Source: U Wisconsin Vegetable Entomology.
He was hanging out on my Waltham butternuts. Waiting for his ladyfriend to arrive, no doubt. Now terminated with extreme prejudice.
The squash vine borer (SVB) is back in town. Continue reading Post G22-024: First SVB of the year.
Source: Clemson University, original photo credit David Cappaert, Bugwood.org
I saw my first Japanese beetle of the season today.
Is it really that time already? Yep, sure is. The Japanese beetles are out, which means more garden pests are soon to follow. In particular, this means that the squash vine borer should be arriving more-or-less now, in this region.
Insects emerge almost like clockwork, based on the cumulative springtime warming of air and soil. In particular, Japanese beetles emerge right around 1000 growing degree days of warmth.
Growing degree days in a year are calculated as the cumulative time during which the air temperature exceeds 50F. In Virginia, Virginia Tech would be the place to get information. A nice general reference is available from the American Public Gardens Association. The most commonly-used basis is 50 degrees because that’s the temperature at which most plants and insects begin to grow.
Last year, in Northern Virginia, we passed 1000 growing degree days on or about June 11, 2021 (Post G21-033). And this year, we passed that mark on June 11, 2022, per the Cornell University degree-day counter.
Source: Cornell University degree-day counter.
In short, the only thing that’s surprising about this is that I’m surprised.
For me, it’s now time to buy and hang a couple of Japanese beetle traps. I use the Bag-a-Bug brand. It’s not that I think these are necessarily more effective than any other. It’s just that, as an economist, I get a chuckle out of the carefully-calibrated prices of the traps, lures, and bags. All the parts are available, so, technically, it looks like you could keep re-using the same trap year after year. In practice, the prices are such that ever-so-slightly cheaper to chuck everything and buy new traps every year. There’s no way that could possibly be coincidence.
There is considerable controversy over whether or not to use Japanese beetle traps.
The controversy isn’t really about environmental impact. This is, after all, an invasive non-native species. To the best of my understanding, birds around here will only eat the adults if there’s absolutely nothing else available. So I don’t think anybody sheds a tear for a dead Japanese beetle.
Nor are the traps toxic. These are lure-and-pheremone traps. They attract Japanese beetles, then physically trap them. As far as I have ever seen, they are absolutely specific to Japanese beetles. Nothing else gets killed, and there are no pesticides involved.
Instead, the controversy is all about how smart (or dumb) it is to have these in your yard. Maybe all you do is lure even more Japanese beetles into your garden, and so increase your beetle damage. Completely respectable sources of gardening information urge you NOT to use Japanese beetle traps.
And yet I persist. I looked at the research showing that traps increase crop damage, read up a bit, and decided that putting Japanese beetle traps directly in your garden is, in fact, not very smart. To me, that’s what the research seemed to show. Hanging widely-spaced traps in the middle of an orchard (which is the method used in the research typically cited) turns out to be a fairly bad idea. That did, in fact, increase beetle damage relative to adjacent areas without traps.
Instead, I think you want to place the traps downwind and away from your garden. Not in your garden. Not upwind of your garden.
The idea is to place these so as to intercept beetles flying upwind, lured by the smell of your delicious garden plants. At this latitude, prevailing winds are out of the northwest, so my traps get placed south-east of the garden itself, as far away as I can place them in my back yard.
You don’t use these traps to lure beetles away from your garden, or away from your plants. (Which would mean placing them upwind of your garden — don’t do that.) Instead, the idea is to intercept beetles that are flying upwind, toward you garden.
In any case, I know what the scholarly research says. I just happen to disagree with their blanket conclusion that these traps increase damage on your plants.
My observation is that, placed downwind and away from the garden, Japanese beetle traps work exceptionally well. It seems to take about a week to go from beetles everywhere, to nary a beetle in sight. Maybe that’s just by chance, but that observation — plus a couple of quart bags full of dead beetles — says otherwise.
Finally, there’s a reason that I’m on the lookout every year. As soon as everybody realizes the Japanese beetles are here, the stores (and even Amazon) will sell out of Japanese beetle traps. Snapped up by all the people who, like myself, ignore the expert advice on this issue.
So I’m off to the local big box store to pick up a couple of traps. If this year is like last year, in another two weeks there won’t be a trap left on the shelves.
The U.S. is still seeing an average of 31 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, same as it was more than three weeks ago. But what was an offsetting jumble of increases and decreases across the regions, three weeks back, now seems to be getting organized into a coherent downslope for the U.S. Omicron-II (BA.2.12.1) wave. Continue reading Post #1538: COVID-19 trend, finishing out the data week. Looks like the peak is finally getting organized
The U.S. now stands at 31 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population, not really very different from where we were over three weeks ago. That said, it’s about time for this latest wave to peak, and maybe this last little dip in cases is the start of that.
It’s tough to say. The indicators are mixed. When I run all the information through a blender and ponder the resulting data smoothie, I’m guessing this is the peak of the Omicron-II wave in the U.S.
Continue reading Post #1537: COVID-19 to 6/15/2022, now 31/100K, maybe that was the peak
Boring is as boring does. The U.S. remains at 32 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population. Continue reading Post #1536: COVID-19 to 6/14/2022, no change, BA.4+BA.5 now >20% of new cases
The official count of daily new COVID-19 cases rounds to 32, roughly the same as it was three weeks ago. The weekly-percent-change numbers are meaningless due to the final echoes of the Memorial Day holiday. Continue reading Post #1535: COVID-19 trend to 6/13/2022, still at 32/100K/day.
This is in response to an article in today’s Washington Post, about the unusual nature of the 2021-22 season for flu and other respiratory viruses.
It is of course a) based on anecdotes (at one point, last month, one hospital saw …), b) relies on a handful of quotes, and c) ignores any systematic data on the relevant issues.
Basically, the thrust of the issue is that there’s now some huge problem with flu and other respiratory viruses, caused by COVID. Which all the COVID deniers then immediately assume “cause by our response to COVID”.
What the Post completely, totally, and utterly fails to mention is that the 2021-22 flu season has been incredibly mild by historical standards. Just by way of illustration here’s cumulative hospitalizations for flu, 2021-22 versus the last fully-normal flu season (2018-19):
Source: CDC Fluview.
By eye, looks like flu hospitalizations for this most recent season were about one-fifth the normal level.
In other words, this flu season isn’t some sort of man-made disaster. It’s not some sort of natural disaster. Fact is, under no stretch of the imagination can you consider it a disaster.
But looming disaster is the gist of the Post article. And the gist of most of the comments. In the end, since there’s nothing actionable about the article, all it does is feed the trolls.
All of which could have been avoided if the Post had started with this one simple fact first. But then it wouldn’t have been such wonderful click-bait.
The seasonal pattern of flu has been disrupted this year. Normally — again from CDC — about 1.5% of all hospital OPD visits would be for influenza-like illness at this time of year. But this year, it’s now 2.5%. That’s interesting, I’m pretty sure that passes any measures of being statistically significantly different from the average prior year. But that’s all it is.
The COVD-19 new case rate is unchanged at 33 new cases per 100K population per day, pretty much the same as it was three weeks ago.
Data source for this and other graphs of new case counts: Calculated from The New York Times. (2021). Coronavirus (Covid-19) Data in the United States. Retrieved 6/11/2022, from https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data.” The NY Times U.S. tracking page may be found at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html
I can look back to my May 25 posting and see that my best guess, at that time, is that we were then three weeks from the peak of this wave. That was based on the behavior of the Northeast region, which led the nation by three weeks and had just peaked at that time.
From three weeks ago:
OK, if that actually turns out, then the Omicron-II wave will start to decline early next week.
So, while it seems like it’s taking forever for this most recent wave to dissipate, that’s not true. As yet, it’s taking just about as much time as you’d have guessed, based on the behavior of the Northeast region. And since that region has now formed a nice, neat top, there’s no reason to change that prediction.
That’s what I would call the predictable dynamics of the Omicron-II (BA.2.12.1) wave. As goes the Northeast, so goes the nation.
Whether or not the newest variants (BA.4 and BA.5) will change that, it’s too soon to tell. My guess, in a just-prior post, is that they won’t.
It’s a dreary, rainy day here in Northern Virginia. Which is the perfect time to consult Virginia and national mortality data on COVID-19 and death by all causes.
I’ll close this post by looking COVID-19 mortality data from Virginia, where we have relatively timely information on official new cases and deaths by age. My point being to show how few individuals have died from COVID-19 during the Omicron-II (BA.2.12.1) wave.
I’ve expressed that as a table of odds, below. A randomly selected individual had a one-in-X chance of dying from COVID-19 over this period.
Source: Calculated from Virginia Department of Health data. Population denominators are 2019 Census projection for Virginia.
In the past two months or so (the duration of this COVID-II wave, so far, in Virginia), the odds of a child dying from COVID were about 1 in 600,000. The odds of death for someone age 85+ was about 1 in 900.
Just to benchmark that, based on the U.S. life table for 2018, a man my age has a 1.4% annual risk of death from all causes. Pro-rating that to two months, and comparing to the COVID-19 data for the 55-64 age group, risk of dying from something other than COVID is about 25x higher than risk of dying from COVID.
Not quite as low as the likelihood of being struck by a meteor, but not high on my list of worries.
If I factor in vaccination and booster status — most deaths are still among the un-vaccinated — I’m more than 300x more likely to have died of something other than COVID, than to have died of COVID during this most recent (BA.2.12.1) wave.
At that level, I worry more about cholesterol than COVID. And that’s a good thing.
Am I still masking up in indoor public spaces? Sure, why not. It’s free and somewhat effective, and there still is quite a bit of COVID-19 in circulation. But, objectively, at this point, I can name a couple-dozen things that I need to worry about, regarding risk-of-death, far more than I need to worry about COVID,
The U.S. is still at 33 new COVID-19 cases per 100K per day, where it has been for roughly the past three weeks.
It is now time for the fourth and final phase of my 2022 tomato strategy, heat-tolerant tomatoes.
I outlined the overall approach in Post G21-001. There, among other things, I listed the varieties I’m planting. To recap, the goal is a continuous supply of tomatoes all summer long, with a large batch of paste tomatoes for producing dried tomatoes. Continue reading Post G22-022: Heat-tolerant tomatoes
