Coming to an orchard near you, The Spotted Lanternfly

Triazicide

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I see some trees with tanglefoot coated paper on them. In the real hard hit areas they will fill a trap in a day.

My 2 cents on Lanternflies: I think the threat to most fruits is over stated. Across the street there is (was) a large tree of heaven in my neighborā€™s yard. It was carpeted with them, and a 10ā€™ radius under the tree was black from mold growing on honeydew. The bark peeled right off the tree. All this in a week or two. 30 feet away are my fruit trees, didnā€™t see a single Lanternfly on them. However, a nearby fig friend had a lot of Lanternflies on his fig trees (many nearby tree of heaven), but I donā€™t know if they were causing damage. Local vineyards have reported a lot of trouble, too.

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Man, thatā€™s good to hear. Some articles make it sound like pestilence straight out of the Book of Revelations. Penn State is known for excellent fruit science department so they may come up with something.

Do they fly to new trees or have to crawl up the trunk? If the latter, Tanglefoot sounds good.

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Looks like mantises eat them.

I collected about 100 mantis oothecas over the winter, they eat stink bugs also. If anyone wants to find some look in unmowed areas with good sun exposure, usually on 1/8"-1/4" stems.

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Am I understanding that the lantern flies killed the tree? It seems that controlling that host plant would be very helpful and maybe the actual presence of the lantern flies would be enough to diminish the amount of the tree of heaven. I have a hard time not getting anxious about invasive species; most of our land is covered with them and I feel powerless: honeysuckle, autumn olive, callery pear, the non-native kind of blackberry, plus surely many more invasive plants I donā€™t even recognize. Part of me says I canā€™t worry about them and the other part of me wants to try to control them.

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Yup, thatā€™s the host plant in China. One invasive pest killing another? Seems ok.

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I agree! Iā€™d feel differently seeing the tree of heavens wiped out than I feel about seeing all our local ash trees slowly dying due to the EABs.

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TOH is hard to kill, cutting a tree results in the whole root system suckering so if SLF can top kill TOH they might make the problem much worse. PA recommends killing 90% of TOH trees in infested areas, but leaving some male trees to attract and trap SLF in the future.

One way to kill TOH which limits root suckering is to hack the trunk with a hatchet and squirt herbicide into the cuts ā€œhack and squirtā€ in late summer after the sap has stopped flowing so the herbicide will travel down to the roots and kill them before they can sucker. Otherwise the whole area needs to be mowed regularly for several years (and suckers pulled from areas that canā€™t be mowed), or the suckers need to be treated with herbicide after the tree is cut.

Well they finally found me. While clearing out some Tree of Heaven weed trees from my tree lines today I found hundreds of adult Spotted Lantern Flies. Killed as many as I could, little buggers are pretty darn quick! Didnā€™t notice any in the orchard, going to give it a thorough looking over tomorrow. Not real happy about my discovery. :frowning_face:

@J.D Where are you?

Iā€™m in Northampton County PA, closest town would be Cherryville. Northern most edge of the Lehigh Valley.

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Do they prefer TOH enough that we are unlikely to see them in their absence?

That seems to be what they are attracted to the most here. I did walk the orchard today, found a few on all of my stone fruit(apricot, cherry, peach and plum) none on the pome fruit. Found a bunch on the maple trees too. Strangely enough they seem to like utility poles and the sunny sides of my out buildings. I know of a few people in the area having major problems on grapes. Its amazing how I went from seeing none, to what must be thousands in one season. Unfortunately , Iā€™m getting the feeling that they are here to stay.

The PennState Extension just published their results on some insecticide trials they have been doing on the SLFā€¦ https://extension.psu.edu/updated-insecticide-recommendations-for-spotted-lanternfly-on-tree-fruit?j=268406&sfmc_sub=43216378&l=159_HTML&u=5275059&mid=7234940&jb=4

A new article on Bloomberg:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-02/america-isn-t-ready-for-the-lanternfly-invasion

Iā€™m thinking of taking out my 2 peach trees since I donā€™t spray for PC/OFM so Iā€™m already not really getting any good fruit from them.

There is an interesting line in the article about how wine made from grapes on vines that had Lanternfly attacks was ā€œredolent of cabbage.ā€ I wonder if that was really related and if there could be some impact on fruit flavors if these pests canā€™t be controlled for completely.

The way the eggs can be laid on anything sure makes it seem like these things might spread very fast.

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I noticed bunch of these in my maple tree. Donā€™t know what to expect yet. Iā€™m sure another horrible pest to deal withā€¦

Call the Penn State Extension Susu. Tell them you have them, then smash them.

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Our county is already in the quarantine zone. So they know about it. I entered in my zip code on their website.

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Do we know which fruit trees or bushes these donā€™t attack? I might try to plan my plantings around these if they are as bad as some of the newer nasties like SWD. Theyā€™ve already spread to parts of Lancaster, PA where Iā€™m at, so only a matter of time before I see some.

Thereā€™s a long list of stuff they like. The ones I recall are grape, peach, apple.