George, I wonder why the blister beetles are so bad there. Are there any commercial growers near you growing soybeans?

Thanks for sharing your story.

I agree that neem is not a quick fix, but it is a good fix if you don't need an instant kill, and I don't think it harms beneficials as much as some other organic products do.

Your poor arm! I am glad it doesn't hurt because just looking at it makes me think that it would hurt.

I bet I haven't seen more than 10 blister beetles so far this summer, and only 2 of them were together. I usually see them in what we jokingly refer to as onsies and twosies. I cannot imagine having them in huge numbers. I did not replace my sweet autumn clematis after they killed it about 6 or 8 years ago because that was the one place where I'd have dozens, if not hundreds, of them at once. That makes me wonder if y'all might have one of the native clematis vines in your area and if they might attrack huge blister beetle populations.

I also rarely get the grasshopper outbreaks that are as bad as you and Dorothy both see in your worst years. Even in our worst year, I don't think I've had as many at once as you have had in your worst years. Maybe it is that y'all live in the Green Country and all that green is just more attractive to the pests than our grasslands are.

Dawn

Yikes! George, that looks mean! Is it only when you squish them this happens? They don't sting you if you brush up against them by accident? Will chickens eat them or does this blister juice make them unpalatable? (Maybe they are the habanero of chicken cusine?) Knock wood, I haven't noticed any. If it weren't so hot, some time in the garden with a magnifying glass would be a good idea.

I have heard people say that using a lot of neem changes the taste of the plants. Supposedly the plants can take it up from the roots. I've slept since then, but I believe it was used on a continuing basis, maybe even as a soil drench. I am not fond of the smell. I wonder if it would keep flea beetles off eggplant?

I saw what I "think" is a blister beetle this evening. I had to google it. It was a fairly large red beetle, with a thick black horizontal stripe across the back. Is that what they look like?

George, I have read that one type gets into alfalfa hay and if a horse gets too many it can be lethal. It is curious why you have so many. I normally have a few, but I haven't seen any this year.

The threat of blister beetle poisoning to horses is a very real threat, and if a horse ingests enough blister beetles while eating hay, it can be lethal to the horse within a few hours. As far as I know, this is no cure. At lower levels it can make horses sick with symptoms like colic, but at that lower level the horse usually survives. I know horse people who avoid using alfalfa hay (unless they grow it themselves or buy it from the first cutting) for that reason, but in really horrific drought years, sometimes you have to buy whatever kind of hay you can find that is being trucked in because the hay shortage is so severe that you can't be choosy. Here in OK if you grow alfalfa for hay, you usually can get your first cutting cut, baled and stored well before the blister beetles show up. I don't think I ever see any of the blister beetles before July and most first hay cuttings down here are in May.

I don't use neem often enough for it to affect the plants, Amy, but I've read the same thing about neem being systemic. Genearlly I never would use a systemic pesticide (not even an organic one) because I don't want to eat a plant that has taken up the pesticide within itself, so I probably don't use neem more than 3 times a year, and I just spray it on whatever specific plant has a problem. I don't like the smell of it either, but if you need to call in the big guns for a big pest, neem's a great choice.

If it is any comfort, George, blister beetles seem to arrive in mass, do their thing, and they go away. OSU says they have only one generation here in OK, so I guess that is something for which to be grateful.

I found another swarm last night, and they had some really tiny ones in there.

My friend Ron Cook commented to me that he has used their attraction to light to kill them. He hangs a light over a kid's sled, filled with soapy water. He's practically filled the thing with dead beetles! I need to try this.

I don't recall a blister beetle with a red stripe on it. But I did a search on Photobucket and saw some which were definitely blister beetles and came in colors I have never seen. Here's a picture of the striped blister beetle I'm dealing with.

<a href="http://photobucket.com/images/blister%20beetle" target="_blank"><img src="http://i57.photobucket.com/albums/g223/cicada_pics/beetles/100_2829.jpg" border="0" alt="blister beetle photo: blister beetle 100_2829.jpg"/></a>

Thank you. I don't know what these things are, then. I saw some photos on google that looked very similar, but who knows. It looks mean to me, whatever it is.

I've only had black ones, striped ones and, rarely, an ashgray one, but they do come in a variety of colors worldwide. I'm not sure how many species are found in the USA, but worldwide there's an estimated 7500 species of them, so there's room for a lot of variation. There's also some closely related beetles that are fungal beetles.

I have seen them in all colors out here, mostly black. They grow in numbers if I don't weed eat the Johnson grass along the edges of the property (same with grasshoppers).