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I am all for staying away from chemicals ... however ... any suggestions for Japanese Beatles? They invade my garden by their millions each year due to the fact that my neighbor has a Chinese Elm hedge which they absolutely adore. Thanks
Every morning I go out with a small berry-bucket with about 2" of water made soapy with a small squirt of dishwashing liquid soap. I move it under the beetles and bring my hand down from the top over them, and they drop to get away early in the morning and in the evening. In the sunny, hot days, they just fly away.
Once they drop into the soapy water, they die quickly. After a year or two of doing this, you'll notice the numbers decrease very significantly.
your best bet is to spray with nematodes. normally, you would spray the ground to treat for things like grubs. then you water well for the next three days. the nematodes flow through the ground with the water. if however, you get any on plants, the critters on them, will get infected. (ie. butterflies on a butterfly bush) ... so, if you spray with nematodes, make sure you cover the treated plants for a few days to keep pollinators safe (i don't know if birds would be bothered). if there is no water for the nematodes, they will all die in a couple of days. any good garden shop or feed store will carry them. they are usually packaged on sponges, three sponges to a box.
i would be getting permission to spray there trees as well, if they don't.
cheers
we had a Japanese beetle problem in Kentucky. It went on and on and on for close to 20 years. The horticulturist in the newspapers and television first advised us of traps. But that just drew them in from the surrounding fields and other people's yards and no trap was big enough, and you could not empty them fast enough. The horticulturistis all said well then use sevin dust. There were so many of them that the sevin dust looked and acted like confectionary sugar to them. Some people were being advised to spray on their yards nematodes for the Japanese grubs before they emerged as beetles, but lets face it we were going to have to spray the entire fields, and woods around us to get rid of them. The horticulturists finally threw up their hands and told every one to cut anything that was red or sort of red down, plums, crab apples, and forget those roses too.
Then one summer it was very humid, and it rained a lot. One of those rains washed all the dead beetles down our water spouts. A few days later there was the stink like some huge rotting dead something. It was not huge it was just the great number of dead beatles.
That was the end of 20 years of of us just being choked with Japanese beatles! They have never been that bad since. This was not a small area, it was all of central and eastern Ky. It is like some plague of Egypt being lifted. Thank God, they are gone or at least now dimished to seeing only a few around a rose bush like normal insects.
