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Spotted beebalm, scarlet beebalm, and wild bergamot, these members of the Monarda clan are some of my absolute favorite perennial landscape plants. Why? By providing rich nectar rewards, these delightful natives are magnets for an astounding array of beneficial animals ranging from hummingbirds and gold finches to butterflies, bumble bees, hover flies, and myriad predatory and parasitic wasps. I have watched the summer parade of interesting and beautiful insects visiting Monardas for hours over a cup of coffee on sunny summer mornings.

But every year, there is foul-play afoot in my flower beds. Sometime in the latter days of May and early days of June, just as the bergamot is prepping to bloom, developing flower buds and their attendant sepals become shredded and riddled with holes. Close examination of the buds reveal tiny black pellets lodged in the nooks and crannies of the flower heads. Now, to bug geeks, tiny black pellets usually are a sign of insect activity. Said pellets are actually the excrement, a.k.a. frass, of caterpillars feeding within the flower buds. Some further poking around the nascent blossoms revealed small creamy colored caterpillars hiding in the axils of sepals and at the bases of florets. While identification of small caterpillars presents a challenge even to seasoned entomologists, identification of adult moths and butterflies is way easier. A more extensive search of the bergamot patch revealed a rather pretty raspberry pyrausta moth, a member of the crambid moth clan. Crambid moths, also known as snout moths, are named for the elongated mouthparts protruding from the front of their head. Many bore into the stems of grasses and other monocots and some, such as the European corn borer and sod webworm, are serious agricultural and lawn pests. Just one or a few of these caterpillars feeding within a developing flower bud are sufficient to all but ruin its floral display.

Here is the dilemma. For many herbivores in my landscape, the death sentence is commuted under a live-and-let-live policy with the belief that even pests will become food for other insects or birds higher in the food web. However, in the case of the raspberry pyrausta, lack of intervention translates into few or no blossoms on Monardas and few or no resources for pollinators, predators, and parasitoids dependent on nectar and pollen for their activity and survival. So, in this case the caterpillars gotta go to make way for the beneficial insects. Ridding the blossoms of caterpillars is fairly easy to do. As flower heads begin to form in late spring and early summer watch out for holes in leaves, feeding damage to developing florets, and small black frass pellets accumulating in the axils of leaves and sepals. Carefully search the flower head and when you locate the caterpillar, simply crush it. If you don’t like touching insects, don a pair of rubber gloves and do the deed. Mechanical destruction of the pest is foolproof and works well in small patches.

While some blossoms on my bergamot look fine, many are ravaged. This culprit is a small caterpillar feeding in the flower head. Chewed florets, holes in leaves, silk, and pellets of frass are telltale signs of the caterpillar. Regular inspections and crushing caterpillars when you find them will help keep your blossoms looking fine.

For larger plantings, you could consider using an insecticide listed by the Organic Materials Review Institute (OMRI) for controlling caterpillars. These insecticides have been reviewed by scientists and approved for use in the production of organic food crops. Two of my favorites contain the active ingredient Bacillus thuringiensis kurstaki (Btk) or spinosad. Btk is derived from a common soil microbe and it works well on many species of caterpillars. If you grow milkweeds as a source of food for monarch caterpillars in your flower beds, take care not to spray Btk on your milkweed lest you poison any resident monarch larvae. Some brands of spinosad will also carry the OMRI stamp of approval and they work well on caterpillars. Spinosad is also a product of a soil microbe. This molecule attacks the nervous system of insects. But be careful with spinosad, as it is highly toxic to bees. If other plants in your garden are in bloom or are about to bloom avoid drift that might contact and harm charismatic pollinators. Use the same caution with Monarda. The pyrausta will be present in the early formation of flower buds but as florets form and mature, avoid using spinosad as bloom time approaches and certainly when flowers are in bloom. Many snout moths have multiple generations and in my experience the raspberry pyrausta is no exception. I have crushed several crops of caterpillars in the flower buds and just the other day, a few more adult moths dared to flit around my flower bed.

For a bug geek, watching the sunrise on a warm summer morning while sipping some coffee and squashing some caterpillars is not a bad way to start the day.  

Acknowledgements

We thank Dr. Shrewsbury for providing the inspiration for this episode as well as snapping some photos and crushing caterpillars to save the monardas from marauding caterpillars.

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This article appeared first on Catseye Pest

This article appeared first on Catseye Pest

One of the upsides of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is a notable increase of folks enjoying time outdoors walking, cycling, and visiting at social distances along neighborhood streets. One steamy morning last week as I circled the block, I noticed surprising numbers of rather large bees buzzing about mailboxes along the streets. Bees interested in postal delivery? A closer look told the tale. Let’s start with the mailbox. If your mailbox is like mine, it rests atop a wooden post some four feet or so above the ground. Over the years the post supporting my mailbox has become home to an occasional colony of carpenter bees. Year after year sometime in May the carpenter bees reliably return to the mailbox post. Males perform aerial battles for dominance of the mail box territory and their mates chew perfectly round holes in the mailbox post, entrances to brood chambers for their young. But in July, as carpenter bee activity wanes, activity around the mailbox post is supplanted by another type of bee. The aerial acrobats now performing near mailboxes are giant resin bees, exotic colonists from Asia first reported in the United States in North Carolina in 1994. In addition to their native Asian range that includes China, Japan, and South Korea, giant resin bees have been discovered in Italy, France, and Switzerland in Europe. In North America they range from Canada to Alabama in most states east of the Mississippi and have been reported in almost all counties in Maryland.  

Giant resin bees belong to a family of solitary bees known as Megachilidae and are kin to mason bees and leaf cutter bees we met in previous episodes. Like mason bees, each female bee is reproductively active and therefore dissimilar to social bees like honey bees and bumble bees that have a queen. Their presence near a mailbox post riddled with carpenter bee galleries is no mystery. Despite sporting powerful jaws, the potency of which I discovered after handling one, giant resin bees do not excavate galleries in wood. Their sharp jaws are simply not strong enough to do so. Instead, they rely on existing galleries to create a home for their brood. Abandoned galleries of carpenter bees provide perfect chambers to colonize and raise their young. While male giant resin bees spend time defending territories and chasing each other about, female bees gather plant resins to line the inside of the gallery. After each chamber is properly prepared, females collect pollen on fine hairs called scopa on the undersides of their abdomens, return to their galleries, and create pollen balls inside the brood chamber. Eggs are laid on the pollen balls, which serve as the food source for the developing larvae.

On my neighbor’s mailbox post a male giant resin bee arrives to stand guard. When not performing aerial antics, male giant resin bees can be found fanning their wings around co-opted carpenter bee galleries. Does he await the appearance of a lovely lady bee while shooing away other potential suitors?

The ecological impact of these nonnative bees is still largely unknown. They have been observed foraging on several imported plants from their native range including golden rain tree, Koelreuteria paniculata, glossy privet, Ligustrum lucidum, kudzu, Pueraria lobata, and Japanese pagoda tree, Sophora japonica. There is some concern that they may commandeer nesting sites of our native carpenter bees, but the true magnitude of this effect is still unknown. With the abundance of human made habitat for carpenter bees, there may be enough wood to go around for all wood-nesting bees. Who knows? Nonetheless, these goliaths of the solitary bee world are here to stay and they make an interesting study on a walk around the block on a warm summer morning.  

Acknowledgements 

We thank our gracious neighbors who allowed us to photograph giant resin bees on their mailbox post early one morning and our friends at Woodend Sanctuary for allowing us to film their giant resin bees. The interesting article “Invasive Megachile sculpturalis in Upstate New York” by Robert G. Laport and Robert L. Minckley was consulted in preparation of this episode.  Bee guru Sam Droege provided the fantastic image of a female giant resin bee featured in this episode.

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Through no fault of their own, white-tailed deer are a major pest of ornamental plants in our suburban and rural landscapes. It is estimated that in the US, more than 20 million deer share the land with us. When I see a dozen or so bedding down in my backyard, I think most of these rascals live in Columbia, Maryland. Long gone are the wild predators, mountain lions and wolves, that once kept burgeoning deer populations in check. Encroachment of human development on natural habitats put deer in contact with humans and their gardens. The grazing pressure of deer in my neighborhood has defeated all attempts at growing unprotected vegetables. During the winter, my pansies were pillaged and my once glorious azaleas were reduced to skeletal pickets of denuded branches presenting a few sad blossoms this spring. Small saplings bear the scars and deformities dealt by young bucks removing velvet from their antlers. The growing tips of my hopeful sunflowers and blueberries are but a memory. With all the undesirable changes deer bring to the suburban landscape, what is the upside of this pariah?

One answer to this question appears in the final resting place of recently expired deer, the deerly departed so to speak. Several years ago while walking a field not far from a roadway traversing Etchison, Maryland, I noticed the earthly remains of a white-tailed deer resting in the tall grass, no doubt the unfortunate participant in an encounter with a vehicle on the nearby road. Upon closer inspection, I discovered a well-developed ecosystem of necrophagous insects making the most of the decaying bounty provided by the deer in its final act. Among the most prominent and abundant of these flesh eaters was Oiceoptoma noveboracense, commonly known as the margined carrion beetle. Along with flies and other species of beetles, carrion beetles provide an important ecosystem service by recycling the protein found in the flesh of dead animals. Carrion beetles are not usually the first to arrive at the carcass of a dead thing. This honor belongs to blow flies which often discover a body within minutes of its demise. Once colonized by blow flies, a dead animal will soon be writhing with maggots of flesh-eating flies. Maggots are an important source of food for adult carrion beetles. As they graze on the fleshy bounty, adult beetles occasionally deposit eggs in the soil near the carcass. Eggs soon hatch into larvae, youthful champions at consuming shreds of protein-rich flesh and internal organs of the deceased. By the time I happened across the deer, hundreds of beetle larvae were enjoying sustenance and shelter from the helpful deer.

In a previous episode we met bess beetles, one of the champion insect recyclers of wood. But in the wild more than wood is available for repurposing. Dead animals play an important role in food webs as rich sources of nutrients for the necrophagous species, eaters of the dead. Watch how a bountiful supply of deceased white-tailed deer reenters food webs with the assistance of flesh-eating carrion beetles.

A more recent discovery of a disarticulated deer along a bike trail revealed the carrion beetle’s dogged ability to remove even the last shreds of meat from a bone. After feeding as larvae and molting several times, larvae move to the soil to pupate. A bit later in summer, fresh adults will emerge from the soil and await the arrival of more dead animals ready for recycling. Due to their affinity for certain types of habitats, their patterns of seasonal appearance, and their geographic distribution, Oiceoptoma beetles can be useful in helping crime scene investigators solve homicides. Uplifting encounters with deceased white-tailed deer provided some succor to the ill will engendered by these habitat destroying herbivores. To bring more crime solving, flesh recycling beetles into the world is surely a noble final deed for the oft maligned white-tailed deer. 

References

Many thanks go to Kelly for allowing me to wander his fields and to Dr. Shrewsbury, who spotted the deer skull along the Western Maryland Rail Trail, for inspiring this episode. The delightful reference “The Carrion Beetles (Coleoptera: Silphidae) of Nebraska” by Brett Radcliffe was used as a resource.

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Last month we learned how aphids can wind up with a hole in their rear end courtesy of tiny parasitic wasps that turned them into mummies. This week we see how aphids can meet another gruesome end in the jaws of aphid lions. With ample rainfall and favorable temperatures, the lush growth on trees and shrubs continues to generate healthy populations of aphids on many garden plants. A week or so ago, on a dynamite pollinator attractor called Silphium perfoliatum, a.k.a. cup plant, I noticed a fine crop of aphids happily sucking sap on the underside of leaves. The thought of giving these gals (many aphids at this time of year are a “ladies only” society due to parthenogenetic reproduction) a squirt of insecticidal soap to quell their numbers ran through my mind for a brief moment. Fortunately, upon closer inspection of the festivities I spotted a murderous contingent of Mother Nature’s hit squad nearby, brown lacewing larvae. Brown lacewings are close kin to debris carrying green lacewings we visited in a previous episode.

Green and brown lacewings go by the colorful common name of aphid lions. Here’s why. Adult lacewings are attracted to fragrant odors emanating from plants infested with aphids. As they feed on plant sap, aphids produce a waste product called honeydew. The honeydew is a sweet concoction of sugars, amino acids, and other compounds. As this sticky goo degrades, telltale odors waft from the plants. Female lacewings cruising the landscapes in search of food for themselves and their babes sense aphid-related odors. The scent is like the smell of burgers and fries to a fast food junkie and sends a signal to the mother lacewing that “dinner is served”. Upon arriving on a plant, if the proper cues are present, the female green lacewing touches her abdomen to the surface of a leaf and draws out a thin strand of protein. At the tip of this protein stalk, she deposits a single egg. Why she goes to this trouble is not entirely clear. Perhaps, by placing the egg on a stalk, hungry predators including other lacewing larvae are less likely to snack on the tasty egg. Brown lacewing mothers seem to eschew this behavior and deposit their eggs directly on the surface of the leaf. After hatching, the tiny larva shinnies down the stalk and begins its search for food. If mom was clever and placed the egg in the right spot, a smorgasbord of aphids awaits nearby.

Aphid lions to the rescue! Last week my cup plant was loaded with aphids. Brown lacewing larvae came to town and now it’s so long aphids. When aphids appear, before you spray take a moment to see if some of Mother Nature’s hit squad, like brown and green lacewing larvae, have arrived to help.

Aphid lions have powerful, sickle-shaped jaws that grasp their prey. Once attached to the aphid, a pump in the aphid lion’s head is activated and the liquid life is sucked from the hapless victim. Aphid lions are reported to devour 200 aphids per week and several hundred during the course of their development. After shedding its skin twice to grow, the aphid lion spins a white cocoon and attaches the cocoon to the plant. Within this silken orb the transformation from alligator-like larva to pupa to winged adult takes place. After a few weeks in the cocoon, the beautiful adult lacewing emerges. The adult green lacewing has fantastic green or golden eyes and dozens of veins running through its wings, hence the name lacewing. Adult lacewings eat nectar and pollen and honeydew produced by aphids and other sucking insects. In addition to feasting on aphids, voracious lacewing larvae eat a variety of prey including caterpillars, spider mites, lace bugs, beetle larvae, and eggs of many kinds of plant pests. They are highly beneficial. Aphid lions can be purchased commercially and released on plants to help reduce pest populations. These fierce predators have been used to reduce pests with some success in agricultural crops such as cotton and strawberries and to reduce mealybugs on houseplants indoors and lace bugs on azaleas in landscapes and nurseries. As I watched aphid lions devour aphids with remarkable gusto, I wondered what our world would be like if aphid lions were the size of the German Shepherd next door.  

Acknowledgements

The interesting references “Handbook of Biological Control” by Thomas S. Bellows and T.W. Fisher, and “Biological control in specific crops: Woody Ornamentals” by Paula Shrewsbury and Michael Raupp, were used to prepare this episode.

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This article appeared first on Catseye Pest

This article appeared first on Catseye Pest

Last week we visited blood-thirsty mosquitoes, ectoparasites high up the food web that feed on animals including us. This week we meet one of Mother Nature’s champion recyclers, bess beetles, whose mission is to repurpose tough wood fibers into cute beetle larvae. During the past week or two while wandering wooded trails, I have enjoyed several encounters with magnificent bess beetles as they scurried about the forest floor. Coincidentally, several images of bess beetles have arrived in my mailbox from other folks curious to learn about these lumbering beauties. Bess beetles are also known as patent leather beetles and the horned Passalus by virtue of their shiny deep brown color and notable horns. These powerful beetles are important participants in the great circle of life. No, they do not occupy an exalted place at the top of the food chain like Mufasa, the Lion King. They sit near the bottom of the heap along with fungi and bacteria where they help decompose fibrous wood. Adult bess beetles use strong jaws to gnaw and ingest wood. After being processed in the beetle’s digestive system and deposited back in the wood, the microbe-packed droppings, a.k.a. frass, are consumed by bess beetle larvae. The microbes contained in the leavings of the adult beetles are particularly important for young larvae that require parental microorganisms to help them digest wood. Tough plant tissues such as lignin and cellulose are indigestible to us, but the gut microbiome of the bess beetle and resident microbes found in decaying wood enable bess beetles to capture nutrients as they recycle tough plant polymers.

Bess beetles are among the champion recyclers of the insect world. A remarkable microbiome in their gut enables bess beetles to breakdown tough polymers found in wood and extract nutrients locked up inside. Now is a great time to observe bess beetles as they scramble across the forest floor or recycle wood beneath the bark of fallen trees.

Upon plucking a bess beetle from the forest trail, I was intrigued to hear it squeak. Bess beetles are able to produce sound by rubbing their wings across a rasp-like structure on the upper surface of their back just beneath the hard wing covers. This form of sound production is called stridulation. Many beetles, such as the milkweed longhorned beetle we met on June 27, 2016 in “Turning the tables on milkweeds: Milkweed longhorned beetle, Tetraopes sp.”, stridulate. The larvae of bess beetles are somewhat unique in that they also stridulate by rubbing together two sections of their legs. Several authors suggest squeaking sounds enable both larvae and adults to communicate with others in the decomposing wood. One account indicates that larvae follow the calls of adults in the colony. Perhaps this is a way for parents to assist their babies in discovering food or maybe it conveys a message akin to “eat your vegetables”. Other scientists believe the calls may frighten would-be predators. To learn the true nature of the call of the bess beetle, I made a recording of the sound. By playing the sound backward at very slow speed, the beetles could clearly be heard trilling the Gershwin classic “summer time and the livin’ is easy”. Guess summer must be right around the corner.

Acknowledgements

Bug of the Week thanks Ashley May for inspiring this episode and providing the nice image of a bess beetle that apparently joined her picnic. Information for this Bug of the Week came from two fascinating papers, “Gut anatomical properties and microbial functional assembly promote lignocellulose deconstruction and colony subsistence of a wood-feeding beetle” by Javier A. Ceja-Navarro, Ulas Karaoz, Markus Bill, Zhao Hao, Richard A. White, Abelardo Arellano, Leila Ramanculova, Timothy R. Filley, Timothy D. Berry, Mark E. Conrad, Meredith Blackwell, Carrie D. Nicora, Young-Mo Kim, Patrick N. Reardon, Mary S. Lipton, Joshua N. Adkins, Jennifer Pett-Ridge, and Eoin L. Brodie, and “Observations on the life history of the horned Passalus” by L.E. Gray.

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With COVID-19, the economy, and now social unrest in our land, we’ve all had a lot on our minds. While rightly absorbed with these critical issues, attention to a few little pest management details have fallen by the wayside around my landscape. On a recent journey behind my toolshed, I found my old Frisbee, a wheelbarrow, a five-gallon bucket and a long abandoned former fire pit filled to the brim with murky water. This should have been no surprise, what with several impressive bouts of rain we’ve had recently. Want to know the perfect recipe for creating scads of mosquitoes? Abundant rain, containers filled with decaying organic matter like leaves and flower buds, a little warm weather, and some overwintered mosquitoes like the ones nibbling my ankles a couple of weeks ago. One look into the water revealed not hundreds but thousands of tiny mosquito larvae, a.k.a. wrigglers, ready to turn into tiny vampires in a week or so. Using my mosquito sampler, I reckoned there to be roughly 2000 larvae in the fire pit. With temperatures now hitting the 90s in the DMV and throughout parts of our country, legions of female mosquitoes shall emerge from the drink and, as Paul Thomas Anderson said, “there will be blood.”  

Water filled containers and drain pipes are breeding sites for mosquito larvae. Get cracking and inspect your landscape, eliminate breeding sites by inverting containers, dump bird baths twice a week, and if you cannot drain standing water kill mosquitoes where they breed with Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis.

Awhile later that day, in preparation for my joyous weekly lawn cutting event, my wife removed a drain cover in the lawn to prevent its impending destruction, one that had befallen other such drain covers levied by the blades of my lawn mower. Upon removing said cover, we were once again astonished to discover scores of mosquito wrigglers paddling about the waters of the drainpipe. How female mosquitos penetrated the gravity triggered trap door security of the drain cover remains a mystery to me. Darn clever are these tiny vampires.  

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During the first several days of adulthood, both male and female mosquitoes consume carbohydrate rich food such as plant nectar or aphid honeydew. For male mosquitoes, sweets remain the sole source of food, but the gals have a blood lust. Female mosquitoes use animal blood as the source of protein to produce eggs. The pregnant mosquito lays her spawn in a water-filled container such as a pail or bird bath, or in pools of standing water on the ground. Some, like the ferocious Asian tiger, Aedes albopictus, lay eggs near the water-line of a container. When the vessel fills with rainwater, eggs hatch and larval development begins. Others, such as the common house mosquito, a.k.a. Northern house mosquito, Culex pipiens, lay eggs in clusters called rafts that float on the surface of the water. Each raft may contain more than 150 eggs.  

Mosquitoes are more than just a nuisance and several species here in the United States carry important diseases such as West Nile virus, Eastern Equine Encephalitis, Chikungunya, and Yellow Fever. West Nile virus has killed more than 2,600 people in the US since first detected in New York two decades ago. While most of us shrug off West Nile virus, it can be severe and even lethal to seniors and certain others. Recent research helps explain why this may be so. Our immune system plays a vital role in preventing diseases carried by mosquitoes. Cells lining our skin and mucus membranes bear specialized virus-sensing proteins called Toll-Like Receptors, a.k.a. TLRs. TLRs have the critical function of detecting invaders like West Nile virus. If TLRs detect the West Nile virus, they release additional proteins that stimulate production of chemical communication compounds called interleukins. Interleukins released into the bloodstream marshal cellular assassins called macrophages and direct them to hunt and kill cells infected with West Nile virus before the virus can multiple and make us seriously ill. Researchers have suggested that some seniors and people with compromised immune systems may lack sufficient TLRs and related immune system proteins to thwart the West Nile virus.  

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Many species of mosquitoes prefer to feed at dusk and you can avoid being bitten by staying indoors in the evening. Unlike many of our native mosquitoes, the exotic Asian tiger is a daytime biter, adding hours of entertaining itching, scratching, and swatting to days in the garden. Protect yourself from aggressive biters by wearing light-weight, long-sleeved shirts and pants when working outdoors. Certain brands of clothing are pretreated with mosquito repellents such as permethrin. I have worn these in tropical rainforests where mosquitoes were ferocious and repellent clothing really did help. Many topical insect repellents can be applied to exposed skin before you go outdoors. Some will provide many hours of protection, while others provide virtually none. Some repellents should not be applied to children and you should always help kids apply repellents. Do not apply repellents containing DEET under clothing. For safety, be sure to read and follow the directions on the label of the repellent before you apply it to people or clothing.

If you dine outdoors, place a small fan on your patio. The light breeze created by the fan will reduce the number of mosquitoes flying and biting. Many traps are also available to capture and kill mosquitoes. Some, like the sensational bug-zappers, rely on a light source to attract blood seekers. However, many types of moths, flies, and beetles are attracted to light, whereas mosquitoes, unfortunately, do not use light as the primary cue to find their meals and are not readily attracted to light traps. One study demonstrated that less than 1% of the insects attracted to light traps were biting flies such as mosquitoes. This study estimated that light traps kill billions of harmless and beneficial insects each year. Actually, mosquitoes are attracted to odors emanating from the host. As we move about the earth, we release many odors, including carbon dioxide and lactic acid, that are used by hungry mosquitoes to find us. Some mosquito traps release carbon dioxide and will catch many mosquitoes. However, much work remains before we fully understand how well these traps reduce biting rates or generally reduce mosquito populations in a broad area. Another trap called the Gravid Aedes Trap (GAT) has been used along with reduction in breeding sites on a community-wide basis with good success in several locations, including some in the DMV. These traps are partially filled with water then organic materials like hay or alfalfa pellets are added to create an infusion. The delightful aroma of this infusion is irresistible to pregnant, or, in ento-speak gravid, Aedes mosquitoes like the Asian tiger. Reminiscent of the Hotel California, mosquitoes check into the GAT but they never leave. Inside the GAT they are snared in sticky stuff or poisoned.

Mosquitoes in my back yard seem to have an ankle fetish. At double speed watch this one tank up on blood and then scram to find a place to digest its meal and turn my blood protein into mosquito eggs.

To reduce the chances of mosquitoes breeding around your home, eliminate standing water by cleaning your gutters, dumping your bird bath twice a week, inverting your wheelbarrow and getting rid of water filled containers. If you have an aquatic water garden, drain pipes that hold water, or standing water on your property that are mosquito breeding sites, you can use a product containing the naturally occurring soil microbe known as Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis, a.k.a. Bti. Bti comes formulated in doughnut-shaped tablets that can be placed in water to kill mosquito larvae. Battalions of biters are about to make their presence known. So snap to it, inspect your landscape and eliminate mosquito breeding sites. And get ready to protect yourself, or there will be blood.

Acknowledgements

We thank Mike Murillo for providing the inspiration for this episode. Several interesting articles including “How the body rubs out West Nile virus” by  Nathan Seppa, “Toll-like Receptor 7 Mitigates Lethal West Nile and Encephalitis via Interleukin 23-Dependent Immune Cell Infiltration and Homing” by Terrence Town, Fengwei Bai, Tian Wang, Amber T. Kaplan, Feng Qian, Ruth R. Montgomery, John F. Anderson, Richard A. Flavell, and Erol Fikrig, and “Density and diversity of non-target insects killed by suburban electric insect traps” by Timothy B. Frick and Douglas W. Tallamy, were used in the preparation of this episode.

To see how to reduce mosquito breeding and biting in a residential landscape, please visit this website: Mosquito Protection – Bite Them Before They Bite You

To learn more about mosquito repellents, how long they last, and which one might be right for you, please visit the CDC’s comprehensive mosquito repellent website, Prevent Mosquito Bites.  

To learn more about how communities can band together to reduce mosquito populations by eliminating breeding sites and using GATs, please visit this website, CITIZEN ACTION THROUGH SCIENCE: COMMUNITY-DRIVEN MOSQUITO CONTROL

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