We're waging war on Japanese Beetles

[schmije]

Here in Illinois the Japanese Beetles are unbelievable. We use pheremone traps that we empty every day. Today DH emptied one then came back an hour later to a FULL trap. He just modified the trap with a plastic trash bag to hold many, many more beetles. My chickens love beetles, but can't possibly eat them in the quantities that we catch.

I am curious how you deal with Japanese Beetles. The pheremone traps work well, but at this rate we'll need to empty our traps a dozen times a day!

Oh, and i saw a post about freezing the beetles to feed to chickens as a cold treat. Interesting idea! I may try that.

 

[Dar]

is this the same as the Asian long horn beetle that is raging war in the Greater Toronto Area?... or another one?

 

[Schultz]

You can trap them? Wow, I was out looking at my plants on Friday and there were beetles everywhere. I would love to rid my yard and garden of these pests. Where do you get the traps? Or what other ways are there to rid my 4 acres of them?

 

[schmije]

Yes, you can trap them. If you do a Google Images search for Japanese Beetle trap, you'll see lots of examples. We bought ours at Farm & Home, but you can also get them places like Home Depot, Lowes, and Tractor Supply. The only problem with trapping them is figuring out what to do with them. We usually dig a hole and dump them in.

We had to do something. They destroy the leaves on everything in our garden.

 

[schmije]

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I looked those up, and no, they're not the same.

 

[huntercf]

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Have you thought about getting a few guinea hens, they are voracious bug eaters.

 

[Schultz]

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Have you thought about getting a few guinea hens, they are voracious bug eaters.

We had guineas and they went to freezer camp, soooo I will have to look for the traps and figure out a good way to dispose of them!

 

[coldinnh]

you also have to stop the larval stage of the beetle. The grub - milky spore is an organic pesticide. Due to such heavy usage grubs/beetles are becoming chemically resistant to pesticides.

 

[schmije]

We're not really intrested in trying to apply a anti-grub agent on the 5 acres we own, not to mention all the other ground that surrounds us (aka neighbors property that doesn't treat for grubs).

So we trap!

 

[schmije]

I performed a little experiment. I put one of our full traps in the barn freezer - the WHOLE trap. I left it for about 15 min. I wasn't intending to freeze the beetles, I just wanted to slow them down and stop them from flying. The beetles on the top of the trap were moving when I put them in the freezer, and they weren't moving when I took them out. I opened the trap and dumped them into the pen with my 50 seven week old chicks. A bunch of the beetles from the middle of the trap were not cold enough, and they flew away. My chicks LOVED the treat. The experiment was (mostly) a succes.

Note to self: Leave the trap in the freezer longer to 'stun' more of the beetles.