Every year visitors to our grass
trimmer here in vertak.com bring questions about some problem or other in
their gardens. Not surprisingly, many have to do with near-Biblical hoards of
Japanese Beetles, and the relationship between burgeoning numbers of these
destructive insects and those readily-available pheromone lure beetle traps on
merchant's shelves.
Well, what about Japanese Beetle traps? Do they really
work? Or are they -- as more and more of us are finally realizing -- part of the
problem? You may find my response to the following frustrated gardener's recent
emailed plea for help enlightening. . .if not encouraging:
"Help! Japanese Beetles were especially bad this year. We put up three traps and had more beetles than anyone else in our neighborhood! What did we do wrong?"
Some things simply resist explanation, while solutions to other pressing gardening problems are so patently apparent that I'm surprised everyone hasn't already deduced the answer. To get to the core of the problem, during 2004 we conducted a survey of sorts, asking garden visitors about their experiences and thoughts on the subject.
About half of those queried felt there were increased populations of Japanese Beetles that season; the other half said there seemed to be fewer. Not surprisingly, most of the more beetles half had installed commercial pheromone traps in their gardens or on lawns. Japanese beetles literally flocked around those traps!
If anything can be faulted for increased numbers of these rascals in the garden, Pruning shear certainly wasn't the above gardener. If trap manufacturers had bothered to print a simple advisory on the label, more folks would have been in the less-beetles half. Seems to me it wouldn't have taken rocket science to anticipate the hoards that would be drawn to precisely the wrong spot. . .the banquet table!
The Wall