Week 5 – Pill Bug Soup
This week Maya and I returned to Pink Houses Community Farms! While we were there, I ran into some new cats that I hadn’t seen before. I suspect a cat colony may be nearby…
We set traps on Tuesday and did some scouting in the plants. We found a huge number of whiteflies laying eggs and living as larval scales on the plant leaves. The explosion of whitefly populations that happened in 4 weeks was crazy! We were also surrounded by white cabbage moths flying around the farms. While they were beautiful and added an almost mystical air to our scouting trip, it was concerning as we knew they were probably going to be laying eggs soon and the dreaded cabbageworm would take over the farm. Hopefully our scouting in August proves this suspicion wrong!
In addition to some serious pest number explosions, I also found a lot of promising beneficial predator. There were spiders all over the farms, on leaves and stems and walking in the ground. I managed to capture some nice pictures using one of the magnifying lenses as a macro lens for my phone! For anyone interested in budget nature photography, that’s a field tip!
Besides spiders, there were a lot of long-legged flies walking on brassica leaves and some lightning bugs hiding out on the lower stems. The most promising insect friend we found were lacewing adults! There were both green and brown lacewings. These insects are some of the most successful aphid predators, and they help reduce nearly all pest numbers significantly. Good news, considering how many pests we were seeing everywhere!
When we returned on Thursday, we picked up traps and prepared to identify insects. Looking into the pitfalls, we realized somehow for this collecting session we had a sort of pill bug soup. While we don’t count pill bugs for our data entry, we easily had at least 20 in each pitfall trap. The smell coming from the containers was terrible. We initially suspected that the pill bugs may be the principal suspects, but after we identified all the insects in the trap, we realized we had stink bugs floating at the bottom! The mystery was solved, and note was taken to keep an eye out for stink bug pests over the next few weeks. They can be notorious plant damagers.