How to Deal With Stink Bugs

How to Deal With Stink Bugs. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Today we wrap up our on-going series about the brown marmorated stink bug. We have looked at how the species was discovered quite a number of years ago on the East coast and how it as devastated crops. We have seen how it has slowly migrated across the U.S. and is now found in a number of areas in the Pacific Northwest, especially in the Portland area and most likely arrived there as a hitchhiker. Peter Shearer with Oregon State University hopes to see some kind of biocontrol but they are looking at other possibilities as well.

SHEARER: The USDA has done some foreign exploration in Korea and China and has brought back a couple promising little parasitic wasps and we’re one of the labs at Oregon State that has these in quarantine so we’re building up these little wasps. And then we will expose these things to our native stink bugs next year once we start populations.

Shearer says they will look at other stink bugs as well.

SHEARER: We have to go out and start collecting specimens of our native predatory stink bugs. Not all stink bugs are bad stink bugs. Some of them are actually predators for various caterpillars and other insects and we want to make sure that we don’t impact them so we have to start colonies of our native stink bugs, expose their eggs in our laboratory to our promising parasitoid and hopefully make sure that this new wasp won’t go after our native ones.

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