Mary Surber, age 9, of Monroe, Michigan, for her question:
What damage does the Japanese beetle do?
A horde of Japanese beetles can devour all the leaves on a tree and eat up all the greenery in a vegetable garden, chew holes in all the flower petals and their grubs can ruin all the roots of a grassy lawn. Just imagine the harm these greedy bugs can do to our leafy parks and wide fields of growing crops.
A Japanese beetle is only about half an inch long. He is a wide insect with a hard, glossy green head and glossy greenish brown wings. When gobbling his food, he keeps his top pair of hard wings neatly folded down his back. But around the edges you can see that his body is marked with a row of 12 little white buttons. He arrives in the middle of summer and, sad to say, the greedy gobbler never comes alone. He is almost sure to bring an invading army of his friends and relatives, all of them as greedily hungry as himself. They live on vegetable food and almost any kind of greenery tastes good to them. Experts say that Japanese beetles attack almost 300 different plants.
Sometimes they devour wild plants and flowers, fruit and foliage. But the greedy bugs would rather dine on the plants and trees we grow and cultivate for ourselves. They chew up lettuce and cabbages and acres of corn and other crops growing in our fields and gardens. They devour the leaves from ornamental trees and even the fruit from our orchards. And this is not all the harm they do. The eggs hatch into greedy grubs that feed on the roots of grasses and other low growing plants. A plant cannot live without its roots and many lawns and golf courses are ruined by Japanese beetle grubs feeding underground.
Every year, invading armies of Japanese beetles and their grubs do more than ten million dollars worth of damage to our plants. They are very harmful pests indeed. And, sad to say, the wretched creatures do not really belong to us. They are not native American insects and nobody wanted them. The first arrivals were found about 52 years ago. Henry Weiss noticed a few of the shiny green beetles in his New Jersey plant nursery. Bug experts found out later that the pests had come from Japan. Most likely a few eggs or grubs were stowaways on plants shipped here from Japan several years before they were discovered. At that time, no one knew much about the greedy little monsters, but one thing was plain. They liked it here. Each year they multi¬plied in great numbers. And each year they spread out to invade more and more of our land.
In half a century, the Japanese beetles spread through most of our eastern states and into some of the central states. The Department of Agriculture has spent many years trying to control them. For more than 40 years, we have had a special Japanese Beetle Laboratory to study their ways. Experts try to find their weak spots to destroy them. So far, our best weapons against them are the up to date, bug killing insecticides. But these strong chemicals must be used with care. Otherwise, they may poison the fruit and vegetables that they rescue from the beetles.
Controlling the harmful Japanese beetle is a huge and costly job. Sometimes, the frosty winter destroys the eggs in the ground. Sometimes, dry spells in early summer destroy the grubby caterpillars. Some can be destroyed by insecticide chemi¬cals soaked into the soil. Certain modern insecticides are soaked up by the plants. Bugs that try to feed on them get their tummies filled with poison. The grown up beetles can be wiped out with strong chemical sprays. Sometimes airplanes are needed to dust and spray wide acres of corn and other crops. Naturally we wash and wash our vegetables and fruit and salad greens before we serve them.