They say — whoever they may be — that necessity is the mother of invention. It’s true. The biggest variable is the definition of necessity itself. After all, it’s different for everyone. What’s necessary for one may be superfluous to another. But necessity or not, saving money is something we can all appreciate and this is where invention and innovation shine bright.
Much of what we’ve learned here regarding biocontrol and IPM results directly from common-sense-derived innovation. Not ours in many cases, but those of another daring person willing to try something new. A person willing to step outside of conventional thinking. Much of it is nothing more than the employment of common-sense. To some of these innovations, after all, we sit back and say: gee, that makes a lot of sense.
Here are a few examples of prior innovations brought to us by practitioners in the field who started using their imagination when confronted with a problem. Instead of just throwing more hard-earned money at the situation.
- Using slices of potatoes to trap fungus gnat larvae in the soil as a way of determining their presence.
- Using a Shop-Vac to suck up airborne whitefly adults so as to reduce the overall population and breeding capacity.
- Using a damp, soapy sponge to clean up spider mite webbing as the webbing is the mites’ breeding area.
- Using a bamboo pole to help release Crypts (Cryptolaemus montrouzieri) into the canopy of affected trees.
This is just a small sampling. You can find more throughout the site, especially on our Helpful Tips and Hints page in our Necessary Info section. More can also be found throughout the Biocontrols section, the Plant Pests section, and even in this Bug Blog.
You can probably find more helpful hints throughout the site as much of the innovative ideas we offer is embedded where applicable. But that’s not why we’re writing this. We feel it’s necessary to find even more money-saving, success-enhancing innovations. Thus we’re asking you to tap into your brain power to discover even more ways to use biocontrols in an IPM program, then share them with us so that we may share them with others.
We’ll start off with a new innovation, as shared with us by Brian Spencer of Applied Bio-nomics Ltd. in British Columbia (Canada), stumbled upon by Pierre Ramakers, senior entomologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
A New One
For a long time we’ve known that thrips are attracted by scent as well as visual stimuli such as color. But now there may be a way to utilize this scent-attraction to help thrips trap themselves, thus removing them from the crop. One new way to do this, even though this still requires some more experimentation, is to soak plain old cotton balls in vanilla or almond extract and place them in the crop. Apparently thrips are quite attracted to these scents and will actually make their way into the cotton balls looking for the source. The good part is once they burrow into the cotton balls they find it nearly impossible to extricate themselves. This is a novel, inexpensive approach that can help reduce thrips numbers simply by way of trapping them.
What’s Your Latest?
So, back to the subject of this entry, help us — and yourself — control pests naturally by figuring out new innovations and how to put them to use. Have you come up with anything new that we haven’t yet heard of? Share it below (while comments remain open), or drop us an email. We all thank you for thinking outside the box.
