The beetles at the top of my most destructive types of beetles list here in Kansas are the green june beetle and Japanese beetles. This article has some helpful solutions for the green june beetle
I think this addresses japanese beetle concerns
Here are a couple of my photos i took of the green june beetle
Wow! Never seen that kind of damage before.
Same. We have them around every summer but I don’t see them on my fruit. Stinkbugs, yes.
I do feel like at my location we will need to be more agressive with treatment this year. @marknmt be thankful they are not coming there in numbers like i saw here this year. There were millions of the green june beetles. The japanese beetle trap @39thparallel built kept my japanese beetles under control this year but i will need a couple of more traps like it. @alan the stinkbugs numbers continue to rise here and more damage is done every year.
Wow that is crazy. This year was probably the worst I have ever seen for Japanese beetles. They even destroyed our rhubarb plants. Ate all the rhubarb stalks and leaves. First time I have ever seen that.
I was going to try neem oil as I heard that can help, but just didn’t have the time to tend to it. I know of people that spray whey and some type of Clay on their fruit trees that seems to work for most insects. Haven’t tried them myself.
@Midwest This trap will work on japanese beetles but you want to start before long building it The Ultimate Japanese Beetle trap
Not trying to hijack, but I have to ask… the dark/light green variegation-like pattern on the leaves. I saw that at the end of the season after I planted grafted trees, but not again. What is the cause?
I thought it would be some particular nutrient deficiency, but couldn’t find good info.
Thats just honeycrisp when i first saw it i thought it was apple mosaic virus. Its not its just the nature of that variety.
They move in like a wave just drifting around the country. They were here deep for about three years and now it’s just a few around. When they were here I was getting them in my house and just about everywhere. The traps work but there are so many that there is not much you can do. I think you just have to deal with them another year or two and they will move on like they did here.
They can defoliate a tree
Thanks for posting. That was what my apples and pears looked like this past summer. They ruined about 60% of my apples while I was gone on vacation for a few days. Once they started, spraying didn’t seem to help much. I’ll try to build a couple of those traps to see if that helps. I’m going to try bagging some of my fruit as well. Will that keep them away I assume?
For apples, if you bag with plastc ziplock bags, you gotta hope that those beetles won’t get in through ventilation holes at the bottom of a bag.
You may want to look into fruit sox, too. Home Orchard Society sells them.
Green June Beetles are not a major pest because they mostly eat overripe fruit but…THEY ARE DISGUSTING! They stink and fly in your face when you are picking. They are also highly resistant to insecticide.
They attacked unripe fruit at my location.
Yea they are my biggest problem. I don’t use traps. Now using grub killer, milky spore in orchard and spraying trees. I had some success last year in keeping the numbers lower.
Milky spores take a couple of years to spread and become more effective.
You should see better a result afterward.
That’s not good. Maybe they are adapting to eat what’s available. I drenched them with a couple different insecticides last year and they were not phased at all. We should see if there is a lure to trap them.
They went after some of my apples that were about a week off from being ripe around July 26th. When I picked all of that variety early because they damaging all the fruit, they started on the green fruit. They eventually diminished around the beginning of September. They did not defoliate the leaves. This is here north of DFW. As a kid, I thought it was cool to find one of those shiny beetles because it was fairly rare to even find them. I’ve never seen them like this summer, hundreds of them. Guess they are just like every other imported and invasive pest. Adaptability to pesticides is not good either. Triazicide didn’t phase them much.
How big of an area around your orchard do you apply the milky spore? I would think they could fly in from a pretty good distance, and it won’t do much good except on the larvae in the orchard itself. Looks pretty pricey at $300/acre for one application.
@Chaos_5,
Milky spores lasts 15-20 years so it is a good investment. Also, they spread in ground into your neighbors’ land, too.
Everyone is right they are immune to insecticides. When they were here I was so tired of fighting them that I bought a can of wasp and ant instant kill and went tree to tree killing them. Was satisfying watching them drop dead but after the spray dried new ones replaced them. My suggestion is a whole lot of traps as that’s the only thing I found that works. I put one per tree and that stopped defoliation by more than 50 percent. They do love the traps.
Almost forgot. The giant bags of dead beatles that you will have make great fertilizer.
