Stink bugs have become a real problem in the western hemisphere over the past couple of decades. Farmers are up in arms about the problem. And things have gotten so bad that it has come to the point where even the United States federal government is having to step in to help find a solution to this problem.
What is at stake here? The potential for massive financial loss due to damage to agricultural crops. Stink bugs feed on fruits and vegetables, and so what we have seen over the past two decades ever since these bugs were accidentally brought here from overseas in Asia, is that they descend upon entire crops of fruits and vegetables en masse. As they suck up the juices from the fruits and vegetables they feed upon, these crops become destroyed and unsellable in the marketplace.
With a population that has been multiplying at an alarmingly exponential rate, something must be done about this problem. The question is, what steps can be taken to curb their population growth?
Obviously we have access to pesticides. But the decision to use pesticides is never something that you should take lightly, as its exposure to your home environment can cause unintended consequences that could be harmful or even lethal to you, your children, or your household pets. Is it really worth the risk to use pesticides? What if there are better, more efficient, and more effective ways? Your stink bug infestation would have to be really severe and out of control in order for you to decide that you need to resort to using pesticides. They should really only be used as a measure of last resort.
And then there are many other clever ways that have been devised for how to get rid of stink bugs naturally or through some other means that does not involve any manual intervention. (We all know what happens if we try to manually kill a stink bug by squashing it with a shoe or some other object, right? You get a big whiff of a putrid odor right in your face, thanks to the stink bug’s self-defense mechanism.
One very simple solution is to use a vacuum cleaner to suck them up. This catches them by surprise, giving them little or no time to react. You get them before they able to spray that odor in your face. And once they enter the vacuum, they will be unable to escape and it will only be a matter of time before they will die due to either suffocation, starvation, or dehydration.
And then there are stink bug traps which you can set up with which to capture them. These traps come in all different shapes and sizes and function in many different ways. There are some traps which are commercially available, designed exclusively for use to entrap stink bugs and allow them to die naturally (as opposed to being killed directly by any apparatus connected to the trap). And then there are many stink bug traps that you can design entirely on your own using household products such as buckets, jars, light bulbs, dish soap, and fly paper. All you have to do is Youtube how to set up your own stink bug traps and you will find numerous videos with many different creative and unique ideas on how to create and set up your own stink bug traps. Which type you choose to create depends on your skill level and comfort level, as well as how complex or serious your particular stink bug infestation problem happens to be.
Researchers in recent years have been looking for ways how to get rid of stink bugs naturally – without any human intervention at all; in other words, they are looking for a way for nature to take its course in order to slow down their population growth or to kill them off through some natural or environmental means. And what they found is that while stink bugs have no known predators in the wild who would hunt them down, kill them and eat them, there is a species of Asian wasp known as Trissolcus, that may show some promise as a means to keep stink bug population growth in check.
Apparently this species of parasitic wasp will “hijack” the eggs laid by stink bugs by piercing the eggs and then laying their own eggs inside the eggs of the stink bug. The unborn stink bug larvae are devoured from the inside out, such that when the egg does finally hatch, a baby wasp is born… and there is no trace of the baby stink bug whatsoever!
The theory goes that if a large population of stink bugs is identified somewhere, and you are able to find stink bug eggs having been laid, you can introduce these Asian wasps into that environment and they will eventually kill off the baby stink bug eggs before they are ever born.
Now where can these stink bug eggs be found? They are most typically found on the underside of leaves hanging from trees. So according to this theory, you can unleash one or more Asian wasps into the environment and they would devour the stink bug eggs and claim them for their own babies soon thereafter.
The bottom line is that there are ways how to get rid of stink bugs naturally. And the government is working on it. In the meantime, there are many different ways to combat the stink bug problem without having to resort to doing something that you are not comfortable doing, such as squashing them.
If you are the type of person who is deathly scared of bugs and don’t want to have to even deal with killing them, the good news is that there are a myriad of ways, as described above, how you can get rid of them without having to get too close to them.