Spotted Lanternfly Circle Trap

(dramatic sounds)

- Hello, I'm Beth Finlay, master gardener, area coordinator for Penn State Extension in the Master Gardener Program.

Thanks for joining us to learn about trapping and banding to help manage spotted lanternfly.

For those residents who prefer to avoid chemical treatments, we do have a couple of good options, sticky tape, and a tree band around the trunk can work well with precautions.

And we also have a couple of models of circle traps, which are also very effective.

These are available commercially, and on the Penn State spotted lanternfly website, you can find instructions for making these at home from fairly common materials.

Both circle traps and sticky bands capitalize on the spotted lanternfly's habit of climbing up trees, tree trunks to feed, and they do that repeatedly.

If they get blown to the ground or soar to the ground, they will look for another tree trunk or vertical surface to climb.

So we can take advantage of that.

Circular traps can be adapted to trees of varying sizes, and there is a limit to the girth that they can completely cover, but that doesn't keep you from using them on larger trees, you just may not get the full coverage.

So we have two types of circular traps here.

They're really almost identical, but you'll see that there are two different kinds of capture containers.

One, a rigid plastic bottle, and the other, a disposable plastic bag.

I'm going to mount the circle trap with a plastic bag.

Both of these work quite well.

So again, we're going to work at about a four foot, four foot to five foot level.

These spotted lanternflies are going to be coming up from the bottom.

And the trick is to capture them on top of this screening, but inside the outer screenings, so that they get funneled up into the capture vehicle.

So, I'm going to place the wooden backstay flash against the tree.

This netting has several different settings where you can make the strings through, so you can cinch it appropriately to the size of the tree.

(chirping birds)

So, I'm going to tie that off to hold it securely, and I can always come back and snug it up if I need to.

These traps usually come with a double Velcro strip that you could put against the tree and against the wooden strip to secure it against the tree.

I find it easier to use a couple of push pins again, or thumb tacks, small tops, just to ensure that the trap is going to stay against the tree.

Then there are some little metal prongs in here, which you may or may not need, but those can be used to ensure that the outer net isn't flash against the inner net.

So now the insects, wherever they climb up the tree trunk, are going to be funneled between these layers of netting.

They're going to climb all the way up, because that's their predilection.

They will keep climbing upward and they will get trapped in the bags.

SLF, like many insects, is not good about reversing downward.

And they're not all that ambitious, once they get into a closed space.

So once they're in that bag, you've got them, and they will very soon die.

When this bag is full, it's fairly simple to detach it from this top tube, seal it tightly and trash it, replace it with a new disposable bag.

If you're using the bottle container, you can detach the bottle, empty it into a disposable bag to be trashed, and then rinse the container before replacing it.