Fall Pests, Boo!
There are a few pests that like to show up around the time kids are deciding how they'll dress up for Halloween. We've been seeing these little buggers in various perennial grass seed fields over the past couple of weeks. Billbugs are a common pest in Kentucky Bluegrass stands. This pest tends to build up a population that can go fairly unnoticed for a few years. Without a proactive prevention program billbugs can decimate a crop when the population density reaches critical mass. Drought will often reveal affected areas in the field that simply don't have the root structure to survive the stress. Irrigation certainly helps but it can often mask the problem in the absence of rigorous scouting. We've come across a few places this fall where high populations made the damage, likely done last spring, easy to spot. A lthough these insects are typically very difficult to find, we were able to collect a handful of adult billbugs crawling on the surface. Hunting Billb...