Alien Invaders

Have you seen these in your yard or on the golf course this
summer?



The Japanese Beetle is an attractive insect, but a destructive one. Look what they've done to the leaves of one of my raspberry plants.



The beetle has been in the US since the early 1900s, but occurs primarily east of the Mississippi River in growing numbers.  We seem to have a particularly heavy infestation in the Twin Cities this summer.  Larva overwinter as pupae in the lawn soil, emerge as adults in the spring, mate on various sorts of plants as they eat through its leaves, lay their eggs in your lawn, and the larva grow up feeding on grass roots until they enter a suspended state of metabolism during winter cold weather.   Plants the adults prefer to munch while finding a mate include roses and red raspberries, dahlias, hollyhocks, and hibiscus, and various trees such as Japanese maple (naturally), Norway maple, apple, and Crepe Myrtle, as well as soybeans.  They particularly like fragrant roses; one of my white roses had so many beetles chomping away inside the petals, it looked like it was animated by Harry Potter magic.



How do you get rid of them?  In Japan, they are controlled by their natural predators and parasites, but in the U.S., unless there are huge infestations with risk of crop damage, affected plants are usually not treated.  To read more about its control, go here:

It is also suggested that the best control is to use landscape plants that don’t attract the beetles, like red maple, boxwood, redbud, dogwood, burning bush (Euonymus), juniper, spruce, and pine or flowering perennials like ageraturm, columbine, begonia, lily of the valley, coreopsis, larkspur, foxglove, and hosta.