See my edits, above.
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I need to keep using sevin to directly spray on the insects, right? If I spray the whole trees, They still keep coming.
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I have no experience with these beetles, but I read that the June Beetles are mainly interested in the fruit. Japanese beetles eat leaves and perhaps other plant parts.
Your second image above is a mass of beetles that are neither June nor Japanese.
If you can post an image of one or two individuals, perhaps I can ID them.
All adult beetles of any one species are about the same size-- there are no “small” or “large” Japanese or June beetles.
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As long as the Sevin sticks on the fruits and leaves then the beetles will stay away. Re spray if the rain washed the sevin off.
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Sevin keeps them away or kills them if it is on the leaves and fruit. I sprayed my persimmon trees, because the beetles keep eating the new flush of leaves. They died after coming in contact with the dried spray on the leaves and I found many dead beetles on the ground and stuck onto the leaves.
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I used to use sevin concentrated to mix with water to spray the garden. Then I found not work any more. I thought the insects got used to it. I switched to Ortho and malathion. I found they work on small beetles. The Japanese trap can catch a lot everyday.
But no use to big beetles.
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The second picture is Japanese beetle mixed with a few big ones. I dumped into hot water from the trap bags. I also catch some with hands. I put on glove.
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@39thparallel made me a trap which is killing plenty of them!The Ultimate Japanese Beetle trap
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I spray with neem oil mixed with dish soap and water. It’s not harmful to pollinators as far as I know and it works really well. The difference on my euro plum and grapes (their favs in my yard) the day before a spray to a day after is dramatic. Day before they are everywhere in twos and threes. The day after, not a beetle. A spray works for 3-4 days for me if there’s no rain.
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Here in the south we call those big ones “June Bugs” even though you rarely see one until July. This has been BY FAR the worst year ever for them- EVER. I cannot begin to tell you how many peaches I’ve lost to them this year.
Sevin Spray absolutely does kill them and keep them away for a few days. However, the problem I have is that these beetles do not hurt fruit at all until it is about 1 day from being ripe or is ripe and just hasn’t been picked. Now, I’m not an organic grower but I still just don’t want to spray sevin or other pesticide on fruit the day before I pick it to eat. So it makes the June bugs very hard to manage. If you spray a week before fruit is ripe I find the sevin looses effectiveness (probably from being diluted with dew and so on), but I don’t want to spray the day before its ready to pick-when the sevin is most effective. So I end up doing nothing at all and loosing tons of good fruit! Any thoughts on this would be welcomed.
BTW…a funny thing that a lot of rural children do in the south is to take the June Bugs and tie a piece of thread onto their leg and let them fly. It is absolutely amazing the amount of thread that a single june bug can unspool and fly around with. A child can hold the spool and the June Bug at the other end will fly in circles way up high, overhead. Funny but true!
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They are called June beetles here. Japanese are smaller with more rust color in the mix. We have them, but they have never attacked any fruit trees in all the orchards I manage. They are more a problem for certain ornamental plants, I think.
I choose some good pears to wrap with nylon bags.
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That is so interesting that they devour my fruit and don’t touch your orchards! Perhaps your customers and/or you pick your fruit before it gets as ripe as I let mine. As I said, they only start to work on my fruit when it is very ripe- always after it gets soft on the tree (the way I like my fruit but I know others may not).
And just like @LarryGene said above, they don’t touch anything except the fruit, whereas the Japanese Beetles eat leaves on a lot of my trees and plants along with the fruit.
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It may just be we don’t have so many. It isn’t one of the pests Cornell talks about in their guidelines for commercial fruit production.
It is only when Jap Beetles are crazy thick that they eat the fruit here.
But yeah. letting fruit get completely soft on the tree invites a lot of difficulty. Here from yellow jackets and birds. Also SWD. You really notice a big difference in keeping fruit on the tree rather than picking it when it starts to soften and letting it ripen indoors for a day?
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I use Garden Tech Sevin (Zeta-Cypermethrin), which is not Carbaryl based. For me, Carbaryl based sprays have not been effective, but the new Garden tech Sevin is. Just my experience.
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The japanese beatles we have here in Michigan eat blossoms,corn silk, any thing that has moisture.
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Today I was walking around my yard in the morning and there were perhaps 10 blue and orange wasps cruising around right above the grass. They flew too fast to take a clear picture. I found out they are Scolia dubia that parasitize Green June beetle and Japanese beetle grubs. Perhaps these are something we should be trying to actively attract to our yards. I did notice that I don’t have many beetles this year compared to in the past, so I’m sure they are helping.
https://extension.psu.edu/blue-winged-wasp-scolia-dubia-is-a-real-asset
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I’ll have to keep an eye out for those wasps. We have quite a smorgasbord here waiting for them.
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Maybe it would work,but if we introduce an insect to a specific area,how long before it becomes a problem,itself?
This is a wasp that’s native to my part of the country so it would just be a matter of planting certain flowers, which the adults visit, to bring them in from other parts of the neighborhood. It isn’t an invasive from what I understand.
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