Hello all,

I've been seeing damage on some of my plants every morning and assumed it was due to beetles as we have a hundred in the pool every morning, though I rarely see them on my plants. I have very few flowers-- mostly a lot of small conifers, japanese maples, hosta and coleus. The coleus have been holey every morning so I went around the garden with a flashlight tonight and sure enough, beetles everywhere. Japanese beetles, oriental beetles, a similar-sized brown one that I am going to say might be a chafer beetle... even a few different smaller/skinnier/faster beetles. UGH. Too many beetles!

I did plant a flower this year, a clumping daisy (whoops-a-daisy), about a month ago-- it's just a baby and quite small still, maybe a foot high and wide with just a few flowers starting to open on it now. And tonight I saw at least 30 darn beetles on it! One leaf in particular was completely covered...EW.

So I took to google to see what I could do and it seems I may be kind of screwed already, as many suggest grub control which it seems to be too late for, even for preventing next year's issues- apparently these things should be applied in late spring/early summer. I went out and sprayed everything with Safer insecticidal soap bc I had it on hand, but the only bugs listed on the label are tiny soft-bodied things so I doubt it's going to help at all.

Due to the pool issue, I did hang up 2 beetle traps a couple weeks ago (and last summer as well) and I'm wondering if I should take them down. I bought them on amazon after reading tons of conflicting reviews-- yes, many people say that using them will just draw the entire neighborhood's beetles to your yard but in the end it seemed like even if I have to empty my traps every day bc they're all coming to me, then at least in time I will be keeping that many from laying eggs in my soil and in a couple years I will see next to no beetles. At least this was my hope, as that is what the "most popular" reviewer wrote about his experience with the traps I bought. And he updated his review a few times over a couple years. Anyway though, I have the traps up and yet the beetles aren't all going into them, are they?? No. They are not.

Anyone have any good advice? ...Leave the traps up and also buy some kind of spray to get the ones who choose the plants over the traps? Get rid of the traps and do something else entirely? I see a lot of people "knock them into a bucket of soapy water"... yeah I'm not going to be able to do that every night. First, I'm a little bug-phobic and second, who has time for that? I have small children and pets and an old house to take care of; there's no room in my schedule for nightly-beetle-bucketing.

I'm sad, and totally creeped out.

Thanks in advance,

Nicole