|
The Notoriety Of Japanese Beetle For human beings; they appear to be small and harmless and they even good-looking or attractive. But for an equally beautiful and fragile plant life; they are big, they are numerous. Thus they are mean and the very sight of them could be a deadly nightmare. For most that belong to the delicate category of the flora, these creatures are every bit as frightening as all other calamities that would kill the fragile aesthetic ornaments of nature. These critters are called Japanese beetles. Just as the name suggests, they are native in the mystical Land of the Rising Sun. They very much emulate the samurai warrior class of ancient Japan in a sense that they are both attractive yet ruthless at the same time. The Japanese beetles measure about 15 millimeters long and 10 millimeters wide. They have iridescent copper-colored forewing and a green pointed head. In Japan, they are every bit benign and undamaging because of the presence of other pests; the natural enemies who have the strength and ferocity to repel their wholesale infestation of crops. However, in United States of America they are a unique type of pests and there is no other warrior insect in this land to stop their advance. For that reason they are a serious threat to 200 known species of plants.
These plants might picture them the way we human beings probably picture out a giant robot; clumsy, slow yet not one to be trifled for the sake of survival. These beetles have poor talent in aviation and they easily crash towards an obstacle. They don't have sophisticated means of harming plants and they would rather come at them in raw strength and numbers, eating on the blooms of rose plants. The first Japanese beetle in America was found in a nursery near Riverton, New Jersey in 1916. It is postulated that what preceded the first documented emergence of this insect was that these beetle larvae entered United States of America in a shipment of iris bulbs before 1912. The customs determined their presence during the inspection of the commodities. The first of these Japanese insects to have been detected in Canada was found in a car of a tourist at Yarmouth, arriving in Nova Scotia by ferry from Maine in 1939. Back then nobody ever thought that these insects were destructive. But the following decades proved them to be very harmful that the angry gardeners could very much make allusions of them with the mythical swarm of locusts of Egypt during the Biblical Ten Plagues. There is, however, a way to repel these creatures. Gradually spreading milk spores on areas likely to be infested with Japanese beetles could kill their larvae before it spawns out new breed and eventually contain them. Some people opt for the popular method called pheromone-baited traps yet recent studies show that it proved to be more harmful than helpful. These traps attract more beetles than the trap itself could ever target and neutralize.
|
Gardening Supply home page