Videos Teach Growers about Stink Bug Threat

Videos at StopBMSB.org show how to monitor for damage and infestations.

“This bug was in every field that I own,” says Nathan Milburn, an orchard grower in Elkton, Maryland. “In the border areas, near the woods, we saw significant damage of 30 and 40 percent, maybe even 50. That was a scary thing to see. As much work as we could do to try to protect our crop, we were still seeing damage with fly in, because these guys could fly far.”

Growers discuss these challenges in the recent video series, “Tracking the Brown Marmorated Stink Bug,” available for free on YouTube.

A team of 50 scientists, in collaboration with the Northeastern IPM Center, has produced and posted to YouTube ten video clips on how to recognize, trap, and manage the brown marmorated stink bug (BMSB). The videos were produced by James Monahan, a videographer who previously worked on films for public television and university websites with the Rutgers Center for Digital Filmmaking. Chris Gonzales and Carrie Koplinka-Loehr of the Northeastern IPM Center served as co-producers.

The videos cover history and identification, overwintering and spread, monitoring and mapping, host plants and damage, the situation in the Pacific Northwest, and management. The average video length is 7 minutes, and the total length of all of the segments together is 66 minutes.

Other findings in the videos: Some insecticides may cause secondary pest outbreaks of mites, aphids, and scale. To protect pollinators, avoid pre-bloom insecticides with long residual activity. Peppers, tomatoes, sweet corn, okra, and beans suffer the most damage from BMSB. On peppers and tomatoes, look for whitish scarring on the surface.

You can find the videos on YouTube by searching for “brown marmorated stink bug” or by visiting www.stopbmsb.org/video.