Latest News
Researchers in Pennsylvania and Michigan have started a full-court press in providing growers with information on the latest pest monitoring and control tips.
The warmer than usual winter and balmy start to spring has Beth Gugino, plant pathologist at Penn State, concerned about pathogens that may have lived on plant tissue that didn’t die over winter.
When Donna Fisher's 12-year-old son, Matthew, woke up one morning complaining of back pain, she thought he had just slept awkwardly. "I started to rub his back and he said, 'You have to stop — that hurts,' " said Fisher, a New Kensington resident. When Fisher called to check on him later that day, Matthew said his older brother, Sean, told him he had a blackhead on his back.
Because of the very mild winter, some of the area's most annoying pests never went dormant, making this spring "horrendous" for ticks and fleas, one local doctor says. The size and strength of the stink bug population is left up to anyone's guess.
A manufacturer has pulled a controversial pesticide from the American market, surprising both growers and environmentalists who have warned that it poses serious hazards.
Monday night was sleepless for Adam Voll, who spent the wee hours fanning apple trees and irrigating peach trees at his family's farm in Butler County, where the temperature fell to 19 degrees, damaging at least some of the crops.
Although the growing season hasn’t even started, there’s already a bumper crop — of a critter that really ticks people off.
Warm weather beckons us outdoors. It also brings out the bugs. Both of them together can be a dangerous combination. Especially if it's blood-sucking deer ticks that latch themselves onto your skin and can cause a painful and debilitating disease.
Christmas tree scouting reports for the 2012 growing season are now available online at the Pennsylvania IPM Program's website and on the 1-800 PENN IPM hotline.
A mild winter that’s ending with an early warm-up can be a great thing for sun lovers and folks with an aversion to the cold. But it can also cause some problems: • a potential for ruined fruit crops. • an early start for some allergies. • and the early appearance of some stinging insects.
The brown marmorated stink bug — an invasive species officials have been worried about for more than a year — has been confirmed in Markleton. The voracious plant-eater, identified by scientists at Pennsylvania State University, was found by Tony Marich in his home.
A small, glitter-green insect that has killed more than 50 million ash trees in the Midwest and beyond has arrived in the Philadelphia region. Officials had both dreaded and expected it - just not this soon.
U.S. poison centers answer more than four million calls each year. That’s one call every eight seconds! This March marks the 50th anniversary of National Poison Prevention Week. In honor of this important occasion, the U.S. EPA is hosting a conference call on poison prevention with Administrator Lisa P. Jackson on Monday, March 19 at 10:30am EDT.
When Dr. Larry Hull entered the world of land-grant university tree fruit entomologists in 1972, integrated pest management was just the new kid on the block. The idea of IPM was to draw back from the heavy reliance on chemical pesticides and to integrate a diverse group of pest control tactics, most of which were just ideas that needed to be developed.
A dead Camponotus leonardi ant infected by Ophiocordyceps unilateralis s.l, a brain-manipulating fungus. The fungus has grown stalks from the ant's head and the bulbous, reddish tissue on the stalks are ascomata (spore producing bodies), from which spores are shot out nightly to infect new hosts.
Pennsylvania’s fruit orchards remain free of the Plum Pox virus. That’s the good news relayed by State Agriculture Secretary George Greig, reporting on the results of a survey conducted last summer in Adams, Cumberland, Franklin and York counties.
It appears growers are at least doing their part to control the brown marmorated stink bug, or Asian stink bug as it is now referred to, as evidenced by their apparent decline in numbers in orchards last season.
Martin Overline doesn't like to brag, so he leaves it to others to say what he will not: He ranks among the best mouse men on the East Coast. He doesn't breed mice or collect them for study. He kills them. Sends them on their furry, four-footed journey to that giant mousetrap in the sky. And metes out similar fates to other creeping, crawling pests.
David Mortensen, a weed ecologist at Penn State University, predicts that weeds will evolve resistance to new herbicides too. He says it's a kind of treadmill, where farmers constantly need new weedkillers. "When one herbicide fails, you add a second herbicide, and then a third herbicide to the package. And I am convinced that this is not a sustainable path forward," he says.
Steve Jacobs. Jacobs, a senior extension associate with the Pennsylvania State University Department of Entomology, talked about the brown marmorated stink bug at a recent Chicago pest management conference.
