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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.
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.
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.
by Dominic Reisig, NC State University, in Southeast Farm Press
Yes, spring is in the air and kudzu bugs are again on the move.
This article covers 1) what is going on in terms of movement right now and 2) what you can expect in terms of future soybean invasions for May and June.
From Southeast Farm Press
Humans aren’t the only species with a sweet tooth.
Research from North Carolina State University shows that the invasive spotted-wing vinegar fly (Drosophila suzukii) also prefers sweet, soft fruit — giving us new insight into a species that has spread across the United States over the past four years and threatens to cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to U.S. fruit crops.
From Southeast Farm Press
Target spot has created much concern among cotton growers in the Southeast over the past few years and began showing up in cotton fields in the Carolinas and Virginia for the first time last year.
Little is known about the impact of the fungal disease on yield and quality, but recent research indicates there may be significant differences among varieties.
From Southern SARE
North Carolina organic wheat producers who face challenges in controlling stubborn weeds, specifically Italian ryegrass, may soon be able to choose from varieties that suppress those weed populations.
North Carolina State University graduate student Margaret Worthington is studying 60 soft red winter wheat cultivars from public and private breeding programs for morphological characteristics and allelopathic traits that would help the wheat plants out-compete Italian ryegrass. The research, “Breeding Wheat for Increased Weed-Suppressive Ability Against Italian Ryegrass (GS12-115),” is being funded by a two-year, $10,952 Southern Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SSARE) Graduate Student Grant.
From the Roanoke Times
On Friday a Virginia Tech research team working to stop destruction of Appalachia’s iconic hemlock trees unleashed a new microscopic weapon in the fight against the tree-killing woolly adelgid.
Tech entomology professor Scott Salom and graduate student Katlin Mooneyham seeded infested hemlocks on private property near Mountain Lake in Giles County with about 1,000 laboratory-grown eggs of the Laricobius osakensis, a newly discovered beetle species from Osaka, Japan, that preys almost exclusively on the woolly adelgid.
Just in time for spring landscaping, the North Carolina State University Turfgrass Program has launched the android version of its popular NCSU Lawn Care app. Focusing on the key categories of lawn care and maintenance, such as grasses, pest problems and irrigation, the app is a convenient, valuable tool for homeowners and commercial landscapers alike.
