For more than 20 years, specialists with the University of Kentucky Integrated Pest Management Program have trapped moths of Kentucky’s major agricultural pests to give producers an early warning about potential outbreaks. A recent UK College of Agriculture survey shows this program is paying financial and environmental dividends for the agricultural industry.
By Dominic Reisig, North Carolina Extension Entomologist, In Southeast Farm Press
Kudzu bug activity has heightened with the warm weather in the past two weeks.
Adults are flying from over-wintering sites and searching for their reproductive hosts, wisteria, kudzu and soybeans.
From Delta Farm Press
Yes, those are stink bugs in your wheat field. No, you probably shouldn’t start spraying just yet.
That’s the assessment of Gus Lorenz, Extension entomologist for the University of Arkansas.
After weeks of significant rain and mud, “I guess it got dry enough to walk some fields today,” Lorenz said. “My phone was ringing off the wall with calls, mostly about stink bugs in wheat.”
From Southeast Farm Press
Winning soybean yield contests is a common occurrence in recent years for Eastover, S.C., grower Jason Carter.
But winning last year’s contest with a rare and new-to-South Carolina insect handicap was an adventure he doesn’t want to try again.
Carter says he found the rare Dectes stem borer in his soybeans and finding out what was killing his beans proved to be about as frustrating as dealing with the problem.
By Kim Kaplan
Total losses of managed honey bee colonies nationwide were 31.1 percent from all causes for the 2012/2013 winter, according to the annual survey conducted by the Bee Informed Partnership and the Apiary Inspectors of America (AIA) and funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Read the rest of this entry »
The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is planning to release two new predatory beetles to stop the spread of the hemlock woolly adelgid, an invasive insect that has devastated hemlock forests throughout the eastern United States.
From Delta Farm Press
In 2012, Cotton Belt entomologists reported the lowest percent loss to insects since annual surveys of Cotton Belt entomologists began 33 years ago, according to entomologist Mike Williams, who compiles the annual survey, Cotton Insect Losses.
Biologists checking on bats that hibernate in mines and caves in the region were hoping against hope this year that a fungus killing bats in the Northeast might have traveled south without quite the lethal power.
They have been disappointed.
White-nose syndrome has claimed more than 90 percent of bats in three sites around the region, the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission announced this week, and has now been found in seven Western North Carolina counties.
by Dominic Reisig, NC State University
There are many management efforts you can take before your soybean seed goes into the ground.
Some of these actions are simply insurance and some of them, like your choice of row-spacing and planting date, are the best insect management decision choice you’ll make all year.
From the Tennessee Daily Reflector
Biologists will release two new predatory beetle species in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to battle a pest that has devastated hemlock forests.
The park has been using predatory beetles that feed exclusively on hemlock woolly adelgids (uh-DEL’-jidz) since 2002. Biologists hope releasing the two new species will enhance biological control of the invasive pest. Both of the species to be released come from Osaka region in Japan, which is where the adelgid strain in the park originated.
More than a half-million predatory beetles have been released in the Smokies in the last decade. Biologists also control the pest by spraying horticultural oil on trees near roads and injecting systemic insecticides into the soil and stems of hemlocks in the park.
