Creature Feature

[imafan26]

Spittle bugs are the larvae stage of a frog hopper. It is also the stage when they are noticed first. The first time I saw it I thought somebody spit on the plant.

http://www.extension.umn.edu/garden/yar ... pittlebug/

[imafan26]

Got squash?
Squash and cucurbits are either monoecious plants that have separate male and female flowers on the same plant or gyenecious like cucumbers that can have mostly female flowers. Parthenocarpic plants do not require polination to produce a fruit and they have small seeds. All parthenocarpic fruit are gynecious but all gynecious fruit are not parthenocarpic. Gynecious fruit produce mostly female, but still require anothe plant with male flowers to polinate it to produce fruit.

Some parthenocarpic cucumbers that do not require or want a polinator are Diva, Suyo, Tyria, Tasty Jade, and Socrates.
Parthenocarpic zucchini = Parthenon.

Most of the modern hybrids are gynecious and have mostly female flowers but the packet will usually contain 10% of a polinator variety. To get adequate polination, you would have to hand polinate or plant more seeds.

Male flowers usually appear first to attract the polinators. Most flowers are only open and receptive a few hours and require multiple visits to achieve adequate polination.
While honeybees get most of the credit for polinating most of the crops. The squash bee is a better polinator of cucurbits.
Squash bees have more of a "nose" and hairs on their legs to carry pollen instead of pollen sacs. While they are gregarious, they are not social bees and live as solitary bees usually nesting in the ground near squash plants. They are going to be active in the mornings when the flowers are open and will sometimes be found napping in the flowers later in the day.

http://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/pollin ... bees.shtml

[KitchenGardener]

Thank you so much for posting about the squash bee. We have tons of honey bees who visit my garden and flowers, but I just assumed that I had never seen one of those fellows. And wouldn't you know that the very next morning I happened to look in a newly opened squash blossom and what did I see, but a squash bee! I'm learning so much about beneficial insects from this site, so thank you.

[rainbowgardener]

Anyone know what this one is?

This is magnified. It was maybe an inch long, like about twice as long and wide as a Japanese beetle.

It looks dark in the picture, but I think if light were on it, it would have some shiny, metallic bits. It was crawling up a corn stalk.

[applestar]

Definitely a beetle of some sort isn't it? It has a distinctive wing contour over the abdomen that looks kind of metallic green, so my first guess is probably not it, but my first thought was a female stag beetle.

Just in case, here is a link I found:

Family Lucanidae - Stag Beetles - BugGuide.Net
http://bugguide.net/node/view/3103
Scroll down to this section: Illustrated Key to North American Genera adapted from(3)

Are there scarab beetles in North America?

[KitchenGardener]

Perhaps either a:

Green June Beetle (can also be brown or black): http://www.insectidentification.org/ins ... une-Beetle

OR a

Sugar cane beetle: http://ipm.ncsu.edu/AG271/corn_sorghum/ ... eetle.html

[rainbowgardener]

green June beetle it is! I think this one would have looked a lot more green if the sun had been on it. Thanks KG!!!

I was planning to do milky spore this fall against the Japanese beetles; turns out these guys are susceptible to it also.

[rainbowgardener]

I'm confused though. Look this thing up and I see it called June beetle or June bug.

What I always called June bug is this one:



You can't tell from the picture, but it is much smaller, the same size about as the Japanese beetle.

When I did a google image search on June bug, both that one and the one I have now came up:



This is a quote from the page that the picture came from:

June Bugs are emerging as summer's warmth is finally upon us. The green June beetle, only one of some 300 species of scarab beetles found in Southern California, flashes a metallic green underbelly as its buzzes about erratically. The mature scarabs flying about have spent at least a year underground in larval form munching at the roots of lawns or your favorite ornamental plants.

http://www.sandiegoreader.com/weblogs/o ... emerging/#

uses June Bug and green June beetle interchangeably.

This guy is WAY bigger than the little brown ones. And all of a sudden from seeing the first one, I have a swarm of them! The air is full of them! I have never seen anything like it... I think that is goodbye garden as they are leaf chewers!

[rainbowgardener]

Well, some good news on the green June beetle front. The swarm only lasted about three days. Since then I've seen the occasional one, but not tons. And today I found one, with one wing all deformed and its abdomen showing where it would normally be covered. The abdomen was pulsating. Since it is usually covered, I don't know if that is normal, but I sort of thought maybe it was full of parasites inside. I looked and couldn't find any mention of anything that parasitizes the adults (as opposed to the grubs), so maybe not.... But anyway, for whatever reason, it was in bad shape.

And incidentally I was wrong. The Japanese beetles are leaf chewers. These guys just attack ripe fruits.

[rainbowgardener]

So my kale has been chewed up so much that there's little for me to harvest, even though it is growing very well. Leaves quickly get skeletonized.

I thought slugs, but I treated twice with Sluggo and twice with DE to no avail. I found one little cabbage worm, but never any others and no frass, etc.

Today I found this guy on it:

anyone recognize him?

I only found one of him. I also found one leaf footed bug nymph on a different bed, near a squash plant. I dispatched it, but have to assume where there is one there are a lot more.

[imafan26]

It is a harlequin stink bug. Harlequin bugs are important pests of cabbages in the Southern states. The lifecycle is complete in 50-70 days and consists of 3 stages. Eggs look like black and white kegs standing up on a leaf. There are 5 or 6 nymphal instars and each one looks a little different in pattern until around 7-9 weeks before they are mature. They gradually look more like the adult with each molt.

Plants commonly attacked by the harlequin bug include such crucifers as horseradish, cabbage, cauliflower, collards, mustard, Brussels sprouts, turnip, kohlrabi and radish. In the absence of these favorite hosts, tomato, potato, eggplant, okra, bean, asparagus, beet, weeds, fruit trees and field crops may be eaten.

Hand picking works and this is a good time to break out the dust buster since as you have noted where there's one....
Kaolin clay may be helpful.

Stink bugs in general, I find hard to control. Thankfully I do have a few birds that eat them and the geckos are good at picking off most of the caterpillars and bugs on my plants.
http://entnemdept.ufl.edu/creatures/veg ... in_bug.HTM
http://www.hobbyfarms.com/12-organic-wa ... in-bugs-3/

[applestar]

Yep. Harlequin Bugs I sometimes get them in the height of summer -- mid-July to maybe late August -- or after a hurricane remnant sweeps up from the south -- and they are worse than the caterpillars in some ways. I've mentioned them before... I can't recall if I said growing red cabbages and purple Brussels sprouts DID or DID NOT help.

Kale will recover once it gets cooler and grow through the winter in milder freeze IF you can keep sufficient plant mass alive until then.

[rainbowgardener]

OK thanks everyone! Looking it up, you all are right, harlequin stinkbug. I found it on kale and apparently that is one of the places it likes to be.

However, I don't think it is the culprit that is eating holes into my kale to the point of nearly skeletonizing the leaves.

Harlequin like other stinkbugs is piercing/sucking insect not chewing insect. I found this for what harlequin bug damage looks like:


My damage does look like slugs. I was thinking about maybe something else, just because the slug treatments didn't fix the problem. But I need to go out at night with the flashlight and check for them.

[rainbowgardener]

So my kale devastation is still a mystery. I went out just now at midnight with a flashlight. Looked at every single leaf on every single plant. I spotted one little slug down by the base of one plant, but that was all I found. One little slug surely couldn't be doing all that by himself!? I expected to find it crawling with them....

I also spotted one more unknown bug. This one looked about the size and shape of a black watermelon seed, with two thin horizontal orange lines across its body. Looking at pictures on-line, the closest I found was spittle bug, but I'm not sure that's right and I've not seen any evidence of spittle bugs.

I'll try again with the Sluggo and DE and maybe see if I can buy Neem oil, since this is clearly a leaf chewer of some sort.

[applestar]

Have you seen any blister beetles? Are your Swiss chard a(and beets) and peppers showing similar chew marks? They came after that mild winter and summer hurricane and did a lot of mischief in my garden. They didn't stay put but moved from plant to plant, but they favored beets and S. Chard and turned them into lace. The ones I got were dark grey with black abdomen. Don't touch with bare hands if you see them!