I'd have to change out the bags on the traps regularly because the dead beetles would start to stink.


Sorry, but when i first saw this i thought about how this would work down in a dirthole. But I hear from neighbors that these traps work very well

Spread milky spores 2 40 lb bags worth. See in a couple years how it works!

Diazinon works great, if you can find some. Farm auctions, thrift shops..When I see I grab it. Just sprayed bag worms and some wasps today.

I hope that milky spore works out for you.

The studies and reports on milky Spore is it takes a couple years to really work and reduce the numbers. First yer is little change then better. it will not get rid of them but helps control them and reduce numbers significantly. I really need to speak with orchards to see what they are doing, my 30 fruit trees have this much damage how do they control it?

We had huge swarms about 5 years back, and tried it all. Best spray was an ortho product that included acemitaprid, the mildest of 3 forms of synthetic nicotine, which is toxic to a lot of bugs. Nicotine would be absorbed into the leaf and was effective for 2 to 3 weeks. Did not wash off. Bugs eat the treated leaf, ingest the nicotine, get sick and die. The plant killed them. Treat what you wanted to save, and let them have the rest. Regrettably, that product was taken off the market. Concern about the bees. Now only available as a restricted use pesticide.

Over time, our numbers have dropped. My take is there is something like that milky spore that is a natural control, but they travel faster in the air than the spore does in the ground, so they outrun it. At least for a few years until it catches up to them.

The traps work to attract them. At best, they may catch half of what shows up, but even that is a lot of bugs. We modified them to fit inverted, cut off milk jugs, tied to tubes that dropped into 5 gallon buckets. Could fill 5 to 7 of those per day. Neighbor caught enough one year he could have filled a dumpster with them. Nasty, oily, stinking mess. Need to be buried.

Only way I would consider traps now is if I had access to good sized body of running water with fish in it. Setup a trap so bugs drop onto water for fish to tear into. Bugs will float downstream and fish can move......so those that are stuffed can go somewhere to sleep it off, and be replaced with fresh meat from downstream. In a hot zone, there would be a river of bugs floating down the river. A gutter flush system. Does not work on an impounded body of water unless it was a massive reservoir. Bugs will overwhelm any lake less than 10 acres. Will cover it with a raft of rotting, smelly, oily bugs.

I keep a spray bottle out in my garden with water and dish soap. I spray Japanese beetles on my grape vine and kills em dead., Not right away but the next day I see em dead on the ground.

Hard to spray 35 fruit trees every day.

As folks have already mentioned, "Seven" once had Carbaryl as the active ingredient. Now it is something else and personally I dont feel that it has as good of a control on Japanese Beetles. We use Carbaryl which you can buy from many of the on-line chemical suppliers, such as Keystone or Do-it-yourself. Carbaryl is what many orchards use as a thinning agent on fruit in the early season. This time of year it will not have that affect on apples. We use Carbaryl on our fruit tree nursery stock and our own production trees. Kills any beetles it comes into contact with and has a good residual. I often just spray the trees that are getting hit. Seems like they like to congregate in mass, again probably a pheremone thing. You can kill a lot of them in short order if you just hit them where you see them and dont worry about spraying every leaf in your orchard.

The beetles have been bad this year, normally the adults are only active for 4-6 weeks. This year I am guessing it was closer to 8 weeks at our place.

The Spotted Lantern Fly that arrived in USA from China is probably worse than japanese beetles.

Skip all the snake oil and cancer chemicals. Hand removal is your best friend, do 15-30 minutes each night and you will be surprised at how fast you crush the population. You will knock out the bigger ones prettt fast, then the small ones and nature will help you with the rest. Works for grasshoppers too, last year they completely took out all the leaves on both figs, and apple. This year 15-30 minutes of hand removal each day reduced the population by 90%, figs are good, apples are good.

Just in case anyone is curious, if you hand catch a pile of them and feed them to your large Central American cichlids, it will plug the filter up with green glitter.

Not feasible when you have hundreds of acres of grapes or apples. Heck you couldn't do it with one acre. 660 vines in an acre here

@ Turtledale, Understand that requires a bit more thought. Im still going to go with physical removal, likely a suction device, net system or something along those lines. We do it at night here with the light that attracts them, but I would need a little bit longer to think it through.

Serious question. Have you ever observed a swarm of Japanese beetles? Do you understand that they are excellent fliers and do not wish to be captured by any means. Even if there were just a few, have you been able to capture even one of them.
In another life as a horticulturist, I was tasked to protect trees and shrubs from these devastating insects. The only method which reduced the damage was timely application of Sevin which contained carbaryl, with a spread/sticker to prevent it from being washed off by the daily afternoon showers prevalent at that time of year. The carbaryl kills them on contact and also killed any that ate some of the leaves very rapidly before they get their fill.

The invasive spotted lantern fly might be worse than the japanese beetle

With the way Japanese beetles are I don't even know if it's worth planting birch trees

July 1 spray Sevin.

How does a person safely spray herbicides on foliage above their head?