The next Urban & Community IPM webinar will be Thursday, September 16, 2021 at 1:00pm. This month's topic is Identifying Insect Pests in the Home and Garden, presented by Elaine Lander. Our webinars are free and open to the public, but be sure to register in advance! All webinar information and registration links are available on our webinar website.

Upcoming webinars:

• Sept 16: Learn to identify insect...

If your company does residential landscape pest control, your employees should be trained to know what to do when they encounter a vegetable garden, or fruit or nut trees in a yard (Figure 1). Their training should include how to answer a customer's questions about the safety of their pesticides around vegetables or herbs. Talking to a customer about the edible plants in their garden so you don't accidentally spray their plants might save that account from subsequent cancellation.

Is it appropriate for a technician to recommend that a resident simply wash their vegetables after having their yard treated for say, mosquitoes, or should the vegetables be thrown away? What about a perimeter spray around the home? The answer...

Two identical looking species of wood-boring beetles, collectively known as invasive shothole borers (ISHB), have killed thousands of trees in Southern California and pose an ongoing threat to California's urban and wildland forests. These beetles, which are not native to the United States, were first identified in Los Angeles County in 2012 and have since spread to six other counties: Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Ventura.

Beetles, Fungus, and Impact

The polyphagous shothole borer (Euwallacea fornicatus) (Figure 1) and the Kuroshio shothole borer (Euwallacea kuroshio) are small ambrosia beetles that have a symbiotic relationship with several species...