Attack Of The Vital-Juice-Sucking Chinese Stinkbugs
by John Laumer, Philadelphia on 09.13.07
The Japanese beetles are bad enough, having been around my home in the hundreds of thousands for the last two growing seasons. Nothing eats them. No amount of bag trapping can control them.
The good news is that all the Japanese beetles have eaten this year is my 40 foot river birch tree (3/4 denuded at end of August), all roses, all new growth on my three elephant plums, an entire climbing hydrangea, all new growth on three mature grape vines, and entire pole bean plants. The rest of the garden, however, is untouched.
These Chinese stink bugs (pictured), however, are a different matter. They're slow, stinky and somewhat repulsive when they get into the house and crawl into the bathroom sink and shower, which is a fairly common issue, because they also are incredibly abundant in any standing foliage near the doors and windows.
What really makes me angry is that the stinkers love to eat produce, sucking out the plant juices with some sort of proboscis. In the picture you can see a bunch of them sucking away at a small Hubbard squash. They also love pumpkin, beans, zucchini, eggplant, and many other succulent fruits. Never in decades of gardening have I experienced an insect that goes after the late fall harvest with such intensity.
Anyone else have this problem? How can we send them back to China?
One of the best Green pest control mechanisms I've heard offered up is the Offer They Can't Refuse.
That is, you find something that the pest finds extremely enticing, and you place it somewhere to get them to congregate near, but not on, the flora you're trying to protect. Then you use simple mechanical pest control (crushing, heat, drowning by soapy water) to snuff them out in large numbers. In the case of stink bugs, I would suggest soapy water as this is likely to be the least odiferous option.
Perhaps you could go to the grocery store and buy a small assortment of produce and lay them out, cut and uncut, to see which ones if any the little buggers enjoy more than your garden.
I live near Philly as well, and these things are everywhere. I don't remember ever seeing them until about 5 years ago.
We usually plant a distraction crop like pumpkins in a corner of the garden away from the raised beds. They always show up there first and that's were we can usually keep most of them. We noticed planting late helps too because the plant is maturing during the wrong part of the bugs cycle and can usually outlast them when they become a nuisance. Not to mention that good old hand picking and crushing work too.
I'm in Lancaster, PA and I haven't had a problem with them in our garden, but they were crawling in the house. Normally our cat deals with any arthropod that gets bold enough to be visible, but he won't touch these things, which leaves me to dispose of them without crushing them and releasing their noxious gas.
The worst was when we went up into our attic after a week of it being too hot to be up there only to find dozens of them dessicated in the window frame. Yummy.
We hired an exterminator to take care of some carpenter bees that had taken residence in our eaves, and he said that the stink bugs are as bad as he's ever seen them and that there's not much you can do.
I wonder if you could inject some sort of poison into a squash and put it into a trap of some kind.
I know two things that will kill the bugs, one of which you might not want to put on your edible plants: nicotine, and diluted dish washing detergent.
I know for sure that nicotine kills bugs. If you shred a pack of cigarettes and let it steep in a gallon of warm water over night, strain it through several layers of cheese cloth, and add two tablespoons of dish washing detergent to the mix, and spray that on the bugs, it will kill them for sure. (Wear gloves when handling the nicotine water; you don't want to poison yourself with too much nicotine absorbing through your skin.) The detergent will break down along with the nicotine. The detergent lessens the surface tension of the water, making it coat the bugs well, and the nicotine poisons them. Both decompose after a while.
If you don't want to spray nicotine on your plants, just the detergent water should work pretty well. Nicotine will make the plants inedible for the bugs well after you spray it.
I'm not sure what concentration works best; I know 1 pack per gallon works, but you might be able to get away with a much more dilute solution.
Needless to say, wash your veggies before eating them.
I live in Phila. and have hundreds of stink bugs inside my house! Mostly in the upstairs bedrooms b/c it is warmer there in the afternoons. Last night I actually had a gallon spray bottle of pure bleach and sprayed them and sprayed them but after they flop upside down for a while to "play dead" they jump back up and start crawling/flying again! Oh yes they fly too! Don't know what to do. Have ordered some bug spray with a sticky solution that also has to be added so it will stick to them but haven't received it yet. And when I do receive it I have to mix it and spray it heavily on all the outside of the house as they hibernate under siding! Don't know if I will last until then. When they see me coming towards them with wads of toilet tissue they actually hide! They are very smart little creatures.
Yes.. they are smart..I go to open the door and they turn thier heads from me like a stalker pretending to not be noticed. I've been trapping them in a pill bottle and drowning them in vinegar and leaving them there til they are good and dead. I haven't tried raid or anything yet, but the vinegar kicked his butt in a couple minutes,. submerged, and also swished violently. I want to know if the raid will do anything because they hang out in high places like bedrooms where I can't just reach out and get them. This afternoon I discouraged them by shooting Mr. Clean antibacterial through the screen and flicking them,.. but nothing bothers them. They need to be smashed, drowned, sterilized, deskunked or poisoned. My mom said that they are drawn to the warmest side of the house.. or Southeast in the afternoons. They have been leaping out from the top of the door so that they can get inside.
THANKS CHINA!
-EBG
The worst thing you can do is smash them! To whomever said they smash them, if you don't have to many it would be better to have them walk on to a piece of paper and take them outside. They're fairly naive and will walk right onto a magazine or piece of cardboard. They won't spray either.
I wanna try the nicotene poison, since we have a smoker here anyway.