Calling all wood-boring beetles: Laboratory and in-field bioassays with potentially attractive compounds for beetle management

Wood-boring beetles (Scolytinae, Buprestidae, and Cerambycidae) are a continual management problem in tree nursery production.   All three families spend much of their life cycle underneath tree bark damaging the integrity and aesthetics of the tree.  The cryptic nature of the damaging life stages of the pests makes them difficult to detect and manage before the nursery product looses value.   Identifying chemical compounds that are attractive to adult beetles would provide another monitoring tool in an integrated pest management program.  Several chemical compounds were tested in laboratory bioassays for attractiveness to common problematic ambrosia beetles in Tennessee nurseries.  Compounds were scored as attractive if beetles oriented toward the point source provided.  Three promising attractive compounds were then tested in a field bioassays .  A semi-transparent corrugated plastic prism trap covered in insect glue was baited with a single promising compound and hung at approx. four feet from a metal rod; a slow-release ethanol lure was used as a positive control treatment due to its well documented attractiveness to many species of ambrosia beetles. Traps were placed five meters apart along a woodlot edge transect; test compounds were randomly assigned a trap within a replicate with eight replicates conducted in McMinnville Tennessee and another eight replicates in Farmington, Connecticut.  Scolytinae, Buprestidae, and Cerambycidae beetles were collected from the traps every week for four weeks and cleaned with Histoclear before identification.  Results of the bioassays will be reported.