If you put them too close to the garden they’re going to go after your plants and not the trap and you get more damage. When they’re that far away what they’ll do is with this pheromone they’ll lure the Japanese beetle in, they drop into the trap and you kill them. Keep them a foot or two off the ground is ideal. Also, keep them low to the ground because that’s the cruising altitude of Japanese beetles. What you want to do with the Japanese beetles traps is keep them 100 to 200 feet away from your garden and ideally have about three or four of them per half acre lot so that you have a perimeter control of the Japanese beetles as they fly in. A lot of these traps have a bad reputation because people think that they attract more beetles than they actually control. You’ve all probably seen these out in yards. But this is a good way to come out every morning and religiously reduce that population of Japanese beetles.Īnother thing you can do to control Japanese beetle adults is to use the Japanese beetle traps. Of course you can crunch them too and you can hire a local kid to come over and pay for their first year of college tuition by paying them a dollar a beetle. Their response is to just drop right into the water and that will kill them. Japanese beetles don’t like soapy water so what you can do is early in the morning when they’re still sluggish, go over to the plant and just knock them into the soapy water just by rustling the plant. They lay their eggs around where they feed.īut what about the adults. Spraying nematodes or Milky Spore powder is a great way to reduce the grubs, especially around the plants, and their feeding because that’s what Japanese beetles do. Both of these products work really nice to control those grubs and reduce the overall Japanese beetle population. The Milky Spore powder is a powder that will live in the soil and kill those grubs when it comes in contact with them. This one works well in warmer areas because it over winters in the soil unlike the nematodes that you have to spray every year. They really reduce the population so you have less adult beetles later on the summer.Īnother product you can use is Milky Spore powder. So do it right after a rain or water the area early and then afterwards after you spray them to keep it nice and moist. That’s how they move around is through water channels. The key with this, of course, is to water the soil really well. That’s how they can find them and kill them. You would want to spray these on your lawn areas in May or June and then maybe again in September because that’s when the grubs are most likely to be in those upper level soil surfaces. Nematodes are microscopic little, wire worm-like creatures that use water channels in the soil to go on a seek and destroy mission. Just like this product I have right here. But you can also enhance that effect too with two organic controls. During really cold winters or really dry summers you’re going to have less grubs and therefore less beetles. The Japanese beetle grubs may be more or less severe depending on the weather. The eggs hatch into C-shaped grubs and they spend the winter in the soil. Then they lay eggs all around the plants where they were feeding. Their whole purpose in life is to eat and mate. They emerge as this little guy right here that will be flying around feeding on everything. Japanese beetles start as c-shaped white grubs in the soil and in the spring they slowly move up through the upper levels of the soil till they get to a place, usually in early summer, where they’ll pupate. The key to controlling Japanese beetles is to know something about their lifecycle. We’ve tried to introduce those in the Northeast over the last hundred years but they really haven’t gotten established so every year you see a lot of these adult beetles flying around. Where they’re native in Japan they’re not really a big issue because they have parasitic flies that keep them under control. So if you’re growing almost anything in your yard, you probably have Japanese beetles. Just let me give you a list of some of the plants they’ll feed on apples, plums, cherries, grapes, hollyhocks, potentilla, hibiscus, zinnias, basil, and it goes on and on. Japanese beetles are tough to control because they love everything. Now if you’re West of the Rockies, watch out. They plague gardens and feed on over 300 different types of plant. If you’re a gardener east of the Rockies you know about this pest the Japanese beetles. Watch this video to learn about the life cycle of Japanese beetles and how to control them organically using sprays, hand picking and traps.
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