Anyone else seeing alot more tent caterpillars around this year? They've pretty much already wiped out the wild cherry trees in my area. Today i was working under a pitch pine and the little bastads were dropping on me from the needless. Looked up and this is what I saw.
Wow. Around these parts they don't get on our pines or haven't yet. They tend to get on the cherry trees. They will strip the leaves off then make another cocoon. I've found if we take a torch to them, we won't have them again for several years. But we expect some again this year but not yet. Leaf is not big enough yet. When they come, I'll torch them again. Not sure I'd want to torch them in a pine tree though.
Oh man! I hope we don't have to go through those again! It's been a few years for them around these parts.
The bastages are here already too-hate them-they killed 2 Kwanzan cherry trees and are hard at work on my 2 Yoshinas cherry
I literally just got in from torch duty here at home. Ive got quite a few wild cherries on the property and they're already making quick work of stripping the leaves. I must've burned 30-40 tents . Now I smell like burnt caterpillars
We have them every year but not nearly this bad. The road side trees are covered with them. Burn em!!
Haven't seen any yet this year. I usually cut the branch the tent is on and put some flamable liquid on it and strike a match.
We had them so bad in our area just over ten years ago that the town board hired a guy with a plane so he could spray the wooded areas. They just kept coming out of the woods, it was so bad that we wouldn't open the garage door, it hasn't been that bad since they sprayed.
That's what I'm talking about! The roads were stained and slick with the leftovers of their little hairy carcasses!
I think the ones in the Pitch Pine are probably not the same species as the Tent Caterpillars in cherries. For one thing, they don't seen to have much of a tent. There are tons of different caterpillars and I can ID only a couple.
It's gypsy moths here this year. They haven't hatched out yet but all the trees are plastered with the little thumbnail sized egg smears. Last year they ate pine trees and hemlocks and I've never seen them do that before. I found one tent caterpillar egg case on an apple tree this Winter that also had a tent last year. The tent caterpillars usually target the (uncultivated) cherry trees here. Put the egg case in a glasss jar in a window and they hatched out in the heat but they didn't get far in the jar. Ha-ha !! The gypsy moths will get a fungus disease of some sort that decimates their population if we have wet weather but last year we had a dry Spring. Dunno if that's what did the tent caterpillars in ten years ago but last year was the first time in many years I found a tent.
billb3 we had the gypsy moth infestation here about 3-4yrs ago but it was 3 years in a row! They wiped out thousands of oaks that just couldn't recover from being stripped of their leaves year after year. It looked like winter here in august
That would be hard to explain to the fire dept. I have found something organic that I don't worry about killing birds, bees etc.
Should have dropped the saw off, for guaranteed usage...Seriously you will use that saw so much-my 018 gets twice the usage of my 290-Congrats again and should have stopped by for refreshments...
They are just hatching up here, real small tents on the cherry's right now. We don't have leaves yet as the buds are just opening. Hopefully they won't be too bad. I bust open the tents with a stick and let the birds have at em. We had a pair a Blue birds here yesterday eating bugs, hope they stay and raise a brood.
My cherry tree was being eaten up by those buggers last week. I went to Lowe's and got the insect killer that goes on the end of a garden hose, and got em' good!
