Master Gardeners offer spotted lanternfly advice for fall, winter
Gardeners, beware: The menace presented by the invasive spotted lanternfly will change with the seasons but not go away altogether over the winter, environmental experts say.
The spotted lanternfly, a brown-and-red-winged leaf-hopping insect, is an invasive species across much of the country. The bug has been found in Pennsylvania since 2014 and was first sighted on the eastern side of the state in Berks County, according to the state Department of Agriculture.
The spotted lanternfly is known for weakening and destroying crops and plants, as well as causing a nuisance for homeowners through its sticky excrement.
Penn State Butler Extension Master Gardeners hotline representative Mary Reefer said that while adult spotted lanternflies will die off as the weather gets colder, their eggs will remain.
“The adults don’t live over winter, but the eggs do,” she said. “That’s the problem with fall and winter, because that’s the time to look for the egg masses and destroy them if you can. Unfortunately, most of the egg masses are laid above reach. The statistic is that 95% of them you can’t reach, and we certainly don’t recommend getting ladders out and looking for them in trees.”
The insects’ eggs look like a smear of mud across a surface, often tree bark, she explained.
“That’s just the covering. Underneath are the eggs, and they look like little strings of sesame seeds,” she said. “When you try to destroy the eggs, you have to make sure you get to the eggs, that mudlike covering often cracks and breaks off.”
The spotted lanternfly can lay eggs on a variety of surfaces, so residents should check their car bumpers, lawn furniture, and car wheel wells, she said.
“Any hard surface, they find a way to lay their eggs,” she said. “That’s why they're spreading so much, because they lay on the cars, and they lay on railroad trains, so the railways are particularly vulnerable. That’s an easy way for them to move quite a distance. You really have to look all around as you’re putting your summer tools and furniture and pots away that they might have some eggs on them.”
Removing the eggs is relatively simple if they’re reachable, Reefer explained. The egg masses can be scraped off of the tree with a narrow, flat surface, such as a putty knife or plastic card.
"Scrape it down, make sure you break through that outer coating, and they say to put it into a container that has rubbing alcohol or hand sanitizer in it to kill them, but you can also just squash them,” Reefer said.
Despite their ease of physical removal, the height at which the eggs are deposited sometimes makes them difficult to deal with. The Penn State Extension’s guide to removing the eggs even warns that “this method may reduce the number of nymph or adult (spotted lanternflies) you see later in the year but most likely will not eliminate the population completely from your area.”
“There’s nothing you can spray on them; that covering really protects them, and the extension doesn’t recommend trying to reach them with a ladder or anything like that,” Reefer said. “Consumers can try to kill ones they see that are reachable, but so many are not reachable, and that’s why they continue to be a problem. They are hard to kill when they are nymphs and adults, because they jump so well, and they’re hard to kill when they’re eggs because the eggs are out of reach.”
Earlier in the year, 42 members of the House of Representatives across 13 states, including 14 representatives from Pennsylvania, signed a letter urging the U.S. Department of Agriculture to provide more support to combat the impact of the spotted lanternfly.
Much of Pennsylvania is in a spotted lanternfly quarantine zone, meaning that state regulations require businesses to have a permit if they move regulated items, such as landscaping waste, pallets or outdoor household items, in or out of the zone.
Butler County is not in the quarantine zone yet, though spotted lanternflies have been sighted within the county. The neighboring counties of Armstrong, Allegheny, Beaver, and Mercer are included in the quarantine.
The nymphs, or juvenile bugs, will likely start to hatch in April, at which point the state will be able to look into insecticide programs to get rid of them.
Reefer encouraged people to report the bugs and eggs to the state if they see them, but noted that bigger clusters of bugs are a bigger deal.
“What we’re looking for is large populations,” she said. “Seeing one bug here or there is not an alarming thing, but if you see a tree that has 500 on them, that’s definitely reportable.”
