Not sure if any of you deal with these. Clay colored leaf beetle. Anomoea laticlavia
https://bugguide.net/node/view/10195
They are the most serious pest on young persimmon around here and can devastate leaves on small trees or new growth on grafted trees. They just showed up on the persimmon for this year. I saw the first ones yesterday, June 19. Today I saw quite a few more so they are coming on. I forget how long they last – maybe a couple of weeks, but I can’t recall. They seem to prefer honeylocust, so more of them will end up on that. I haven’t sprayed for them, and they are fairly easy to manage on very small persimmon if I’m around each day, so I went around this evening and hand grabbed the ones on the young persimmon and squashed them. I got a few off of tender growth on grafted trees.
We have a charlie brown honeylocust (my name for it) in the yard that weeps and isn’t too tall yet. I’ve thought about planting a honeylocust a slight distance away from our main planting of persimmon to see if that would keep the majority away from the persimmon. Not sure if that would be good, or just draw them in worse. When it’s cooler in the morning, they don’t move as quickly and will usually drop straight down when disturbed. I’ll either put a hand under a leaf and a beetle will fall down (in the case of lower numbers), or when they get thick, as is often the case with the locust tree, I’ll put a bucket with a bit of water under the branches and get them to fall into the water for disposal.
