Garden Club sponsors beetle workshop tomorrow

Thursday, 03 December 2009 11:19

The New Canaan Garden Club is sponsoring a free workshop, open to the public, on Friday, December 4, in the Sturgess Room at the New Canaan Nature Center, starting at 10 a.m. John Howe, New Canaan’s superintendent of parks and tree warden will share all there is to know about the increasing threat of the Asian long-horned beetle. Trained by scientists at the Connecticut Agriculture Experiment Station in New Haven, Howe will outline for participants the signs of the presence of the long-horned beetle as well as share real beetle specimens and discuss what steps the State of Connecticut must take should there be an infestation.

It is believed that Connecticut trees are in real danger of attack by the Asian long-horned beetle. Since August 1996, the beetle has been found in New York City, Long Island and New Jersey. Recently, Worcester, Mass., suffered a loss of trees as a result of an infestation. Many scientists see this as a turning point; not only has the beetle moved from the cities to an area more thickly covered with trees, but Massachusetts is eerily close to the southern edge of the great Northern hardwood forest, which includes millions of contiguous acres stretching to Canada and the Great Lakes.

The Asian long-horned beetle can kill a tree in three to five years. It is especially dangerous because it uses several species of hardwood trees as hosts — maple, elm, willow, birch, horse chestnut and poplar. Fortunately, oak and pine trees are not affected. Early detection of infestations and rapid treatment response are critical to successful eradication of the beetle, experts say.

These inch-long beetles, with antennas about twice as long, have a one-year cycle. The female beetles chew niches in the host tree bark and lay individual eggs in each niche — 35 to 90 eggs per female. Eggs hatch and the caterpillar-like larvae feed under the bark and then tunnel into the heartwood where they mature. They spend the winter protected in the tree, pupate in May and June, emerge in July, chewing a round three-eighths-foot to five-eighths-inch exit hole. They are around through the summer and into the fall.

Smithsonian Magazine, in its November 2009 issue, addresses the devastation experienced in Worcester and points out that the Asian long-horned beetle is only one of many invasive insect species. Experts believe that as many as 600 of the world’s high-risk insect pests could still establish themselves in the United States. Public awareness is critical to the prevention of wide-range damage by any one of these creatures.