Timing...it counts

As Mother Nature prepares her hoard of diseases, weeds and insects to crawl out of their winter slumber and bombard the course with all their fury, I make my own plans to stop them in their tracks. This of course is all based on doing a lot of things at the right time. 

Today, I had a had a chemical rep in to do some insect monitoring. I wanted see where some very damaging insect populations are in egg development, particularly mole crickets. What we found was that there are already baby mole crickets hatched and growing, as well as lots of just about to lay egg stages. 

The way we check is to use some good ol fashioned lemon joy and water. We just mix up a good soapy solution and pour the water on the ground where we see damage and let the water flood the cricket tunnels. The soay solution does two things. First, the citric acid in the soap is a huge irritant to the insect which will cause them to come crawling out from underground. Second, since insects cannot hold their breath (they actually breath through some small holes on the sides of their bodies), the soap plugs the holes and causes the mole crickets to come up to the surface to escape.   

Once the insect come up, the first thing I want to see is if it is carrying eggs. 

All of the yellowish sacks between my fingers are eggs. 

One female can lay large amounts of eggs. 

My control strategy is to kill the new generations of the insects because it takes less product at a lower application rate. It makes since that the larger the target, the larger the dose of chemical needed to kill it. We are at the stage closest to the dime on the right, or just about to lay eggs. 

Best laid plans of mice and men do not include mole crickets so my staff has been laying the ground work to prevent these very damaging insects from having any fun on the course.