 Hello, my name is Eddie McGriff and I'm a regional extension agent with Alabama Extension and today is my guest I have Dr. Ron Smith. I'm a near left and Dr. Scott Graham. I'm a far left They're both cotton entomologists with Auburn and What we're not able to do is have face-to-face contact So we weren't able to do face-to-face with the Scout School What we plan to do is as we come along with a pest We're gonna do these YouTube videos. So I'm gonna turn it over to Ron and Scott in a minute and Just look forward to them going through the plant bugs today All right, let's talk about plant bugs. We're here about the middle of June in Cherokee County, Alabama with Eddie and doing some YouTube work Filming let's talk about kind of the story Plant bugs are gonna be the tarnished plant bugs gonna be the next pest that we probably need to focus on in cotton this year So let me kind of tell you how they get started the primary wild host Around Alabama is just a plant Daisy Fleabane So they've been on Daisy Fleabane now for one or two generations But it will be drying down here real soon or it already has in some areas of the state and when they do The adult plant bugs that's on the fleabane will look for another host and cotton is about the only good host that they have at that time So when they arrive in cotton in June, they do two things they feed on pinhead squares If a cotton has pinhead square stage if not, they'll actually feed in the terminals of young cotton this year I'm a little bit concerned that we're gonna have some cotton late planted that may still be in the Pre pre pinhead square stage. So they may feed in terminals, which causes crazy cotton But also what they do and what we don't pay enough attention to is they're depositing eggs in the stem of the plant During June when they move in the field and those eggs take about 10 days to hatch into a little small nymph And then it takes a nymph about another to 10 to 15 days to be an adult So right now we use sweep nets and we focus on the adults or threshold We'll let Scott talk about all that in a few minutes But as we approach blooming stage of cotton then we've had time for those eggs to hatch and move into immature So we change our focus after we get to first bloom and and we've got different thresholds different scouting techniques and so forth So in order to lie or post bloom then we'll be focused on the immature stage of the plant of the insect What about control? Well, we've got several things that and most of them work some of them have a plus or a minus and It right now we're targeting adults, so we've got two or three choices It's in our recommendation Acetaphates in there, but we've had so many spider might cause we really don't want to use that fate We've got bifenthrin Centric transform Now two of those will actually take out aphids We may be also see an aphids come into this next one the wind of the next couple weeks And so that's our choices once we get post bloom Bidrin comes back in as an additional choice and then we'll have the pyrethroids that will work to some degree on that But oh and I and I forgot Emeter clover is probably going to be the dominant thing that growers use here Pre-bloom and it will also be used some post bloom. It will kill it will kill Adults emitters not a hundred percent. Maybe it never has been 60 to 80 percent depending on the rate to use, but it also control aphids So for one thing I'll talk about is sampling for plant bugs And when we sample the methods and the techniques that we use change as the cotton progresses throughout the season So while we're in the squaring season from Penn Head Square really to about first bloom We're primarily doing two things. We're looking at Square retention on the upper two or three nodes of the plant and we're also sampling with the sweet net Now the the square retention is important because that tells us how much damage are these tarnished plant bugs doing now And when we come back if we do make an application that tells us What level of protection did we get from that spray because as dr. Smith mentioned these plant bugs can move into the field at different times So sometimes Determining your efficacy from your insecticide application can be difficult if we're only looking at adult plant bugs in the field Our threshold is going to be eight ball eight adults per 25 sweeps While we're in the squaring season when we move later into the year We get to bloom as dr. Smith said then we're starting to look for immature plant bugs, which are Small green bugs that will move rather rapidly on the drop cloth We're at this point We're sampling with a black drop cloth between two rows and we vigorously shake each side of the road and count the Number of plant bugs on the on the sheet and at that point we're looking at three bugs per one drop is our threshold and Very important to stay ahead of of these immature plant bugs as dr. Smith said of the use of something like Novel urine diamond and insect growth regulator if we can time that With the influx of the adult plant bugs just prior to bloom or right out bloom And we can get good residual and try to keep the population beat down Until we get later in the season and we start shifting our focus on the other pests Scott and I will be putting out a lot of tweets and other information as we move into this plant bug Wanda and I will add one little thing to that It appears to me that in dry summers with the flea band dries down very rapidly We get a big movement in a short period of time That's really kind of easy in a way because you it's easy to tell when you need to spray if you've got a lot of them in the field Over a short period of time, but in wet springs wet june's the flea band will stay fresh a little longer Say gradually drift over from flea band into cotton That's a lot harder to to determine the threshold when you got a gradual movement rather than a short-term movement