In every garden, in the country or in the garden, or rather in any suburban area, you can find a huge number of insects, which is not surprising: this is their habitat. Some species are harmless to humans and plants, while others can cause significant damage to plantations. One of these insects is a green bug.
Pest Features
Officially, insects of this species are called forest tree shields. The people called the insect a bug-stink bug. This name was due to the strong smell that remains wherever the bug crawled. Moreover, the smell remains long enough. Wood shields do not eat berries, but their smell makes it impossible to use the crop: if a green bug settles on raspberries, the aroma and taste of the fruits will be completely ruined.
The body of an adult tree shield is oval and wide, and the head is small, with long antennae and proboscis. The dense shell, which consists of individual scales, reliably protects the insect. The color of the bug changes depending on the season: in early spring it is light green, like young leaves on trees, closer to autumn it becomes dark green, and when the leaves begin to turn yellow, its color changes to brownish yellow. Thus, the color serves as protection against predators.
Breeding
During the season, the shieldworms lay their eggs twice. They choose the inside of the sheets to house their offspring. Within two weeks, the larvae emerge from the eggs and immediately begin to feed. The food for the young is leaf juice. To get it, the larva punctures the leaf with a sharp proboscis, sucks juice from it, instead of which it admits poison. Once inside the leaf, the poison leads to its withering. After this, the affected parts of the leaves dry out, break off and crumble. If there are a lot of such leaves on the plant, it will dry out - this is what can happen if a green bug settles on the site. The photo above perfectly demonstrates the consequences of his activities.
The larvae of each generation stage (a total of 5) are covered with a hard shell. To go to the next stage, you need to get out of the shell, and this is quite difficult. Therefore, not all larvae manage to survive to adulthood. Even more larvae die from birds and predatory insects, which also significantly reduces their population. Thus, their number is rarely so large that it can cause the death of bushes and trees.
The situation is completely different in the fields where cereal crops grow: a green bug causes the cereals to cease to bear fruit and then die.
Habitat
The green bug lives throughout Europe. He lives wherever trees and shrubs grow. Gardens, forest plantations, green lawns - these are places where you can meet the pest. But even if he himself is not visible, damaged leaves will suggest that this insect lives here.
Most often, raspberry bushes, currants, gooseberries are affected. If they are not nearby, then he is served as food:
- succulent herbs;
- deciduous trees;
- any berry bushes;
- cereals.
Preventative measures
To significantly reduce the number of woody shields, most often even agricultural measures help. To do this, you only need to find out the features of their wintering: the shields are hidden under the fallen leaves and remain there until the cold passes. As soon as the heat comes, starving insects with renewed energy are taken to eat everything that is available to them and acceptable as food. But if in autumn, just before the frosts, you remove the fallen leaves along with other plant debris and burn all this, the number of shields remaining on the site will be minimal. According to experienced gardeners, if you also dig the soil, then next year there will hardly be at least one green garden bug on the site. There are other ways to remove from the site of the shield.
Mechanical removal
In other words, you need to collect insects with your hands. This is the most harmless way, but it is ineffective: it is difficult to see an insect in green foliage of the same color. Moreover, there is very little chance of finding egg laying, so the number of insects is unlikely to decrease in the area with this method of dealing with them. In addition, it is necessary to collect the wood shields constantly, as new insects will appear, and if they are not removed, the number of pests will begin to increase.
The use of folk remedies
The advantage of this method of eliminating wood shields is complete safety for all living things, from people to plants. Low cost is also important for many. The disadvantages include the low efficiency of home remedies, since the green bug does not die from them, but simply leaves the site for a while. To insects do not come back, it is necessary to repeat the treatment periodically.
To remove pests, you need:
- Dissolve dry mustard powder (10: 1) in cool water and immediately spray all the plants.
- For 5 days, insist onion peel. To do this, take 10 grams of husk on 10 liters of hot water. Mix and set aside. Processing is carried out 3 times a day with an interval of 5 days.
- Make tincture of bitter wormwood and treat infected plants if, for example, green bugs on currants are found.
- To scare away the pest, use the black cohosh plant (tsimitsifuga) - plant it in different places on the site.
Other methods of struggle
How to get rid of green bugs on plants, if there are a lot of pests? Both of the above methods in such cases cannot have the expected effect, so you have to turn to the help of chemistry. Although to date there are no insecticides designed to destroy wood shields, there are other tools that will help clean the area of pests. All of them differ in the mechanism of action and in the way insects penetrate the body:
- Contact. Used most often. Means penetrate the body if the drug contacts any part of the body of the pest.
- Intestinal. Insecticides of this type begin to affect bedbugs only after they enter their digestive system.
- Systemic This type of drug penetrates into the tissues of plants, after which the leaves protecting the leaves die.
Experts advise you to choose insecticides depending on the situation and begin to exterminate the wood shield only when its numbers really begin to pose a threat to the site.
Tools for the destruction of wood shields
Since the stink bug was not included in the list of dangerous insects, to date there are no drugs designed to destroy this particular type of pest. The most popular in this case are organophosphorus drugs with a wide impact:
- Fufanon.
- "Phosphamide".
- Actellik.
- "Karbofos".
The advantages of their use include high efficiency - 1-2 treatments of the affected plants are enough to clear the garden of wood shields. The disadvantage of this method is the high cost and toxicity of the drugs: they are dangerous for both people and animals, and they also poison the soil and cultivated products. They destroy chemicals and
beneficial insects, so their use is not always justified. But this is not the main thing - after just a few treatments, the green bug does not respond to the drug, as resistance arises.