Dawn just remarked this morning that she hoped they stayed away this year. I've seen hordes..but I'm not food gardening this year...so no this year.

They have devastated a large portion of my garden. I only ended up with one picking of chard all year.. About the only plants that haven't been hit by them in my garden are my habanero peppers, while my jalapeno have been eaten almost bare.

I sure killed a bunch of them while hunting for squash bugs the other day!

I would like for you to see a pretty sight. This was 2 years ago. I normally have black blister bugs, but I had the striped blister beetle this time. I have never had them in this number before or since. I pulled out the big guns and sprayed where they were very heavy.

You can see on the lawn that they were eating it as they went. They seemed to like grass as well as vegetables.

I have not seen any yet this year, but I am sort of halfway hoping they will show up here at some point.....

Not because I am crazy, but because they eat grasshopper eggs. It doesn't matter to me in a normal year when the grasshopper population is only average, but this isn't a normal year. We have tons of grasshoppers, so we need for the blister beetles to show up at some point to eat up a lot of the grasshopper eggs.

If you start fighting the blister beetles when they first show up, they are fairly easy to kill by spraying them with insecticidal soap or by spraying the plants they are eating with a product containing Spinosad (which is organic). The brand of Spinosad I usually have in my shed in made by Monterey and I believe it is labeled as Monterey Garden Insect Spray, but there are several different Spinosad products on the market now. The longer you let the beetles stay around and reproduce, the harder it is to get rid of them and, as you no doubt have noticed, they can strip plants down to naked stems in no time at all.

Sometimes, here on the internet I see people advising you can handpick them. Well, maybe some folks can handpick them where they live, but when they show up here, they generally reproduce so quickly that you don't have one here or one there or a dozen here or a dozen there....you have hundreds and hundreds of them, as Larry's photo illustrated so well. And, if you choose to make any contact with them, wear gloves or they'll make you break out in blisters. I can think of at least 1,000 things I'd rather do on a hot summer's day than to stand out there in the heat hand-picking blister beetles.

If I had them present in small enough numbers that I could handpick them, I'd leave them alone anyhow, knowing they'll eat a lot of grasshopper eggs and knowing their population is so small that they cannot eat all my plants. (But, my garden is really big. Even a fairly small number can devastate a small garden.) If I had them present in large numbers, I'd probably spray Spinosad on plants I didn't want eaten....which would be perennial flowers, herbs or veggies, or any annual veggie or herb plants that still are producing and which I want to continue harvesting. If my garden was pretty much through producing for the year, I'd let them have it.

It is very frustrating to have them devouring plants, but then, on the other hand, in a state like ours where grasshoppers can become a huge problem some years, I hate to kill off one of the few predatory insects we have that do help control grasshoppers.

When we lived in Texas before moving here, I don't think I ever saw a single blister beetle once in my life, and I lived there for almost 40 years. The first time I saw them here, they showed up and totally devoured a beautiful Sweet Autumn Clematis vine that was about 5 years old. Then they disappeared and never touched the veggie garden. It was a couple of years later that they began showing up in the garden, but I think the first year that they damaged it enough that I sprayed them with insecticidal soap was 2010, and we had been here since 1999. So, they really haven't been a persistent problem here....just a periodic one.

Some types of birds will eat blister beetles, and there is at least one kind of predatory blister beetle that eats the eggs of the striped blister beetle.

HippyBKC, I am sorry to hear they devastated your garden like that. If they were here and were devastating my jalapeno peppers, I'd be out there in the garden killing every beetle I found. Jalapenos are one of my favorite crops and I can many, many pints of them every year so I'd hate to have anything destroying my crop.

If you need to spray Spinosad and cannot find it in a local store, I've ordered it online before and had it arrive pretty quickly. One of the products containing Spinosad is Captain Jack's Dead Bug Brew, which is a reference to how and where spinosad was discovered.

I quit raising chard outside years ago as the blister beetles would strip it in one day. Only raise it in the greenhouse now. But the other day I went out and saw that my sweet autumn clematis was 3/4 bare stems. I didn't have to get closer to know that they had arrived. I headed straight for the sevin, which I don't like to use on veggies, but I sprayed them good. They only left one small patch of buds, but at least i will get to see that area. For years they would hit the hostas, but hostas died out last year in the drought despite what I thought was adequate watering.

The gray ones and the striped ones have different behaviors. You probably can knock the gray ones into soapy water, but the striped ones show up in hoards and run all over the ground. I had to spray earlier in the year because of them. I try to avoid poisons. I think I used pyrethrin but get those chemicals mixed up. The spray I used said you could harvest the next day. I hate to spray because I have beneficial insects, but the striped blister beetle will eat all the leaves off your garden plants in a day or so. Have you ever heard of Spanish fly. Google it. The striped ones have more of the irritating chemical and can kill horses when they eat the dried bugs in hay.

Hmmmm. I think I am being discriminated against because I never get the gray ones. I feel left out.

Normally in a bad year when the plants are being demolished I have the black ones and the striped ones. In a year when there's only a few, I usually have only the black ones.

I Googled Spanish Fly and found that interesting. I had heard it before but had forgotten all about it. I know that our friends who raise horses do have to watch out for blister beetles getting in the hay, particularly the alfalfa hay.

We do have some robber flies here that prey upon the blister beetles but I don't know that we have enough flies to make a difference.

My garden always has been popular with teens and pre-teens working on insect collections for school. A kid can spend an afternoon in the garden and get a huge array of insects for their insect collection. Back in the good old days when our sunroom was only a screened-in back porch, insects congregated in it on hot afternoons if we left the back door open. In those days, a kid could collect all the insects they needed for their insect collection in an hour or two. Now that it has been converted to a sunroom, we leave the door closed and the insects congregate elsewhere. When Chris and his classmates were in high school, they collected all the insects from our garden and then everyone went home to their computers and looked up the insects online to try to identify them, and then they called each other to compare findings. At one point, they got a tiny bit wound-up because they had caught a type of fly that was either an endangered species or a rare species. I assured them that their instructor was not likely to hold that against them since they had no idea when they caught the flies that they were endangered.

Since we rarely spray anything, our entire property is an insect haven. I'll spray blister beetles if I have to, though I might wait a while to let them live long enough to eat up bunches of grasshopper legs.

One insect that has been AWOL this year is scorpions. I haven't been bitten a single time. Yay! Now that I said that, I'll probably get bitten by a scorpion next week.

I have touched them plenty of times. After looking at the images I am a little more careful. I don't bother the gray/black ones unless they are taking over; I don't care if they eat the autumn clematis because it is very invasive in my yard. The striped ones have to be dealt with immediately.

Here is a link that might be useful: images of several kinds of blister beetles

Well...at least I'm not alone in my fight against these bugs. I've never seen the striped ones before. I also didn't know they ate grasshopper eggs. That may be why I don't have many grasshoppers this year. Too bad that's not all they eat!! Okie dawn, is the Spinosad safe for birds and butterflies? I know you said it was organic, and where do you find it?

Spinosad is a product derived from fermented microorganisms (bacteria, I believe). The fermented microorganisms were found by a scientist in the 1980s at the site of a former rum distillery on a Caribbean Island....hence the colorful name of one brand of it that is sold as Captain Jack's Dead Bug Brew. I usually just buy the Monterey Garden Insect Spray at whichever store I'm in. It is sold in big box stores, farm/feed and seed stores, nurseries, etc. The last time I bought some I either found it at Home Depot or Wal-Mart. I also see it at Tractor Supply Company stores during the garden season.

It may not be as easy to find the spinosad in August as it was in spring, and I say that because I was in a Sam's Club store in TX this week and they already had lighted Christmas trees on display and for sale in the store. Apparently we all may be in trouble if we need lawn and garden supplies in August, but it is a great time to go ahead and buy your Christmas tree.

If you cannot find it in a nursery, garden center or big box store, you can order it online. Everyone carries it, but you'd need to find someone who ships fast because otherwise it likely would arrive too late to save your plants.

You can read about Spinosad at the link below. I never have heard of it being dangerous to birds, and with most insects, it is most effective when they are in the larval or nymph stage. It can harm beneficial insects, so I use it very sparingly. My favorite ways to use it are (a) in an organic, granular fire ant product like Concern and (b) in a pelleted organic snail and slug bait product like SlugGo Plus that also kills pill bugs and sow bugs (and cut worms). I rarely use the liquid spray because I don't want to harm the beneficial insects. However, if the choice is to spray to save your plants, or to lose them.....I'd probably attempt to save the plants if they still were pretty and productive. If they were really on their last legs, I'd let them die. If you need to use a product containing spinosad, you can minimize the effect it has on bees and other beneficials by spraying it in late evening, just around sunset, when the bees have returned to their hives for the evening.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Info on Spinosad