Ladies and Gentlemen...The Beetles!

 If you don't have Japanese beetles at your place, I'd like to strongly suggest that you look skyward and give thanks.  I've taken a pretty aggressive stance towards them this year, after clearly losing the battle last year.  I don't know if I'm winning or losing this year, but they have many more casualties than last year, so at least I've got a sense of doing some good.

What am I talking about?  Japanese beetles made their way to the east coast of North America in 1916, and to my house in Wisconsin five years ago, I think.

They are visually kind-of striking, with their metallic gold shell/wings.  That's it, in terms of the "pro" side of the ledger.  The "con" side includes their ability to swarm on and defoliate certain trees and vegetable plants.  I've read that they eat 300 some different plants, but in our yard they focus on raspberries, apple and cherry trees, grapes, courants, and have expressed some interest in green beans, a certain type of marigold, potatoes, and black-eyed Susans.

They don't actually kill trees and perennials, but they can pretty much wipe out a vegetable crop.

Here's how their lives go: They start in the ground as eggs.  Then they turn into grubs, which eat the roots of your lawn grass.  Then they emerge as beetles in June or July to eat your plants, returning  to the soil  to lay four eggs.  Then, they go back to eat more stuff, and return to lay four more eggs.  They lay 32 eggs, total.

You don't often see one Japanese beetle.  They emit a pheromone that aggressively invites fellow beetles to join them, by which I mean copulate or otherwise climb on them. What we would consider to be an orgy is just another day on the grape leaf to them.

Getting rid of them isn't easy.  There are traps, with sex pheromones as bait, that kill a lot of them, but seem also to invite others from the tri-state area to your yard.  Some people, though, speak very highly of the traps.  There are natural and unnatural ground treatments to kill the grubs and eggs, but that takes several applications.  More and less natural sprays can be used on them while they are on the plants.

I've done a little of all of the above plus the most recommended and most unpleasant strategy of picking the bugs off and putting them in a cup of water with some detergent in it so they can't get out.  I think we're on week six of this year's "beetle-mania," and I would estimate I've caught more than 4,000 of the little buggers so far.  I keep waiting for them to abate, but they  haven't yet.  I figure that if half of the beetles I caught are female, and those females would, if allowed to go free, have 30 baby beetles, I've reduced next year's beetle population by 60,000.  That would be nice.

For some reason all this talk about beetles reminds me of the joke that after Pope John Paul died they were going to name the next one Pope George Ringo.  I'm sorry, but after all the hours I've spent scanning foliage for little metallic-colored bugs, my brain isn't quite right.