Grub collecting day 1

Tuesday April 10, 2007

Today we went grub hunting. Armed with a pitchfork, two shovels, a wheelbarrow, a bucket and a large metal sieve, we set out to rustle up some Japanese beetle larvae. Cliff cut about 15”x15” squares of sod a few inches deep from a spot in his yard, which we picked apart above the sieve resting on top of the wheelbarrow. Our first attempt was unsuccessful, so we decided to try out a different spot. This time we found one Japanese beetle larvae. Success! He was a second-instar larvae up near the grass roots where he was feeding on the organic matter. (Japanese beetle larvae tend to come to the surface to feed in early spring when temperatures reach 60 or so, usually around mid-April). We chucked him in our bucket along with some soil that had fallen through the sieve. Then, we flagged the spot so Cliff could later come out with the GPS to mark the relative abundance of larvae at each location we dug. (We were trying to figure out where they were most abundant, so we could come back out later to dig up more). We tried a number of different spots along the rows of vines in the vineyard and continued to cut up these squares of dirt and pick them apart looking for the little white grubbies. We found one or two in a few squares. One row came out consistently with five bugs per square, and in one spot we found 15 of the guys! Even so, Cliff said he had been digging up bunches of them last year (before he had sprayed thousands of the adult beetles), so we decided to try digging in the garden soil instead, to see if they were more abundant there. And there were! In one big patch at the end of the garlic row where the soil had earlier been overturned and disturbed, they were practically jumping out of the earth. Just raking at the surface layer exposed a few. So we dug up that area for a while before heading to the corn patch where we found a few more along with some glass, rusted nails and other interesting artefacts. We found several different kinds of grubs. Just a few that I can remember included several June bugs (that are gargantuan in comparison to the Japanese beetle larvae-like monster-truck vs car size), a firefly larvae (it had a pretty pink stripe on it), some mystery cocoons, and several grey cutworms, which we promptly smushed, since they hurt the buds growing on the vines. We ended up collecting approximately 220 Japanese beetle larvae in the end. Not a bad haul. I took them back to the lab in white tub containers with sifted soil for use in our experimentations. It didn’t look like any of the ones we collected were infected with milky disease.