The Arrival

I turned the corner last night, July 5, 2019, and there, right there on the top of virginally white 'Blanc Double de Coubert' in full-on public display, fornicating, yes FORNICATING, in flagrante delicto, caught red-handed (or, in this case, green-bodied) in naked embrace, were the first of the Japanese Beetles to invade my garden this year.  Immodest, immoral, deplorable and disgusting Japanese Beetles!

All right, all right.  My indignation is false, my outrage is fake, although this Japanese Beetle sightings is most certainly not "fake news."  I've actually been expecting them, waiting and watchful, forewarned and forearmed.  In point of fact, while I'm spilling the beans, these weren't the first Japanese Beetles that I saw yesterday evening.  I had already found one a few moments earlier on 'Fru Dagmar Hastrup', cornered it, captured it, and crushed it under my sole.  On the first day, the total casualty count for the Japanese Beetle army at my hands was 6; the pair above on 'Blanc', the pair below on 'Applejack', the single stag male on 'Fru Dagmar Hastrup' and another single male on a second 'Applejack'. 

They are right on time, these horrible hordes.  Based on a search of my blog, from the very first time I spotted one in my garden, 7/7/2013, to the beginning of last year's seasonal foray on 7/1/2018, they've never been earlier than July 1st, nor later than July 7th, with the exception of the fabled beetle-less summer of 2016.  My blog is full of beetles, and I noticed tonight that if you click on the search box at the right and type in "beetles", I've accumulated almost a dozen musings on these hard-bodied trespassers.  Go ahead, I promise it is an entertaining side-path through the blog.

Sore from recent marathon weedings of the garden, nursing what I suspect is my first ever episode of trochanteric bursitis, and in no mood to trifle with more garden interlopers after the earlier spring invasion of rose slugs, I've chosen the nuclear option this year.  Full-on, no-prisoners-taken, garden-wide thermonuclear war in my garden, insecticide at 50 paces, and may the human win.  My sole concession to the less onerous garden critters was to spray as early in the morning as possible so as to spare as many bumblebees as I could, but I'm in no mood this year to stand on the ethical high ground and spend every night and morning searching the garden by hand to interrupt and dispatch Japanese beetle couples in the process of making more Japanese beetles.  So this year, I'll spare myself the bursa-inflaming activity and spare you the daily body count, and I will simply report any spotted survivors here later.  To my fellow gardeners, ye of beetle-inflicted pain, the skirmishes have begun again.  Good hunting, my friends.

The Eight Ex-Beetles

ProfessorRoush is NOT, of course, referring to a mythical reunion of Paul, Ringo, George, and any ex-band members who may exist, because if I was, I would have spelled the noun of the title as "Beatles."  Instead, I'm obviously referring to to the barely-visible rear end of the demonic chitinous lout on the lower right side of the white flower here (and not the other long-snouted insect to the left).  Do you see the hiney of the Japanese Beetle in the lower left of the flower?  Look closer.  Click on it to blow up the photo if you need to.  See the bristling patches of white hair along the edges of its abdomen?




I was simultaneously amused and alarmed eight days ago, when, as I visited a local commercial horticultural facility, I overheard a gardening couple asking a store clerk what they could buy to kill Japanese Beetles.  Thus alerted that the blankety-blank beetle season was upon us, I vowed to be ever-diligent over the next few days, and, sure enough, on July 1st I found the first Japanese Beetles of 2018 on 'Snow Pavement', 'Fru Dagmar Hastrup', 'Polareis', and, of course, 'Blanc Double de Coubert'.  The first two victims can be seen at the left, taken moments before I squished them into beetle pulp.  In fact, I found and squished eight beetles on that first evening.  The Ex-Beetles of my garden.





In another more typical picture of the damage that Japanese Beetles can cause to a beautiful bloom, I give you the traumatized bloom of 'Earth Song' that I discovered this morning, seen in the photo at right complete with the Japanese Beetle hiding in the center of the flower (please ignore the Melyrid at the bottom.  I see the latter insects all the time and they don't hurt the flowers).  By the morning of the second day of the 2018 invasion, my total kill is now 14 squished beetles.  Unfortunately, it should have been 15 squished beetles (one male escaped this morning by leaping off the edging brick before I could lower my foot in his direction).

With a little research however, I just tonight discovered that, despite my vaunted prowess as a Japanese Beetle Terminator (Hasta la vista, beetles!), I'm winning a small tactical skirmish, but losing the strategic war.  As if Rose Rosette Disease and Japanese Beetles don't cause enough damage in my garden, the long-nosed brown insect to the left in the first picture above is NOT a harmless flower beetle.  The Internet informs me that it is a Rose Curculio Weevil (Merhynchites bicolor), another flower-eater and civilization destroyer sent to my garden by the demons of hell.  I should be just as diligent handpicking these little snouted monsters as I am the Japanese Beetles, and yet I knew not of their existence prior to this.  It seems to not be enough that I have one beetle enemy, the crunchy critters  have now enlisted allies.  Saints preserve my roses!

I'm Ticked Off

Hey, now this isn't fair.  This entire summer, the tick-averse Mrs. ProfessorRoush has been forcing me to disrobe in the laundry room immediately upon entering the back door and to submit to a humiliating tick check which involves minute inspection of every inch of my tender pink skin.  While that might sound like the start of a fun afternoon to some of you, you can trust me when I say that the only intimate contact it initiates is her scratching at every suspicious skin blemish to assure that some creepy little legs don't appear at the edges.  On most occasions, satisfied that I'm not harboring a pregnant momma tick which could birth-start a tick Armageddon in the house, she banishes me immediately to the shower, merely bleeding from a few overzealous scratch marks, while she lifts my clothes with a stick and washes them in scalding water.

On two previous occasions Mrs. ProfessorRoush did find and remove ticks, justifying her careful diligence.  There were also two other instances when I found and removed small ticks on my own due to her understandable but unconscionable unwillingness to diligently examine certain skin expanses.  The past few weeks, however, I had returned tickless and we had dropped our guard, sure that tick season was over.  Heck, I had even scabbed over the previous tick-created welts that I received from each bite.  I seem to have developed a type II sensitivity to tick bites this year and I form a nice hive at each bite, even when the tick hasn't been attached long.


Today, when I was driven in from a good day of gardening by the July heat, I noticed that my shoulder was itching and, in the mirror on the way to the shower, saw a small speck in the center of a red circle that appeared different from my normal freckles.  Primarily, it looked different because it was RAISED.

There were a few lost moments of reaction while Mrs. ProfessorRoush located her reading glasses.  I've found that older wives are constantly wearing the wrong glasses for the activity at hand and I would estimate that they spend approximately 25% of their lives looking for the alternate pair.   Once she could see the speck closer, she still wasn't sure that it was a tick.  She and I were both willing, however, to play it safe and have her grab this possible part of me with the tweezers and rip it off.  I braced myself for the fear that my farsighted wife would pluck a piece of ProfessorRoush rather than an invasive arachnid, but the "speck" was removed without any trauma other than a raised heart rate and some minor palpitations.  Under a magnifying glass that I've had since I was a child (a side benefit of living a long life interested in the sciences) we discovered that it was, in fact, a tick, the same minuscule invader pictured above one a paper towel next to a 22 gauge hypodermic needle.

There are, it seems, Darwinistic advantages to having a little tick hypersensitivity, even though this episode will likely initiate another series of strip tease inspections by the missus.  If I hadn't started itching, this little guy could have feasted for a few days on my fair skin.  Instead, thankfully, he was encased in this paper towel and flushed down where the sun doesn't shine.  Tough luck, buddy.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetle....

No!  I won't finish saying it.  In the 1988 Tim Burton film, Beetlejuice, the obnoxious ghost perfectly played by Michael Keaton, appears after the third repetition of his name.  So, I won't even think of Japanese Beetles lest I call them forth.

Opps.  Too late.  I found this little demon pictured in the photo above on July 4th, hiding in 'Golden Showers' at the Manhattan City Park Rose garden.  I've been expecting them to arrive soon, because I found my first last year on July 7th.  I didn't find any on July 4th this year at the KSU Rose Garden or on my own roses.  And, believe me, I looked carefully.

However, I had previously put some Japanese Beetle traps out at home, and inspecting this one, a Rescue! Trap, on July 6th, I found three males and a female, all of which I subsequently and thoroughly smashed to beetle pulp.  This trap was sent to me last year as a trial by a marketing agent for the Rescue! company and I believe it is a superior trap.   If you want to purchase one, it is currently $8.34 on Amazon.com.   I particularly like the strength and thickness of the collecting bag and the zipper closure at the bottom which lets the bag be emptied and inventoried as often as I like.  Those of you who have ever smelled the eventual stench of a "nonemptyable" trap know exactly what I'm talking about.  A competitor's system in a different area of my garden hasn't captured any beetles yet, but I don't know if that means that the Rescue! trap is also simply better at attracting the beetles or if it is just positional coincidence.  I'll keep you posted.

Anyway, I've raised the drawbridge, stationed lookouts at observation points around the ramparts, and readied the cannons. And, thanks to this trap, there are at least three male and one female Japanese beetles who won't be fornicating on my roses or producing any future beetles in this season.

Secret Assassins

The website "Garden Adventures" runs a weekly creature feature that I learned about from Toni's Signature Gardens blog, so I just had to add a plug for my own candidate for Little Shop of Horrors.  The picture below was taken last weekend while I was on my Bluebird Trail, cleaning out the boxes for winter.  Near one of the nestboxes, sitting on the top rail of an iron fence and presumably soaking up the sunshine to warm it and start the day, was this 1.5 inch long monster with an iridescent back and a central ridge of spikes.  Since I'm not one to collect insects, nor to touch them without provocation, I hoped that the picture would suffice for an entomologist to identify it.

This spiked creature was subsequently identified for me by a KSU Entomologist as a Wheel Bug, Arilus cristatus, the only member of its genus and a formidable predator of soft-bellied insects, particularly caterpillars and pests such as Japanese beetles.  It is considered a beneficial insect, although it has also been noted to feed on other beneficials such as honey bees and lady beetles. The larger females kill and eat the male after copulation, similar to the fabled Black Widow spider.  One of the largest terrestial North American bugs, it pierces its prey with a sharp beak and injects saliva to dissolve the soft tissues from the inside-out, first immobilizing and then killing the victim in less than 30 seconds. My reticence to touch it was wise as I've learned it can inflict a very painful bite on people, described as being worse than a hornet's sting, and it will create a wound that may take months to heal and often leaves a scar.  For such a vicious bug, one web site noted that in captivity, it quickly becomes accustomed to being handled, but I, for one, am not contemplating keeping one as a pet.

Do you ever wonder, with such a killer bite, why this bug needs all the scary appendages, the ridged back spine and the spikes on top and in the middle?  This thing is right out of the movie Aliens, only needing a wee Sigorney Weaver to make it fit the part.  Does an insect predator really need to advertise that it is a predator?  Isn't that counterproductive to obtaining dinner?  I would have predicted that it would make more sense for predators to look like lambs and lambs to look scary, but I guess it doesn't work that way in the bug world.