Dealing with the Stink Bug

Dealing with the Stink Bug. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

We have spent quite a bit of time talking about the brown marmorated stink bug but justly so since it has had a devastating effect on ag crops. It loves to eat and it is not picky. The damage caused easily can wipe out a farmer or orchardists crop. Tracy Leskey with USDA-ARS out of Kearneysville, WV says they have tried a very broad group of pesticides to try and deal with the invasion.

LESKEY: So what can we conclude from these works, well certainly there was no chemical class that was perfect but within each chemical class we did find promising materials. However, brown marmorated stink bug is highly difficult to kill and so we definitely know there are challenges out there. And certainly that knockdown and recovery was evident with pyrethroids and neonicitinoids.

Leskey said that what they saw in the lab didn’t always translate to the field due to short residual activity.

LESKEY: What we’re seeing so far is that growers have taken a conservative approach. What they’re doing is using alternate row middle treatments at very tight intervals, generally 7 to 10 days. Sometimes even shorter, 3 or 4 days, during peak periods of activity.

She says they found something interesting.

LESKEY: One of the interesting things about this insect is that it responds to light. And so what we want to do is identify the optimal wavelength and intensities of light and see if we could bait traps with them. And so we began in the laboratory and what we found was that by baiting traps with particular wavelengths of light we can actually capture 200 to 400 times more stink bugs.

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