Knowing How Notorious Are Japanese Beetle

By Betty Baser


For human beings; they appear to be small and harmless and they even good-looking or attractive. But for an equally beautiful and fragile plant life; they are big, they are numerous. Thus they are mean and the very sight of them could be a deadly nightmare.

Japanese beetles are known to be a terror among flowers and crops. Such creature vaguely allude to the mysterious yet highly aesthetic far eastern land itself. However, the damage they can create is similar to any natural calamity that might destroy plants indiscriminately.

For their combination of splendor and ferocity against plants, it would not be unseemly to describe them as the samurai warriors of the inferior exponents of the animal kingdom. They are about 15 millimeters long and 10 millimeters wide. The one noteworthy feature of their appearance is the signature soap bubble brilliance of their exoskeleton.

In Japan, they are every bit benign and undamaging because of the presence of other pests; the natural enemies who have the strength and ferocity to repel their wholesale infestation of crops. However, in United States of America they are a unique type of pests and there is no other warrior insect in this land to stop their advance. For that reason they are a serious threat to 200 known species of plants.

To describe how exactly are they dangerous plants is to imagine a giant robot wreaking havoc in a city, uncoordinated yet still deadly. Japanese beetles excel in brute force and the strength of their numbers. But in the ways of insect aviation, perhaps the graceful butterflies or the smooth wasps can make a joke out of them.

The year 1916 was the prevalent date that Japanese beetles was first discovered in a nursery near Riverton, New Jersey. But other evidences pointed out to how they reach American soil and it was via a cargo ship delivering iris bulbs in years prior to 1912, with some of them thrived with larvae. Their presence in Canada can be traced exactly in the year 1939, where a tourist car from Maine was ferried all the way to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.

Back then nobody ever thought that these insects were destructive. But the following decades proved them to be very harmful that the angry gardeners could very much make allusions of them with the mythical swarm of locusts of Egypt during the Biblical Ten Plagues. There is, however, a way to repel these creatures.

The surest way to destroy them is to destroy their source of strength - reproduction. One way is to spread milk spores around the perimeter where they may likely spawn their larvae, exterminating them during their infancy stage. Another way is through pheromone-bated traps, though the success rate is more of a liability since it attracts more beetles than the traps can handle.

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