Got my UV flashlight yesterday & went hornworm hunting last evening. Everything looks so very weird in the UV light - leaves all purple, some bits of blue. Anyway, hornworms show up as pretty “white” in the light - found 3! Two were small-medium size & one was a medium-large. I would not have found the 2 smaller ones without the light - probably not the larger one either. I’ll be back out tonight to look around again.
If they have white things sticking out of them, leave them be. That would be Trichogramma wasps which parasitize the hornworms.
About halfway down in this link, it will show a picture of what that looks like.
https://www.tomatobible.com/tomato-hornworms/
If you leave them be, the hornworms will die and the wasps will hatch and go after more. It’s a good natural way to control them.
Some of my tomatoes showed hornworm damage so tonight I need to go out and hunt for them. I have so many other bugs to deal with that I have a small plastic bucket with water and Dawn for drowning anything I find in it. Then it goes into the fire pit for a bonfire later.
Those black lights are way cool.
That UV light is a great trick! None spotted in my garden, yet.
I think Beau has a UV setting on one of his coon hunting hardhats - I will ask him, just in case. He’d be totally into ‘hunting’ hornworms for me!
I can ‘Tom Sawyer’ that man into doing a lot of tasks I don’t want to do. ;)