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A katydid got into my house last summer. It kept saying "click click click". Lovely bug, though.
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ludosti - The problem with mantids is that they don't discriminate between "pest" insects and beneficial ones. They'll eat 'em all! Scorpions are too cool. I don't know enough about them, since I live where they do not.
Posts: 3141 | Registered: Apr 2000
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quote:quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Originally posted by Scott R:
quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We used to watch the bats swooping out of nowhere to pick off the stragglers. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We did the same thing in Italy. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I did the same thing at KU.
And my family used to do it out behind our house every summer. In a suburb of Los Angeles. Amazing how some things are the same the world over, huh?
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What insects are emerging where you live? I saw my first mosquito of the season today (I think it bit my baby), a lost ladybug, and a moth.
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Ugh. What I hate about springs is flies will appear. Flies are a danger to rabbits! Because of those nasty creatures I hate so much... Hate hate hate those things.
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Not many emerging yet, however, now that it has been warm enough to peruse my foliage deficient yard, I've been finding new praying-matid egg sacs. I found 3 of them yesterday alone. One on a forsythia, one just on some tall grasses that had been mashed down by the snow, and one on a denuded Virginia creeper. Looks like I won't be buying more this spring after all. (As you said above, Jenny. )
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First mosquito bites of the season. I awoke in the night with an incredibly itchy hand. After the itch, my first impression was one of warmth and joy. Joy! Can you believe it?
I thought, it is right for mosquitoes to bite me. It is right for my blood to nourish them. We humans destroy so much habitat and take so much from Nature. Shouldn't we give a little something back in return?
I know I'm an odd one, but that is why I am the Insect Advocate.
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This site doesn't provide an in-depth information, but the Orkin Insect Guide is fun to read through, and features fairly good illustrations of the insects it talks about.
Is it true that female fireflies can't fly? I had no idea!
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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I do have a question, Jenny. There is a large stump in my yard, cut nearly flush with the ground, that went from being quite solid in the fall of 2004 to being remarkably decayed in the fall of 2005. Just before it got cold last fall I pried up a bit of it, and uncovered a boil of ants. I hadn't quite seen ants like them before. They were black, about half to two thirds the size given for carpenter ants on the Orkin site I linked to above, and had kind of block shaped heads with large (relative the their bodies) pincers. Their heads were more on the same plane as the rest of their bodies, rather than being oriented at an angle relative to their bodies the way a carpenter ant's is. Any idea what these are, and how much danger they might pose to my house? They've made fairly quick work of that stump, although of course they had help from other elements of nature in that.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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Noemon - Yes, black widows are very common in this area (Phoenix), so I see them pretty often. In fact, on Saturday we found another one and her several egg sacs (there can be 200-700 in each sac). So, my yard is now several hundred potential black widows less.
So far, I haven't seen any scorpions this spring. Yay! While they are very interesting, some of the species here in Az can be deadly to humans (while the others are certainly very painful and can be debilitating for a couple weeks and could be lethal to my beloved pets), so I do not permit them to continue to live when I find them in my yard. We'll see what happens as we do the major landscaping work in the back yard this and next month. Posts: 5879 | Registered: Apr 2001
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OK, I have a few new insect questions concerning ticks. First of all, my parents own three cocker spaniels and up until about three weeks to a month ago, ticks were never more than a very infrequent problem with them. However within the past month, they've started cropping up more and more to the point where according to my mother, she checks them daily and finds a good half-dozen on each dog.
Now, I've lived in the region for most of my life and I lived there for years, and it's not what you'd think of as typically tick-friendly country. Highly developed suburbs, the most wildlife is either the grass or foliage in a yard, and the occassional vacant lot which the dogs don't get into. They've recently started using some new type of veterinarian-bought anti-tick chemicals, but I'll have to ask my mother what kind exactly the next time I see her.
The dogs don't go outside beyond the fenced and highly unscrub-brush yard that I normally associate with ticks. So if anyone could suggest a reason why suddenly the ticks are apparently going into their house in droves (thankfully not mine, even though I live in a much more rural area), I'd be appreciative. But even more, some method for destroying the ticks back down to a tolerable, occasional level.
Now the second question. She found a tick on the wall a couple of feet up, but according to her it was pretty unusual. She described it as measuring about 1/4'' long by 1/8th'' wide. Perhaps...1/16 or 1/32 thick. A reddish-brown disc-shaped 'face', and on its back were a series of yellow and dark brown/black markinings, running in streaks lengthwise along its body. Three streaks, actually. Now I'm going to look online, but there are certainly those with better google-fu than me, so perhaps you could give better answers:)
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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We have Palmetto Bugs which are really just huge roaches that someone decided would be a little more cute if we gave them a different name. Gross! They fly around and get into your house and you can't just flush them or dump them down a drain cause they come back up the drains which is REALLY unnecessary.
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I just got asked to give a talk as the Insect Advocate at a local health food store!! So now I have to figure out what to say. What have been the most influential things in the Mommy Bugga Bugga and Insect Advocate threads?
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Jenny, if you haven't already seen it The Buglady's site has some really interesting articles.
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:: bumped because Jenny just made reference to this thread having fallen off, which makes me think that she probably didn't see the cool site I linked to yesterday::
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I was just in Colorado, Jenny, and encountered quite a swarm of midges. Here's a link to the story.
Turns out the weather conditions were just right for a massive hatching, though the little buggers' lifespan is only about 12 hours, I was told. The article says "They're probably gone now" and was written on the 4th of April. Well, that wasn't exactly the case.
Turns out they have a larval cycle of about two days, so every two days for a couple of weeks they were out in force.
To give an example, we drove through them on route from Pueblo to Alamosa, down Route 25, which is essentially a highway through a huge high plains desert area. It sounded like hard rain hitting the windshield, and the splatter got so bad that I could hardly see. This lasted for miles.
I stopped to try to clean off the windshield at a gas station, and it looked like a scene from The Birds. Two people at the pumps were writhing and swatting at the things who were glomming onto them from all sides. A tall white column was covered almost three quarters of the way up with a swarm of black crawlies.
A couple miles later, after we escaped the swarm and cleaned off the car (and felt sorry for the couple on a low windscreen Harley that had stopped at the same gas station) a motel owner explained that it had been happening for over a week. His take on it was simple. "Well, we'll have a lot of fat birds and fish."
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Isn't there a Bill Peet book about a swarm of midges that drive hunters out of some wood or another?
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I found the strangest looking bug today on a tomato plant I bought from a small garden stand/vegetable stand.
Turns out it is a wheel bug nymph, and it is a type of assassin bug that kills other insects. I put him in a baggie until I could figure out whether he could go back in the garden, or needed to be relocated. Other than having quite a bite (worse than a bee sting), it seems like he's going back in the garden to kill off aphids and the like.
Just thought I'd share, since I'd never seen one before.
Posts: 3960 | Registered: Jul 2001
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I have to admit, whenever I see an ant in my house, I crush it. But I have a great justification.
When I see a solitary ant, I declare it a scout. By eliminating said scout, I am keeping its comrades from entering my home and suffering a similar fate.
Am I a bad man because of this?
Posts: 3852 | Registered: Feb 2002
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Ooh, Wheel Bugs are cool. My hubby caught one the other day to show the Little Mother.
Fruit flies - clean everything. Clean your drains. Don't leave wet washrags out longer than 24 hours. Keep fruit and veggies in the fridge. Check your potato and onion bins. Fruit flies got into mine and EWWWWW! I had a big mess to clean up. Also, check your potted plants. Let them dry up a bit or put them outside for a while. A fruit fly's life cycle is very short, so if you have a lot it's imperative you discover where they are breeding and remove the chow.
Javert, you have an effective policy. The scout by no means is the entire nest. Keeping the scouts from discovering the goodies in your house is a more humane way to deal with your ant neighbors than destroying their colonies.
Posts: 3141 | Registered: Apr 2000
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For the past couple of years, we have these weird little beetles which hatch out of the litter box. They are about 3/4 inch long, and very fast.
The facts: No beetles have ever emerged from the upstairs litter box.
The cats do not really use the litter boxes in the summer. In fact, they don't use them at all, so we do not change the litter very often in the summer.
What the heck are they, and why are they in our litterl box???
On another gross beetle note, we saw a beetle that I swear to you was three inches long. It was walking on our driveway. Massachusetts. July. It looked like it had wings. It was black and very shiny. It looked kind of like a cockroach.
What the heck was it, and why did it feel the need to frighten my children, my husband, and me???
Posts: 10890 | Registered: May 2003
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Ah yes, late summer/early fall truly represents the golden years of a bug's life. When I'm not smashing, stomping, swatting, drowning, or otherwise cursing the millions of spiders...there are some insects I appreciate.
Like those gigantic green grasshoppers. I usually only see a few of them, but for me, they're truly a sign that fall has arrived.
(Maybe I can get a picture this year...)
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Scroll down to the bottom of this link, Elizabeth.
Was that what you saw? They're pretty common in Queens, and my girlfriend is terrified of them. They get to be between 2-3 inches. They're apparently the largest true bug in North America.
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I ran across one of those water beetles in an ecology class in PA. We didn't know what it was so stuck it in a bucket with fish we'd caught electroshocking. The beetle dove down into the bucket and clamped onto the head of a sucker fish, and proceeded to suck the fish's brain out. The skull actually began to cave in. That's both really cool, and really scarey.
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Oh, good heavens, Flying Cow, that was it! We live between two swamps(so, really, in the midst of one swamp), so I am sure there is much, much more we do NOT want to know about! I do not remember those frightening pincers, but I am going to show my husband. The shininess looks frigteningly right.
Posts: 10890 | Registered: May 2003
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Is Jenny around anywhere? Is it time for an Insect Advocate 2007?
I've got cucumber beetles eating up my sage, and I don't know what to do. I'd say about half of the leaves on my (rather large) sage plant have been perforated with holes. Is there a way to get rid of them short of pesticides?
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Well, FlyingCow -- we pick them off by hand, or let our chickens run in with the plants and pick them off (they help a lot with ridding the garden of insects).
Another thing you might try that has worked for some other beetles we've been fighting -- put out a container half-full of water (we use one of those plastic tubs you get two gallons of ice cream in at the store). Set it next to the plant. The beetles are attracted to the water and fly into the water, but then can't get back out.
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Just be sure you have some place that's not the garden to keep the chickens when they're not eating bugs. Once they finish the bugs off, they'll start in on the plants.
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Too bad rabbits don't eat japanese beetles... instead I just have two pests.
Seems as though the white lawn grubs I found earlier this year were likely japanese beetle grubs. Lovely. Doesn't look like the Grub-X did a whole lot of good - and I read that japanese beetle traps often do more harm than good.
Posts: 3960 | Registered: Jul 2001
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Disclaimer & Reminder: My handle is a Red Prophet reference, not a signal of any kind of vendetta toward insects. However...
I do have some bug questions.
First, I think a nest of yellowjackets is beginning to form in our roof. I've been seeing them flying in and out of a corner in the eaves near the back door. This house (a rental with a lazy landlord) has vinyl exterior, and I'm a little worried about destroying the siding with attempts to locate and/or destroy said nest. How should I plug the hole or rid myself of the little beasties?
Second, in August 2006, I found a very large (6-7 inch resting wingspan) and very beautiful yellow moth in my car one morning. Remembering The Girl of the Limberlost, I hoped to catch and save it since I know they have a very short life. I planned to give it to my mother's kindergarten class in Seattle. Unfortunately, I must have gone about it all the wrong way. I trapped the lovely creature in a shallow box with a lid and expected it to just expire and harden. Not likely. It made a real ruckus fluttering around in the box for a long while, so I put some alcohol on cottonballs and poked them into the box. Eventually the moth stopped moving, so I looked inside and the poor creature had laid her eggs in there! They were small, bright yellow balls and they looked like those little moisture-absorbing granules that come in packets with DO NOT EAT written in six languages on them. I took it all with me to Seattle a few days later and my mom ended up burning the whole container because she was really worried about the eggs hatching and causing some kind of cross-country caterpillar infestation. I live in the North Carolina Piedmont Triad area. I'd like to know a) What kind of moth was it? It was almost completely a canary yellow with a thick, fuzzy body and a few sort of grayish spots on the wings. b) How should I have handled the situation? Obviously the moth needed to lay eggs prior to being caught and pinned, but I had no clue she hadn't yet. Her body shrank quite a bit after she laid the eggs, which was interesting to note, however I wouldn't be able to tell the difference with another type of moth. Should I have released the eggs into the woods? Would they have survived? What is the best way to quickly kill and preserve a moth or other insect for scientific study? Is it right to do so?
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Yellowjacket control - I'm afraid that these little critters will be quite aggressive when defending their nests. I suppose you could try plastering over the hole at night, but would that be any kinder than using poison? Are the yellow jackets really bothering you? Are they a threat to you and your family? If they are not, you might try to just live and let live until winter, when it is quite easy to repair the hole without being stung.
Unusual Moth - try looking up your moth at whatsthatbug.com, one of my favorite insect advocacy and identification sites. Or, try insectguide.net. Both are excellent. As far as preserving insects for posterity, the best thing you can do is kill them quickly and pin them. For my daughter's 4-H project, we have a kill jar (basically a jar with a little plaster-of-paris in the bottom). You then saturate the plaster with poison. You can use nail polish remover. After the insect dies (and it should be within a couple of hours), you must pin it right away before it gets too stiff. For moths, you pin directly through the thorax. Then, you should arrange the wings. If you're really interested, I suggest checking with your local entomology department. I don't know if your eggs would have survived after being exposed to the alcohol. And as far as the contamination concern, this is where proper identification is really helpful. It's true that insects from one area can cause huge problems if imported to another. In my state of Indiana, we are having trouble with the Emerald Ash Borer, a very pretty beetle that destroys ash trees. To control its spread, you are not allowed to transport firewood from one part of Indiana to another! If your moth was a pest species, the Seattle agriculture and natural resources department might not appreciate you bringing viable eggs into their area!
Next time, I would say identify the insect so you know what it is. And if you still want to preserve it, kill it humanely. Conversely, you could capture it in a bug cage and release it after sharing it with schoolchildren.
As far as the morality of killing insects... Most insect species are in no danger of being wiped out. While I, personally, do not like killing insects, I am okay with a few individuals being taken for the purpose of study. I also understand and appreciate the necessity of killing pests, dangerous insects when they are truly a threat, and insects used as food. It's up to you to determine your own relationship with the insect world.
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So, Jenny, what's your advice on japanese beetles? From what I've seen, my best bet is to just pick them off by hand and drop them into soapy water.
Since I'm not home often, and usually water my garden just before sunset (or later), I'm really not around to pick off the beetles. And apparently, japanese beetle traps often end up attracting more beetles.
Posts: 3960 | Registered: Jul 2001
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Well, I've been trying to figure this one out myself! If you don't mind threatening the beneficial insects, you can use an insecticide.
The really bad thing about Japanese beetles is that they secrete an aggregation pheremone, which causes them to hang out together. The plants they chew also release a chemical distress smell that attracts the beetles. So, once a plant is damaged, it is in great danger.
I did some research on Japanese beetles, and found the following: there is actually a "stop eating now" pheremone secreted by the beetles, but scientists aren't able to produce it for commercial use yet; Japanese beetles are most active in direct sunlight and at the tops of plants, in fact becoming disoriented in the dark; plants in the sun because their leaves are chemically sweeter to the beetles; certain wasp, fly, and nematode species do parasitize the beetles and their grubs; and I directly observed them following a sccent path laid down by their fellow beetles across the field to my grapevines.
Here is what I did: I picked off all the beetles I could and drowned them in soapy water. In the early morning after a rain (the rain washed most of them away and cleaned off the scent trail), I put screened things like colanders over the smaller and sensitive plants. I turned my outdoor chairs upside down over the bigger plants. My theory was that it would be harder to find the plants, therefore making other areas more amenable to the beetles traversing through my land. So far, this has worked. The scent trails moved to the strawberry bed.
My suggestion for someone who wants to fight without pesticides would be to use some sort of barrier, like a mosquito netting that lets in light and air and water, for when the Japanese beetles first emerge and start aggregating. They might land on the netting, but they wouldn't have anything to eat. They would quickly move on. Also, if you could shade or hide sensitive plants in some way, that might be good. You could consider using the Japanese beetle traps at an edge of your property far from your desired plants to encourage the beetles to change their flyways in that direction. I'm really dubious about those pheremone traps, though. I've read you want to encourage your neighbors to get them! I also had good luck at my last house, where I grew 4 o'clocks. They are supposedly poisonous to Japanese beetles. I also found out that geraniums make Japanese beetles paralyzed. They'll eat the petals and get drunk, I guess. But they don't learn to avoid them. So if you can plant 4 o'clocks and geraniums, and not mind them getting eaten, they might help. Also, note what weeds are eaten by the beetles and leave them alone if they are far enough away from your special plants. They'll be decoy plants for the beetle flyway. Overall, your tactic should be to make your plants less enticing than the other ones in your area. It is also suggested that you treat your lawn when the beetles are in their grub stage to prevent such large emergences in the summer. You can choose pesticides (which lawn companies would love for you to buy) or try parasitic nematodes (little wormy things that are harmless to people).
To review, Japanese beetles
LIKE: grapes, roses, apples, beans, and others; tops of plants; plants in the sun; other Japanese beetles; plants that make them drunk - geraniums and 4 o'clocks
The first contains 4 basil plants (only 1 with large leaves), sage, rosemary, thyme, oregano, 4 pepper plants, 3 dill plants, and 5 marigolds in the center. It's a happy, slighly crowded box, without much of an issue. I'm starting to get aphids on my dill and I need to spray it down with soapy water, and my sage has started to get spots (cucumber beetles, mainly). The one large-leaf basil is starting to get hit by japanese beetles.
Almost everything in the first box I can probably protect with screening pretty easily.
The second box is my bigger problem. I have 1 gargantuan grape tomato plant (which would take over the whole box if I let it, but it's tied up), two large leaf basils, 2 regular tomato plants, 3 cucumber plants (which climb out from the edge of the garden up a 4-foot diagonal trellis made of bird netting), and five marigolds in the center. My girlfriend and roommate call this box "Jumanji".
Right now, the cucumbers are suspended on a rectangle of bird netting about 4'x4' extending diagonally up from the box at about a 40 degree angle. They have very large leaves that are starting to be eaten by japanese beetles. I can't cover the whole thing in mosquito netting, because then the bees can't get in to pollenate the flowers.
Because I work from 9 until 6, I only see my garden in full sun during the weekends - when I'm also often away from the house - making picking the buggers off very difficult.
I'll try getting some 4 o'clocks and geraniums to see if that will do the trick.
I may be able to screen the basil, though. I'll give it a shot.
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A word on traps, I didn't use them last year (since they sold out in my area) and my dahlias and virginia creeper were denuded by Japanese Beetles. This year I'm using them, and I don't have any way to put them the recommended "30 feet from desired plants" so I just stuck them in the middle of the yard. That seems to have worked.
In the afternoon the beetles swarm all around the traps and eventually find their way inside. There is some evidence of beetle damage to some of my plants, but nothing to cry about. I'd suggest getting pheremone traps and just putting them as far from your "desired plants" as you can get them. You might draw beetles that wouldn't have come to your garden in the first place, but you are drawing them to the trap and not necessarily to your desired plants. At least that's my experience. You will certainly see more beetles if you use traps, but that doesn't mean they are doing the same damage they would in a smaller population left unmolested (i.e. without traps.)
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Amazing how some things are the same the world over, huh?
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So, my yard is now several hundred potential black widows less.![[Smile]](smile.gif)
