- Author: Rick Vetter
If you were to ask an audience of more than a few people if they or anyone they know has ever seen or been bitten by a brown recluse spider in California, many hands would be raised. This is quite remarkable because the brown recluse spider has NEVER established breeding populations in California!
The myth of the brown recluse has been generated and sustained by:
- Physician misdiagnoses (where many skin lesions of diverse non-spider origin are blamed on a non-existent spider)
- Media articles that report claims of horrendous bite injury without proof of spider involvement
- Misidentification of harmless brown spiders as brown recluses by the general public as well as "authorities" who lack...
- Author: Karey Windbiel-Rojas
It's not often that we get to mix baseball and pests in our blog, but today we learned that the San Francisco Giants and Cincinnati Reds game was delayed by almost 20 minutes due to swarming bees.
You can read different takes on this story from the Washington Post, NBC News, and on the Major League Baseball website, and see as one Reds player pretended to spray a pesticide to kill the bees.
In a practical...
- Author: Karey Windbiel-Rojas
Here are the answers to the traps pictured in yesterday's blog post. How did you do? Let us know in the comments section.
As long as you use integrated pest management when seeking to fend off your pest enemies, you can be assured that Admiral Akbar would be proud.
Answers:
1. Yellow sticky trap, used for monitoring and detecting small winged insects like Asian citrus psyllid and whiteflies.
2. Live catch trap....
- Author: Karey Windbiel-Rojas
In honor of May the 4th, the Star Wars fans here at the UC IPM Program thought we'd have some fun with that well-loved line from Episode VI.
Instead of strategies to conduct intergalactic battles, the traps we like to talk about are the ones for monitoring and catching pests around the home, garden, and landscape.
Test your knowledge of traps by seeing if you can name the traps below and what they are used for. Answers will be posted tomorrow!
