When cleaning up your yard and filling the bags for transport, PLEASE check every branch for lantern fly nymphs before going to the transfer station.
Some Lantern flies have already matured with soft speckled gray wings and lovely scarlet undersides when they take flight. The adults are extremely difficult to kill and a danger to the environment. So our best chance of eradicating the danger is to kill the nymphs now.
The black and red babies are elusive and, although they can’t fly yet, they can jump about 5 feet.
I came up with a Lantern Fly nymph killing system, and today, alone, I caught and killed at least 105 of them.
How Do You Do It?
If you have a plastic Dunkin’ or Cumberland Farms Iced drink cup put just about 1/8 cup of water inside. Add a splash of dish detergent and top it off with a layer of oil (vegetable or motor).
Go outside with the cup (and the lid) and track down the nymphs. They especially LOVE to congragate on the Tree Of Life (Chinese Sumac) which makes them that much easier to catch in the cup trap.
Simply take the open cup and place it under or in front of the nymph(s) and tap down hard on the branch or leaf where they’ve gathered, put the lid on quickly because they will jump and escape if there’s an opening. swirl the oily, soapy mixture around in the cup until the bugs are covered. they will suffocate and die.
If you see a dozen or more lined up on a branch, run the rim of the cup along the bottom of the branch and slide the lid along the top. A couple of them will jump off the branch and escape, and if you see these fugitives nearby, repeat the first method of tapping hard with the lid and get as many as you can one by one.
I’ve made a game out of it this week, 10 points for the smaller black ones, 25 points for the red ones and 100 points for an adult — a little sick, maybe, but It’s for the common good.
As the bottom of the cup fills up with the drowned bugs it makes for a more solid base for the newest captures to jump off of, so be sure to keep some of the liquid mixture in the bottom of the cup so you can swirl them to death.
However you do it, kill the numphs now, so we all will have less of a problem later.
Why Are They A Problem?
If you are unfamiliar with the dangers of the Lantern Fly, click HERE for a story (with photos) that Orange Live published last year.
Remember, make sure your brush is bug free before going to the transfer station.