Brown Marmorated Stink Bugs Crawling Out This Very Instant

The much-maligned, with good reason, brown marmorated stink bugs crawled into your home last fall and now that it’s spring, the super stinky bugs are emerging. They don’t sting or bite, but mercy, as their name implies, oooh that smell when they’re stomped on or smashed.

Stink bugs don’t belong here — they hitchhiked into the United States, likely in shipping containers from China, Japan and Korea — and though they won’t hurt you, they’re certainly not harmless to the fruits, vegetables and ornamental plants they decimate with their, egads, piercing and sucking mouthparts.

No wonder agricultural states have declared war on stink bugs. In Michigan, for example, the state extension service has established a Stink Bug SWAT Team — read that in the law enforcement sense of the word, not in the sense you should actually swat them — to keep track of their whereabouts. Stink bugs damaged Michigan’s prized apple crop last year.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is investigating whether some other Asian insect can be introduced as a natural predator — say the Trissolcus wasp, which has worked to control stink bugs in their homeland — but wants to make sure doing so won’t imperil other species. This is good.

Remember that time a plague of tree-climbing aphids began decimating pecan orchards in the southeastern United States and federal biologists released the multicolored Asian lady beetle to devour them? You may not. It was in the 1970s. But the important lesson is that though they did a fine job wiping out the aphids, the ravenous insects gobbled up so many aphids that native ladybugs starved or were, shudder, eaten alive by the Asian lady beetles and their wicked cousins, seven-spotted ladybugs.

So integrated pest management to control stink bugs is a delicate process. For now, it’s on you to control them. What should you do?

Pest-control companies offer an array of insecticides to control stink bugs before they start chomping away at your ornamentals and other plants with their — again, yikes! — piercing, sucking mouthparts. But if you’re looking for organic stink bug solutions, you may want to resort to trickery with sacrificial plants that can be destroyed once the stink bugs invade. Plant them early, before your regular garden crops to lure them.

Stink bugs are highly mobile, so you’ll want to plant the trap crops close to the plants you want to protect, yet far enough away, Anne Nielsen, a fruit entomology extension specialist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, told Rodale’s Organic Solutions.

Sadly, she acknowledged, “we don’t yet know what the ideal distance is.”

Stink bugs aren’t particularly picky eaters, but they do like crops like sweet corn, peppers, tomatoes, grapes, raspberries, peaches and, as Michigan farmers learned, apples.

Another option is to predators like ants, ladybird beetles and some lacewings, all of which prey on stink-bug egg masses, Nielsen recommends. To do that, plant sunflowers and French marigolds.

Or you my want to invest in commercially available stink-bug traps, which you should put out right out now for peak effectiveness. The traps should be placed in trees and bushes, where emerging stink bugs head to mate. They’ll climb in, and die.

And remember, stink bugs will be among five insects invading your home in the fall, so while you’re spending time outside in the months to come, use a good-quality silicone or silicone-latex caulk to seal cracks around windows, doors, siding, utility pipes, behind chimneys, and beneath the wood fascia and other openings. Be sure to repair damaged screens as well.

More information is found at stopbmsb.org.

Photo by Oregon State University via Flickr Commons