You may have seen them in your garden crawling all over your favorite plants. The Japanese beetle was introduced on the east coast almost 90 years ago. And as the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chris Lehman reports, this shiny, metallic green bug has been munching its way across the Midwest:
Transcript
You may have seen them in your garden crawling all over your favorite
plants. The Japanese beetle was introduced on the east coast almost 90
years ago. And as the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chris Lehman reports,
this shiny, metallic green bug has been munching its way across the Midwest:
The Japanese beetle is especially prevalent along major rivers in the
Midwest, such as the Wabash and the Ohio. It spends about ten months a
year underground. But when it emerges in early summer it has a voracious
appetite. And it’s not a very fussy eater. Mark Hoard is a pest
management educator for the University of Illinois Extension.
“They can feed on a lot of different plants. Some of the favorites are
roses and grapes. They seem to like a number of different flowering
species, there’s a number of different trees you can see them feeding on.
So they’re fairly broad in their preference in terms of vegetative
material.”
Japanese beetles also attack soybean and corn. Damage can vary widely from
place to place, although severe defoliation has been reported in parts of
Indiana and Illinois. Farmers have been using pesticides and traps to
address the problem, but experts say a more effective method for gardeners
may be to collect the beetles by hand.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Chris Lehman.