With his soft voice and friar�s manner, Louis Sorkin hardly seems the type to flout the sensible advice of a nursery rhyme. Yet on a recent afternoon at the American Museum of Natural History, Mr. Sorkin, a renowned entomologist, did precisely, luridly that.

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He took a glass jar swarming with thousands of hungry specimens of Cimex lectularius, better known as bedbugs. The small, roachy-looking bloodsuckers have been spreading through the nation�s homes and hotels at such a hyperventilated pace that by next year they are expected to displace cockroaches and termites as America�s leading domestic pest insect. To better understand their habits, Mr. Sorkin has cultivated a personal bedbug colony � very personal.

�You see this mesh here?� he said, pointing to a circlet of wiry material taped over the top of his little jam jar of horrors. The weave is dense enough to keep even newborns from escaping, he explained, but porous enough to allow the bedbugs� stylets, their piercing mouthparts, to poke through. Mr. Sorkin pushed up his shirt sleeve and pressed the mesh end of the jar against the inside of his right arm. Roused to a frenzy by the twin cues of heat and carbon dioxide that �in evolution equal host,� said Mr. Sorkin, the insects scrambled toward the lid, thrust out their stylets and began to feed. For a good 10 minutes, Mr. Sorkin sat there with the proud placidity of a donor