How to deal with cockchafer larvae | Website about growing plants

It is very difficult to fight the larvae of the May beetle (Khrushchev), but it is absolutely necessary, because the harm from these pests is very noticeable. At the beginning of their development (“hatching” from eggs), they are small and kept in groups. They feed on dead organic matter, but as they grow, they begin to damage the living roots of plants: both herbaceous and tree-like.

Poisoning larvae is not only pointless, but even harmful to other soil inhabitants, for example, earthworms, and also ground beetles and other predatory insects, whose diet includes the larvae of the cockchafer. If larvae are discovered during digging, they must be selected. And also, in order to reduce the number of the cockchafer and its larvae, you need to know the life cycle of the insect and its “predilections”.

So, the May beetle was nicknamed for a reason: it appears in our gardens in late April-early May, just during the period of mass flowering of fruit trees. These rather large brown-red beetles love to feed on cherry, plum, apple, and currant flowers. They don’t disdain leaves either. During 1-2 months of active summer, beetles, if there are many of them, can greatly harm plants.

It is difficult to combat them with chemical means. But, given that beetles are active at dusk and spend daylight hours in the treetops, they can simply be shaken off onto some canopy spread under the treetops and collected. May beetles are especially passive at temperatures below +15 degrees.

Of course, manual collection takes a lot of time, but if it is done in the spring, the pests will not have time to mate and, therefore, lay eggs in the soil. If this is not done, the female cockchafers will lay eggs in the soil (up to seventy each), from which, after 1-1.5 months, voracious larvae will hatch, which, before pupating and then turning into beetles, will live in the soil and, therefore, , feed for 3-4 years. Often, summer residents discover the offspring of the cockchafer only after the plant, the roots of which have been eaten by the larvae, dies.

In winter, the larvae “burrow” deep into the soil to avoid freezing. Knowing this, you can reduce the number of larvae by digging up the soil in the garden late in the fall.You can specially prepare warm places for the larvae in the garden by digging holes and filling them with half-rotted manure and compost. With the onset of frost, the contents of such traps are scattered. The larvae, once on the surface, die from low temperatures.

The cockchafer really likes to settle and breed on sandy soils. It is easier for them to penetrate into it to lay eggs, and the larvae are more active in damaging it, since the sandy soil is poor in dead plant debris and they attack the roots of cultivated plants, root crops, and severely damage potato tubers.

Some of the larvae can be destroyed by digging in the warm season, when they are in the top layer of soil. Only the soil should not be dry, otherwise the larvae, in search of a damp place, can burrow quite deeply even in summer.

This is what a trap for cockchafers looks like.

Turfed areas are not very attractive to cockchafers: it is more difficult for females to break through a thick layer of turf into the soil to lay eggs there. If you do not have the opportunity or desire to sod the area, then use mulching with cut straw, wood shavings, and pieces of bark.

It is effective to sow garden rows with perennial legumes. The fact is that beetles cannot live in soils rich in nitrogen. And legumes just saturate the soil with nitrogen. Sowing also helps mustard green manure. When embedded in the soil, the plants repel cockchafers. The pest also does not like other cruciferous crops: the more of them growing in the garden, the less chafers there are.

Watering the soil with an infusion of onion peels helps fight larvae. A third of a bucket of husks is filled with water (to the top), left for five days, diluted with water 1:1 and watered.Clearing several acres of land in this way is, of course, problematic, but in a small area you can test the effectiveness of the method. True, you will have to water it several times.

To combat cockchafers, you can prepare traps from an old basin by coating its walls with grease and placing some kind of light source on the bottom. Not only cockchafers, but also other pests will come to the light. You just need to do this in May. May beetles are also caught in traps made of plastic bottles with diluted jam or syrup, which summer residents usually suitable for wasps. You just need to hang them not at the end of the season, when the beetles, having completed their mission of procreation, die, but at the time of their active summer, that is, in the spring.

I must say that they have now released a very good, safe drug “Nemabakt”, it copes excellently with many soil pests, including beetles. Manufacturers claim that it is completely safe for humans and other beneficial garden inhabitants.

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