Spotted Lanternfly Banding 2020

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- Hello, and thanks for joining us to learn about trapping and banding, to capture a spotted lanternfly.

For those residents who would like to avoid use of chemicals to manage spotted lanternfly, we do have some good options.

We can use circle traps of a couple of different kinds, or we can use sticky banding around the tree trunk, and either can work quite well.

A caution up front though, if you are using sticky tapes, those tapes must be surrounded by protective netting or mesh so that we don't inadvertently capture songbirds and other small mammals or pollinating insects that are really valuable to protect.

So there are many kinds of sticky tapes available some in narrower width some in wider, a number of different manufacturers.

The one we're using this mornings is a sticky fly paper, about nine inches in width, which is really economical, but difficult to handle in the full width.

So the first thing I'm going to do, is to show you that we can score these bands in three inch widths, 4 1/2 whatever you choose.

But the narrower bands are much easier to handle than the four width.

A word to the wise, when handling these sticky fly papers, it's always wise to turn over a tab, turn it in on itself so that you have a convenient non-sticky handle.

So we've scored our band and we're ready to take them to the tree.

And what we want to do is to measure the girth that we're going to need to surround tree and cut a piece of a fiberglass windows screening, or similar mesh, something heavier than a light gauze fabric, but not so stiff that it can't be manipulated on the tree.

So window screening works extremely well and is very easy to use.

So here we have a tape that was mounted some time ago, protect you with the windows screening.

And I want to show how simple it is to replace these bands.

So you can simply let that the screening unstick the bands from itself, which gets easier as the tapes age, and then something roll the tape in on itself, trappings all the dead insects and debris inside.

And then it's very convenient to carry this right to the trash and dispose of it.

Then you can simply replace the band and lower the screen, making sure that everything's in place to keep unwanted by catch off of that sticky band.

So we've prepared our tapes, we have the width that we want to work with and we have our protective covering.

So, now it's a very easy matter simply to unroll the width of tape around the diameter of the trunk.

Again somewhere around the four foot level is usually good, and you're simply gonna unroll this, pulling it on, because you don't want major gaps for the insect to climb underneath it.

So you can wrap it back on itself, use that super sticky quality to your advantage.

And then simply tear it or cut it loose and it will stick to itself.

If you do have large gaps underneath, you can secure those with push pins, just to be sure that the insects are going to contact the tape.

So this is now ready to catch spotted lanternfly all four stages of nymph have this climbing habit the adults certainly do as well.

So this is good for all of these stages of spotted lanternfly except of course for the eggs.

But we're not finished yet, we must not leave this tape as it is because songbirds, bats, butterflies, honeybees, lots of pollinating insects can also get stuck on a tape like this.

You can secure those with push pins, just to be sure that the insects are going to contact the tape.

- [Announcer] Here you can see our example band, ready to catch spotted lanternfly.

If you have any questions, please contact your local extension office or find us at extension.psu.edu.