i am not anne.. but i will give you my opinion ...

traps involve hormonal LURES ...

if you set a trap ... you are LURING them to your yard ...

think about it ..

i used to joke ... that you give all your upwind neighbors lure traps as xmas gifts ...

and lure them out of your yard ...

ken

I do understand that, but when you have roses and crape myrtles that are turned black by the beetles, what do you do? Previous years I've had them be somewhat irritating but I could hand pick and disbud the roses until they left. Last year was an absolute nightmare. I could not even make a dent in them, and there seemed to be at least 2 generations of them as they were in my garden til late September. So horrible that I removed the crape myrtle near my back porch and a fav rose because I could not bear to see it covered in beetles! I loved that rose, and already miss it - thus the hope that I could use traps to lure them from what is left of my roses. Have you ever had a really bad infestation of them? If so, what did you use?

Thanks,
Frances

This is supposition and guesswork, so don't take it as THE answer, but...

Frances, your place is pretty big, so you may be able to do things that someone in a subdivision lot would not be able to do. Also, there may be things that don't work as well for you, because of the size of the property IF you want protection of your entire property.

Ken may have been joking, but what he said has been discussed and tried before. It works! Traps do lure the beetles to the traps. Lots of beetles may be eliminated, but, until they are eliminated, they are eating your plants. If you are able to place the lures out away from the plants you want to protect, the lures will pull the beetles away from your plants AND get rid of a bunch of them. Properly placed, I think the traps could hold lots of promise.

Milky Spores may be a problem because of the cost. To treat your entire property (or at least the yard part of your property), I think you'd be looking at quite a bit of money and effort. It's been a while since I've looked at the numbers, but I know the idea was shot down pretty quickly in the case of my farm.

Thanks Brandon. I think this is along the lines of what Ann said she had done. I'm wondering the kind of traps that would be best. Did you have a bad year last year? Mine was horrible!

They are always hard on my cherry trees, but I don't really notice much problem on anything else. The voles, groundhogs, and beavers are my main pests.

Again, I don't consider myself as an expert on this subject at all, but...

Since Japanese beetles are described as highly mobile and able to infest new areas from several miles away, I don't think of lures and traps as a long-term solution. These things have been known to fly up to five miles in a single flight (although their typical flights are shorter).

Milky spore only affect grubs, so, unless you were able to treat a really large area, I don't see that as much help with adult beetles. It seems to me that it would be like removing a bucket of water from somewhere in the middle of the ocean and hoping to have a long-term effect on the water level there.

If it works, it works, but I have a hard time reasoning how some treatments would work nearly as well as they are sometimes advertised (by the people selling them).

Before we used traps, we had a major problem. We are out in the country and surrounded by several hundred acres of forest intermixed with several hundred acres of hay fields. Most neighbors have personal gardens. Third year I had roses, one neighbor showed up with fresh sweet corn for us. Johnny gave me the corn and thanked me for growing roses, because tor the first time in decades, his sweet corn had good silkbecause all the Japanese Beetles had migrated to my roses, about half a mile away. His corns' silk really looked good and the kernels thus were well developed.

That's when I decided to catch and kill the JBs earliest possible, because I was growing lure plants.

Thanks Ann. I'm going to give them a try if I see many beetles this year.

I used them once and attracted every beetle within 1000 miles! Never again. Then I started just hand collecting them every morning ( a bucket of soap water) and flushing them. Every year I have fewer and fewer...not a problem at all anymore

To kill the adults you can use a simple soap/water mix 1 tbls dish soap to 1 gal water a old windex bottle , Hudson type pump sprayer or a hose end bottle sprayer I like the last one to cover a big area or to get up in a tree the mix has to hit the bug and has no effect if it doesn't or on the larva in the ground but also can kill good guys too but it works so if your just patrolling the plants their feeding on use one of the other applicators , mix a small batch and try it on a few and see how long it takes to kill them if mix is strong enough they should die in a minute or two

had a friend with a mulberry tree that was being devoured and it was a big tree 30 ft tall we sprayed it and within a min or 2 they were falling out of the tree like rain they covered the ground we killed thousands . Talked to him the nxt year and they weren't near as bad may have killed them before the reproduced.

Thanks garden Guy! I'll give that a try.

Candace, I appreciate your input and in years previous to 2014, I had done like you said and just hand picked them. And it was fine. Last year I started out doing the same thing but soon became too overwhelmed by them. I had never seen anything like that degree of infestation.

I have grapes and the Japanese Beetles will eat every leaf so I bought a beetle trap and hung it in the bushes a distance of about 20 yards away. Things went from bad to worse and my yard was overrun with J. Beetles. Living in the city is a bad place to use beetle traps. They need to be placed farther away than a regular neighborhood yard. This year I am working with milky spore. I used nothing last year and had better results than with the traps. I found a remedy online that said to get a bucket and fill it with water and dishsoap and put it under the plants. Use a butterfly net and catch the beetles and put them in the soapy water. Use about a half cup soap. The soapy water will kill the beetles and the decaying beetles put off an odor that lets the other beetles know it is not a safe area. The bugs are chemically driven so it made sense. It worked better than the beetle traps but I find the bugs disgusting and it does not eliminate them so you are catching beetles often to keep the solution fresh. Sometimes its just too hot or rains and you have to start over. So this year I am putting down milky spore . I may take my Beetle trap down to the railroad tracks and put some pheromones in it there. Since milky spore takes more than a year to become effective I may be fighting them on all fronts this year. If you use the trap make sure it is far enough away from your yard and plants.

I saw the plants guys saying to spray dish soap and water on the beetles it does kill them but some plants will not tolerate the dish soap solution on the leaves. My grape leaves will burn if they get a soap and water solution on them I have tried that. So if you are going to use this do a test spot on your plants and avoid doing it in the heat of the day when plants are more likely to burn.