Call Residential Commercial. Resources Stink Bugs Home Protection. What Eats Stink Bugs? Stink Bug Eating Habits. What are Brown Marmorated Stink Bugs? Please click here to see any active alerts. The brown marmorated stink bug, Halyomorpha halys , is an invasive pest that is present throughout much of the United States. The species is native to Asia and was introduced into the United States in the mids, possibly stowing away in a shipping container.
The presence of this stink bug is concerning for farmers because it feeds on a large number of high-value crops and ornamental plants in its immature and adult life stages. In the United States, the highest concentrations of brown marmorated stink bugs occur in the mid-Atlantic region, and they have been identified in 38 states and the District of Columbia.
They cause major economic damage to fruit, vegetable, and field crops in the mid-Atlantic region. However, while farmers in other regions of the country are concerned about the presence of the brown marmorated stink bug, they are currently not a significant agricultural pest in most areas outside of the mid-Atlantic region. In addition to plant damage, brown marmorated stink bugs are a nuisance to people because adult stink bugs often seek shelter to overwinter inside houses and other buildings.
While large infestations can be a nuisance, they do not bite people or animals, nor do they damage buildings. When disturbed or squashed, the stink bugs release an unpleasant odor from scent glands on their abdomen. The adult brown marmorated stink bug is shield shaped with brown mottling. It is between 14 and 17 mm long, roughly the size of a U. Its abdominal edges and last two antennal segments have alternating broad light and dark bands.
The same goes for various locations around the country. While your home may have thousands of stink bugs, homes a few states away may experience a lot fewer. The climate during any given year can affect the number of stink bugs that survive and reproduce, causing a slight reduction the following year. Have you been fighting an invasion of these pests this year? We would love to see your pictures! Visit our Facebook page to share them, or ask us any additional questions you may have! Stink Bugs Have Very Few Natural Predators While stink bug eggs and nymphs may be vulnerable to parasitic wasps , adult stink bugs have very few predators to worry about.
Stink Bugs Can Emit Multiple Scents The one thing probably everyone who has encountered a stink bug can agree on is that they…well, stink. Stink Bug Populations Fluctuate By Year and Location You may have noticed that some years stink bugs are all over your home, as well as the news, while other years not so much. Add to Cart. Add to Wish List Add to Compare.
The brown marmorated stinkbug is not like this. For instance, it, too, will eat ash trees. But it will also eat birch trees, juniper trees, cherry trees, tulip trees, maple trees fifteen different kinds, including sugar maples, big-leaf maples, and vine maples , buckeyes, dogwoods, horse chestnuts, black walnuts, myrtles, magnolias, willows, sycamores, hemlocks, elms, and oaks.
That is just a sampling, of just the trees. In other domains, it will eat a lot of things you probably eat, too: broccoli, asparagus, tomatoes, eggplants, okra, chard, cabbage, collards, bell peppers, cucumbers. It will eat pecans and hazelnuts. It will eat hops and grapes.
It will eat apples and pears, raspberries and blackberries, apricots and peaches and nectarines. It will eat, like a medieval princeling, figs and quinces.
So far, scientists have discovered more than two hundred and fifty plants that the brown marmorated stinkbug will consume. Together, those plants represent every major agricultural and horticultural sector of the American economy: vegetables, fruit trees, berries, nuts, ornamental plants, and row crops, including sweet corn, cotton, soybeans, and virtually every other legume.
What makes the brown marmorated stinkbug so impressively omnivorous is also what makes it a bug. Technically speaking, bugs are not synonymous with insects but are a subset of them: those which possess mouthparts that pierce and suck as opposed to, say, caterpillars and termites, whose mouths are built, like ours, to chew.
Like those two infamous insects, the brown marmorated stinkbug presents a serious problem for American crops. In , Tracy Leskey, an entomologist with the U.
Department of Agriculture, formed a task force dedicated to figuring out just how serious—that is, to studying the biology, ecology, and impact of the brown marmorated stinkbug, and to developing environmentally and economically sustainable strategies for managing it. In the years since then, stinkbug populations have simultaneously abated somewhat in their earliest haunts and expanded into countless new places across the country.
Those fluctuations, combined with the sheer range of plants that stinkbugs eat, make it difficult to assess their economic impact. To further complicate matters, growers are not typically required to report losses and—outside of crop-insurance claims, inquiries organized by trade associations, or the rare congressional request—they seldom do so. As a consequence, there are no reliable estimates of over-all stinkbug damage to date. In , federal scientists asked apple growers in the Mid-Atlantic to tally their losses; the resulting sum topped thirty-seven million dollars, in an industry whose annual profit in the region is less than two hundred million.
That year, Pennsylvania peach growers lost almost half their crop to stinkbugs, a fifteen-million-dollar blow, while some in Maryland lost up to a hundred per cent. In New Jersey, which is the fourth-largest peach producer in the nation, losses ranged from sixty to ninety per cent of the harvest.
No one has quantified the total loss to sweet corn, soybeans, tomatoes, bell peppers, and green beans, but no one disputes that it is significant.
And the toll will almost certainly rise as the stinkbug takes up residence in other places. In California, South Carolina, and Georgia, where the majority of American peaches are grown, stinkbugs are a relatively new arrival, and how much damage they will do when and if they reach a critical mass in those places remains to be seen. Out in Oregon and Washington, it has begun feeding on hazelnuts and berries.
Last year, in California, it caused documented damage to the almond crop for the first time. Across the country, vineyards are facing a double threat, because brown marmorated stinkbugs eat both grapes and grapevines. Worse, they tend to migrate to the center of grape clusters late in the season, then get harvested along with them. According to one study, the threshold for detecting a flavor change in grape juice is twenty-five brown marmorated stinkbugs per thirty-five pounds of Concord grapes.
On the plus side, or something, evidence suggests that fermentation makes it somewhat more difficult to notice the taste of crushed stinkbugs in wine. Unlike, say, locusts, which simply raze entire fields, stinkbugs wreak their havoc insidiously. The injury they do to corn, for instance, is invisible until the ear is husked, at which point certain kernels—the ones into which a stinkbug stuck its pointy mouth—will reveal themselves to be sunken and brown, like the teeth of a witch. Similarly, stinkbugs suck the juice out of apples through nearly invisible punctures, leaving the exteriors Edenically enticing; only later, when the empty cells start to collapse, does the fruit begin to darken and dimple.
The resulting scars, known as cat-facing, also appear on peaches, tomatoes, and other fruits. To add insult to injury, the sugary substance weeping from those wounds attracts other noxious insects, including yellow jackets.
Some evidence suggests that this chemical can also cause a rash in humans, especially if it is concentrated through repeated exposure, as happens with harvesters.
Sometimes, though, fruits from stinkbug-heavy areas are rejected by processors for a different reason: excessive pesticide use. All conventional growers use some form of chemical insect control, and, up to a certain level, the residue is deemed fine for human consumption. But growers in stinkbug-affected regions sometimes exceed those levels—because, as it turns out, the brown marmorated stinkbug is exceptionally hard to kill with pesticides. Its relatively long legs keep it perched above the surface of its food, which limits its exposure to pesticide applications.
Similarly, it eats from the interior of plants, where, for obvious reasons, pesticides are not meant to penetrate. Theoretically, it could inhale a fatal chemical through small breathing pores along its abdomen, but so far the only ones that reliably knock it out are broad-spectrum compounds, which farmers prefer not to use, since they also kill beneficial species.
A class of pesticides known as pyrethroids, which are used to control native stinkbugs, initially appeared to work just as well on the brown marmorated kind—until a day or two later, when more than a third of the ostensibly dead bugs rose up, Lazarus-like, and calmly resumed the business of demolition.
But what is not fatal to a brown marmorated stinkbug is terrible for American farms, farmers, ecosystems, and consumers. Those high doses cut back on stinkbug damage, but they were far too time-intensive, chemical-intensive, and expensive to be sustainable.
Since then, somewhat better strategies for coping with the problem have emerged, but, to date, the only force that reliably gets a brown marmorated stinkbug off a food source is one that poses a whole different kind of problem: the urge, at the end of summer, to go inside.
It has, after all, been in existence since long before the advent of human shelters, to say nothing of human beings, and it is perfectly capable of spending the season huddled beneath peeling bark or in the hollow insides of dead trees.
But, given sufficient proximity to artificial structures, it will readily spend the cooler months inside instead. It will come as some relief to homeowners to know that the stinkbug does not pass its time indoors reproducing. Female brown marmorated stinkbugs lay their eggs in the summer—twenty or thirty of them at a time, roughly once a week, for a lifetime average of two hundred and forty eggs.
As indiscriminating in matters reproductive as in matters gastronomic, the stinkbug will lay those eggs on the underside of pretty much any available leaf. When they hatch four or five days later, the nymphs that emerge look something like ladybugs: smallish, roundish, reddish, with little black dashes on their backs.
The nymphs then cycle through five life stages in as many weeks, shedding their skin each time. In as little as two weeks after entering the final phase, they themselves will have reached sexual maturity. Eventually, though, cooler weather arrives, and all those adult stinkbugs begin looking for places to overwinter. Often enough, they simply come in through doorways, around which they tend to congregate in autumn, but they have dozens of other ways of entering: down chimneys, around utility pipes, underneath the flashing on roofs, beneath cracks in the siding, through the vents in air-conditioning units, via imperfectly sealed windows, in the gaps below door sweeps.
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