Stink Bug Part 2

The Stink Bug Part 2. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

The brown marmorated stink bug has a very large appetite and it isn’t too picky either. It will feed on over 300 varieties of plants including a lot of ag crops. Tracy Leskey, a Research Entomologist with USDA-ARS Kearneysville says originally they were not seeing any damage to crops.

LESKEY: But that began to change in 2008 when this insect started to cause problems in tree fruit specifically in the late season. In 2008 that was the first year we started to see problems. By 2009 it had become very severe and then in 2010, this really defined the level of risk posed by this insect as we saw widespread agricultural injury throughout the mid-Atlantic states.

They tried attacking the bug with chemical applications.

LESKEY: But in 2010 things began to change dramatically. We started seeing brown marmorated stink bug early in the season, something we had never seen before. This insect was spotted in our experimental orchards by late April and in fact it was foraging and feeding on a number of different species of fruit at that time. Now we had hoped that a lot of the cover sprays that we’re going on would protect the crop at this time but what we found was by late June this indeed was not the case. ?
Tomorrow we will hear more from Tracy Leskey on how they are trying to combat this devastating insect.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.