New topic: Japanese beetles, trap or not trap? I’ve always read that traps drew more JBs than they killed, but this summer, there were way more JBs than I could pick. They were up in the peach tree just as the peaches ripened, orgying in the stem basin, so I lost half the peaches.
I was at a place that had a full trap of beetles and no beetles or damage in a rose of sharon tree, so maybe the traps work after all.
Too many row feet, too many tall plantings, two gardens - no way can I pick. And I won’t use a systemic insecticide either, so it’s traps or put up with the damage.
Get a bowl of water and knock or toss the JB’s into the water. They’ll drown in a few seconds. You can add a drop of dish washing liquid if you’d like. Their body structure sticks their face under water. It’s quick and easy, no nasty chemicals or stinky bag traps.
We used traps for our Rosa Rugosa. The beetles were devouring it. It seemed to work-trapped lots of critters, and comparatively speaking, hardly any on the plant.
Worth a try, I’d say.
The times I've used traps, they got full fast the first few days, then the local wildlife would notice the nice, tasty, bag-o-protein and bite a hole in the bottom. Suddenly we had the attracting part but not the killing part. Which is probably what's happening with a lot of people, sometimes the hole can be hard to spot. I sometimes watched the JBs circling through the traps, in the top, out the bottom, and back again.
Four-o-clock flowers are supposed to be very tasty to JBs, but they're also toxic. The beetles will actually eat themselves to death. Plant lots, and protect them when they're small. The times I tried this it worked a little too well, and the flowers got eaten before they were big enough to handle it.
If you're allowed to keep chickens, use the scent lure from the traps, but funnel the bugs to where the birds can get to them. They love them. I know at least one person who has made a “beetle dispenser” this way.