's general manager, John Murtha, is also considering buying special encasements for mattresses and box springs to prevent bedbugs from building homes on them.
Scientists are trying to find ways to fight the bugs, too. The Entomological Society of America's annual conference, held in San Diego last month, featured three half-day symposiums on the insects, with nearly 30 scientific presentations on topics like "How bedbugs survive long xeric periods between blood meals" and "The effect of sex-ratio on dispersal and aggregation behavior of the common bedbug."
Three years ago, no one at the conference presented any bedbug research.
It's a significant shift, said Richard Cooper, an entomologist and technical director of Cooper Pest Solutions, because "if you understand everything about what makes an organism tick, that enables you to look for links in its lifecycle and behavior that can be attacked."
Judith Black, technical director at Steritech Group Inc., a pest-control company that serves the hospitality industry, found only 0.6 percent of the almost 76,000 rooms the company inspected between November 2002 and April 2006 needed to be treated for bedbugs, but those infestations were spread across 24.4 percent of the nearly 700 US hotels it studied.
"The unfortunate thing is today we don't have a baited trap for bedbugs," said Richard Pollack, a medical entomologist at Harvard University's School of Public Health. He's researching how bedbugs find their hosts.
For the past year, Pollack has let hundreds of laboratory bedbugs chow down on his arm to keep his research specimen thriving - and to cut the time, money, and paperwork required to feed them animal blood through an artificial membrane.
So he knows firsthand that, contrary to rumor and imagination, you can't feel the creepy crawlers bite. Which is good, he said, since for now "you are the best attractant."
Nicole C. Wong can be reached at nwong@globe.com.
