Another gardening year, another invasive pest.
This year, I’ve seen a few cucumber beetles and a few Japanese beetles. And that’s about it, for garden pests. In particular, I haven’t seen a squash vine borer. Then again, I gave up on planting summer squash. Due to the squash vine borer.
And then there’s this thing, above. This, by contrast, seems to be all over my garden this year, chowing down on a wide variety of plants.
Based on Google image search, this is a nymph (immature stage) of the Eastern Boxelder Bug, Jadera haematoloma.
Which is a bit odd, really. Apart from never having seen this one before.
There are no boxelders near here. At least, none that I have ever noticed. And I do notice them, because the leaves of the boxelder are a dead ringer for poison ivy. Having grown up roaming fields and woods in Virginia, poison ivy is one of those things that’s now hard-wired in my brain.
But as an alternative host, they like silver maples, and those we have in abundance. Some very large silver maples have been in the process of dying off, a few hundred feet up the road from me, and I wonder if that has displaced some population of eastern boxelder bugs.
At any rate, the consensus of opinion is that these are mostly harmless. They feed by piercing and sucking, but nobody seems to suggest that they do a lot of damage to garden plants. And, unlike hard-shelled beetles, these are easily killed by a simple soap-and-water spray. So if they get out of hand, there is (at least in theory) an easy control measure.
So, for once, I’ll go the live-and-let-live route, for this latest garden pest. At least it’s a native species, and at least it doesn’t normally cause much damage.
