Both the Emerald Ash Borer and the Lilac Ash Borer are extremely damaging pests, but they need different treatments if you are going to effectively control them!
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The Emerald Ash Borer (EAB) arrived in the U.S. from Asia several years ago and has seriously damaged the ash forests and urban canopies since that time. It began in the Northeast portion of the U.S. and has now reached as far west as Colorado.
The risk is significant, as about 6% of the U.S. forests are ash. In some cities, ash trees account for up to 60% of the urban tree canopy.
Young, damaged, stressed, or quick-growing ash trees are especially susceptible to these types of borers, and irreversible damage can occur in just a few seasons. Once a tree is infested, it tends to be visited again and again by egg-laying moths, which lay eggs that develop larvae that do damage to the phloem of the tree. Not pretty.
For those that have ash trees in their yardscapes that are at risk to EAB, systemic pesticides that contain imidacloprid are a common and effective approach - but this will not work for Lilac Ash Borer, which will infest ash, lilac, and privet.
For a time, we treated our ash trees that were being damaged with imidacloprid - but to no avail. I thought our trees were being infested with EAB. They were not - we had lilac ash borer infestations. Since that time, I’ve been able to control these pests by spraying our trees in early spring with Sevin (carbaryl) or Permethrin solutions to control the LAB moths (which look somewhat like a wasp).
Bottom line? If you have ash trees, you need to actively protect them from these pests. Depending on where you live, you will be able to determine whether you have EAB or LAB problems. The EAB is easy to spot - the beetle’s emerald green color is a clear identifier. For those not familiar with LAB, it’s easy to misidentify because of the adult’s wasp-like appearance.
Here are some great resources for more information on the range, diagnosis, and treatment of both EAB and LAB:
Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com.
We have some great ash trees around here.
The trouble is, borers are starting to come.
Can you lose your tree
to either the eastern ash borer or the lilac ash borer?
You bet your ash you can.
Stay tuned and I'll tell you how to fight back.
Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com.
Ash borers are a serious problem.
Ash trees comprise about 5% of the canopy
in the United States
and in some cities comprise up to 60% of the urban canopy.
So if you have an invasive pest that is taking out ash trees,
we've got a serious problem.
Now, if you look in the northeast of the United States,
that's where the majority of the emerald ash borer,
commonly called the EAB,
is doing just an incredible amount of damage.
And a lot of times their range is extended inadvertently
by people transporting firewood to another area
from ash grows or ash tree forests
and end up helping the pest to get further faster
into other areas where they can do further damage.
Well, as time has gone on,
and you can check out the map that I'll put a link
down below in the description,
the USDA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture,
actually has a distribution map showing it from year to year.
I don't think it's every consecutive year,
but it's kind of like a freeze frame type of thing
where you can see the incidence of where emerald ash borer,
EAB, has been identified.
And it's working further west in the United States.
We're in the mountain west of the United States
in the northern Utah area.
And it is now knocking on our doorstep in Colorado.
But for many years, I thought I had EAB on our property.
We have three ash trees,
and I was treating the trees with drenches
and that sort of thing, and I was protected,
only to find out that, as you can see right here,
they made a serious dent.
I lost the central leader out of this tree.
We're still not sure of whether or not other areas in the tree
are going to fail and die out.
We've trimmed out and we're doing active treatment.
So what did I do wrong?
Well, I was using these kind of products
to try to control the LAB, the lilac ash borer.
And I really thought that I was doing the right thing
because these are the kind of things that you drench
or that you do a systemic,
you get it into the vascular system of the tree
by putting it in the soil at the base of the tree.
The tree draws it up and so forth.
Sounds really good. What's the problem?
Well, the active ingredient in this,
imidacloprid, doesn't do a blasted thing
for the lilac ash borer.
I had no idea until I started doing some research
at some of the agricultural college resource pages,
Iowa State, Utah State, Colorado State University,
and found technical papers that show,
especially Iowa State did a great job on this,
showing that imidacloprid does nothing to help control
the EAB.
Now, just so you know what imidacloprid is,
it is a synthetic nicotine.
And so nicotine is very toxic to insects.
As a matter of fact, some of the old timers would use tonics.
You may have remembered a famous gardener advisor
named Jerry Baker that had all sorts of tonics
and he would actually advise being able to do extracts
from chew tobacco to use as a spray to control bugs.
And what you were doing is nicotine affects
the neurotransmitters severely in insects
and stops them just really cold.
But that type of chemical does not work well
for the lilac ash borer.
So what do you need to control the lilac ash borer?
Well, first of all, it's not a drench, it's a spray.
And so you're going to use things like this,
7, which has carbaryl in it.
Iowa State makes a very strong case for saying
what works the very best is permethrin type of preparations
and it's sprayed at the right time.
Now, like any other cycle with insects,
it's a certain phase of the insect that does the damage.
The moth that actually lays the eggs,
you have probably mistaken, as I have, as a wasp.
They look a lot like the standard kind of wasp
and hornet you see around or yellow jacket.
And it's not until you get up really close
and take a good look at them
and see that they actually have their four wings
or differently the way they're set up.
They're not a wasp, but they masquerade as one.
And what they do is they hatch out in the early spring.
It's about time in the next three weeks
they'll start hatching out, out of the tree
where they've borne in from the previous year.
And so the wasp is going to lay eggs,
they're going to, excuse me, they're going to fly, mate.
Then the females are going to start secreting eggs
within a day of mating.
And they're going to find every little crack
and fissure and wound they can in either green ash trees,
white ash trees, all of these kinds of ash trees.
And they're going to secrete their eggs in there.
Then the eggs are going to pupate.
They're going to go in and start digging in.
And once they get inside underneath the bark,
they're going to snack and create a whole bunch
of galleries throughout the area.
This is the vascular portion of the tree.
So to control them, you've got to spray
using carbaryl or permethrin, bifenthrin,
all those kinds of sprays to knock down the wasp as fast,
or not the wasp, the moths that look like wasps,
and to kill the eggs on the surface of the trees
and in the little cracks as quick as you can
to control them before they have a chance
to get protected under the bark.
All right, let's go back to botany classes
that you may have taken in college
or maybe back in high school to understand what's going on.
As you probably recall the names xylem and phloem, okay?
Xylem is a plant tissue that actually transmits water,
minerals, and nutrients from the root structure
up to the leaves and the upper branches,
and is also the rigid part of the tree.
Many times the heartwood is what gives the tree rigidity
and structure, strength, okay?
Now on the nearest, the outside, right under the bark,
is what's called the phloem,
and the phloem actually is returning all the nutrients
and all the carbohydrates that have been generated
through photosynthesis at the leaves,
and it's this circular action.
It's flowing back into the roots, nourishing everything.
The tree grows, it grows more rings,
and that cycle continues.
The problem with these borers,
whether it's an emerald ash borer or a lilac ash borer,
is they get into the phloem area
and create a wide range of galleries,
impeding where no longer the vascular system can work,
and therefore you end up with sections
of the tree dying out.
Trees that are stressed, wounded, or young
and are rapidly growing are especially prone
to infestation by these borers.
Now there's a lot of great information out there
that is way beyond the scope of what we've got.
Like I said, you can check out USDA,
you can check out the technical papers
at your land grant college or your aggie college
in your state.
I hope this has been helpful to you.
Thanks for tuning in.
Until the next time, this is Dirt Farmer Jay
from DirtFarmerJay.com.
