Continuing from Friday…
According to reports from the IPM Insights on August 27, 2012, working with a team of Scientists at the Appalachian Fruit Research Station in West Virginia, the team spent time in the winter of 2012 searching the forests in Maryland and West Virginia for stink bug gathering sites. The team searched for the pests in dead trees that are both fallen and standing, and leaf litter on the ground. Their work was not futile as they found “26 aggregations of the brown marmorated stink bug, a 3% find rate.”
Further research from the scientific team yielded even better results. The IPM Insights reported that “the researchers developed a more specific profile of BMSB’s preferred winter setting: large, dry, dead standing trees, more than 60 cm in circumference, particularly oak and locust, with porous dead tissue and peeling bark that gives BMSB a place into which to crawl. Lee and his team then returned to the woods, targeting only trees that matched their profile.
This time, they found BMSB in 33% of trees, a finding that seems to confirm a BMSB preference for this winter refuge.” This information is exceptionally important as it will give scientists inside knowledge as to where to find the pests when they are hiding in mass quantity and most vulnerable to eradication solutions. Although the research is primarily directed towards the benefit of agricultural areas, reducing the amount of the brown marmorated stink bug in any area is also beneficial to homeowners as it will cut down on their migration and hopefully their invasion into homes in New Jersey as well as other areas of the United States.
In addition to these significant findings, canines are now being trained to hunt down the brown marmorated stink bugs. Bed bug sniffing dogs have been quite successful in hunting down infestations of bed bugs in homes and businesses, so it seems logical that sniffer dogs will be successful in finding these pests and the pungent smell that they emit.