 My name is Tim Reed. I'm extension of Modest with Auburn University and today I'm going to be talking about scouting for insect pests or soybeans. The first pest I'm going to talk about on soybeans are cutworms. Cutworms cliff off the plants at the soil surface or just above the soil surface and they burrow into the soil in the daytime and they come out to feed at night. Sometimes they'll hide underneath the residue that's between the rows and they are becoming more and more of a problem as we go to more and more cover crops during the winter prior to planting. The worm is a large greasy worm. It's going to be hard to see as I said earlier until you get to the point where you can scrape them up with a knife. The feeding damage that they do is typical shown here, typically shown here with the leaves that they've eaten on the corn plant. They'll also feed on cotton leaves, peanut leaves, and soybean leaves. On cotton they can notch this plant stem and maybe not eat all the way through it as they did here. They can thin the stand over time and you'll start out with maybe a one to two percent stand loss the first couple of days after the plant start to come up and then over time you can get up to a 10, 20 percent or more stand loss. So they'll get in your pocket book very quick if you're not careful and allowed to get ahead of you. They are they're in the fields feeding on vegetation prior to planting and that's why you really need to consider using a pyrethorid insecticide at the time you burn down as well as at the time you plant if you're in a high risk area for cut worm damage. Thrips can also be a pest of soybeans. They are always present on soybeans but they're they don't do the same level of damage on soybeans that they do on cotton. You can find this type of stippling effect sometimes. They all vector a soybean vein that crosses virus in North Alabama and we've have seen your reductions in cage studies where we looked at the caging plants and not caging plants and keeping excluding the thrips from feeding on the soybeans and vectoring that viral disease. They can craquel up the leaves like this and acquire treatment in some situations. You can sample thrips by checking the plants over a white surface like a notepad or a handkerchief. Another pest of seedling soybeans would be the immature wireworms. The immature stage of beetles they can feed on soybeans when they're germinating. Three-cornered alfalfa hoppers will girdle plants where they're piercing sucking mouth parts and they can cause the plants to fall over later on. Immature three-cornered alfalfa hoppers are very unusual looking and not going to get them mixed up with anything else. They will also do the same type of girdling. They'll girdle the lateral branches, the main stems, and the leaf petio. It is thought that the girdling by these insects interferes with photosynthesis and the flow of nutrients to developing seed. You may not notice three-quarter alfalfa hopper injury until you go out and sample your soybeans with a sweetener drop cloth and you notice that the plants fall over. They'll fall over and you'll look and they'll have an even break area. It looks like it took a chainsaw to it and cut a smooth surface, level surface cut. Sometimes the girdle will not be all the way around the plant enough for the plant to break off. It'll break off partially. Sometimes the feeding by the three-cornered alfalfa hoppers will lead to the formation of adventitious roots as you see here. If you plant soybeans into a wheat-covered crop, the current thinking is that you may have a higher damage in that cover crop or that other crop of wheat that you plant the soybeans into, then you would if you'd till that wheat up and plant. If you're using the onyxanoid seed treatment on your soybeans, it will reduce the level of three-cornered alfalfa hopper damage that you see on those beans when you plant into them. Work done in Mississippi indicated when they put two adult three-cornered alfalfa hoppers per plant on case soybeans, they had a higher level of girdle plants when they infested at the three-inch height than they did at the ten-inch height, indicating that the girdling that they do when it's severe is going to start when the plants are very small. Later work done in Mississippi indicated that the adults were higher on the plants than the immatures, that the nymphs prefer stems, by the adults prefer pettios to feed on, and they did find that when they put three three-cornered alfalfa hoppers per plant for one week, they got a yield reduction in the greenhouse, but they didn't in the field studies. Treat for three-cornered alfalfa hoppers recommended when the plant stand is being reduced below the recommended plant population. We don't really have a good threshold for seedling soybeans when we're sweeping. We don't have one that I'm aware of. For plant-setting ponds, the treatment threshold of two hoppers per sweeps is sometimes recommended. Recent research in Mississippi indicates that the threshold of two hoppers per sweep is probably too low. Significant yield losses due to hoppers are most likely to occur from feeding when the soybeans are less than ten inches tall, and once ponds begin to develop, you need to consider three-cornered alfalfa hopper numbers as a component of your pest complex when making treatment decisions. That's a constant bore larvae are going to be a problem in dry weather and sandy soils. They bore up and down the stems of the plants that they attack. The burrow weakens the stems and causes the plants to fall over and die, and the larvae wiggle violently when disturbed. They move in and out of plants feeding. They'll go into these feeding tubes that they form by spinning silk webbing that will have soil particles attached to it. They burrow up and down the plant during wet weather. They can actually burrow clean through the top of a 12-inch tall soybean plant come out the top. This is the moss that you can trap with pheromones. There's a model that was developed at Auburn University to help people use the pheromone traps and monitor the weather data to predict when lesser cornstalk boars are going to be an issue. You see this soybean plant was killed by a lesser cornstalk that bored into the plant. These are feeding tubes on larger plants, showing how big the tubes can actually get. And this is one way you can pull up plants and look for presence of lesser cornstalk bore larvae in your soybean field. Research said I did in Tifton, Georgia in the early 80s, showed that when we artificially infested small plots of soybeans with three-corner alfalfa hoppers, excuse me, with lesser cornstalk boars, we could kill the larvae better if we used Lord's Bandit. If we did not and where we used, we would burn the wheat versus not burning the wheat. We had lesser damage reduced in those plots. So if we did not burn the wheat, we had a significantly fewer kill plants than where we did burn the wheat. Burning a cover crop has been reported to increase the number of miles that move into the field after it's been planted. It attracts the moths. Beanleaf beetles are sporadic pest of soybeans in Alabama. They're not as serious a pest as they once were. They're different color phases. They can move into seeding soybeans and do quite a bit of damage, especially along field borders. This is kind of feeding damage that they do. Once this damage gets to this level, I would certainly want to spray my seeded soybeans for beanleaf beetles. Podworms feed on the beans in the pod. They move up and down the plant. In the morning, they'll be up on high on the plant as the temperature is warm up. They'll move down on the plant. This is a picture from soybeans that I took in August of 2016. The plants were in the bloom, the very early pod field stage, and the podworms are actually feeding on the lush green foliage or so than they were on the blooms in the little pods. Economic thresholds vary from state to state. The economic threshold in Arkansas on 38-inch rows is four per three row feet, three per row foot, excuse me, it's four per row foot on 38-inch rows, three per row foot on 30-inch rows, and they reduce the threshold to a lower level and address stress situations. In Mississippi, threshold for podworms is three per row foot with a drop cloth sample and nine per 25 weeks for the sweet net. In Mississippi, they also have a dynamic threshold that varies with the price of soybeans and the cost of control. In Alabama, based on the research done by Dr. Ron Smith, we have just data that showed us that we lost three quarters of a bushel per acre for each infested larval per row foot. So the value of that would be seven dollars and 30 cents with beans at $10 per bushel. That's about a 2.2% yield loss per infested larval per row foot. If you do the math with a 38-inch row spacing, it takes a loss of 5.2 seed per row foot to result in a yield loss of a half bushel per acre. That's $5 worth of soybeans at $10 bushel beans. A single podworm is going to do more damage than this. So on podworms in Alabama, the treatment threshold is one per row foot or three for 15 sweeps between blooming and pod maturity. The smaller the pod, the more positive single podworm will damage. When you're sampling soybeans, remember that a drop cost sample is going to capture throughout two-thirds of the larvae that are actually present with respect to corn earworms. It's going to be a conversion factor. If you've got three per row foot on a drop cloth, you can expect to sleep net sample to pick up 19 per 25 sweeps. Thomas and his researchers did some good work in Missouri in the early 70s where they simulated defoliation at four different levels and depotting at four different levels at different stages of soybean development. In these studies, the control yields were always between 40 and 45 bushels per acre. If we look at the bar charts here where we have depotting and defoliation axes, we see that where we had 33% defoliation and no depotting, we had a 15% yield loss with 100% depotting and no defoliation. We had a 5% yield loss when pods were in the R3 stage of development. If we go to the R5 stage of development, the same levels of defoliation and depotting cause more damage with 33% defoliation and no depotting. We get 25% yield loss with 100% depotting and no defoliation. We get a 70% yield loss. Green stink bugs and other stink bugs are long-lived insects that can cause a lot of damage to your crops. The dust can live for two months. Immature states takes 30 days to go through five instars. The eggs hatch in the summer in about five days and there are a lot of eggs in the egg masses. The green stink bug eggs will start out green and then before they hatch they'll be kind of a pinkish color. The immature stages of the stink bug, they tend to congregate together to maximize the benefit of the odor they produce and protect them from predation towards off predators. If we look at the green stink bug, the immature stage has orange shoulders. There's a southern green stink bug adult and then the immature stage of the southern green stink bug has a pink margin that separates it from the green stink bug immature. If you look at green and southern green stink bug you'll notice that the scent glands are elongated on the green stink bug and they're not as elongated on the southern green stink bug. Brown stink bug is a common pest of soybeans and other row crops. This is the way it looks. This is an immature brown stink bug. They're more difficult to kill than the green stink bugs. Rice stink bug, red bandage stink bug is becoming a more serious pest in Alabama. It's harder to kill than other stink bugs. It has a relatively large proboscis that can feed on larger soybeans. It's harder to kill but also because it moves lower down on the plant than some other stink bugs do. Red bandage stink bug lays its eggs in two rows. We see those here. The immature stage is it hatches. It's a pretty red color. Red bandage stink bug is similar to the red shoulder stink bug. It differs from the red bandage by having an abdominal... it differs from the red shoulder because it has an abdominal spine. Red shoulder stink bug does not have an abdominal spine. It's a little bit shorter stink bug. These are the early instars of the red shoulder stink bug. It has kind of a zebra stripe appearance. Brown marmorated stink bug is becoming established in Alabama. We continue to find it in more and more counties every year. The immature stage is shown here in the picture. It walks kind on its tiptoes when it's out in the field. It's easily distinguished from other immature stink bugs. This slide shows the relative sizes of different stink bugs. The bottom left-hand corner is the brown marmorated stink bug. Above it is the predatious stink bug. It desys macular ventris with the pointy shoulders. The second stink bug from the left in the picture is the red bandage stink bug. Third stink bug from the left on the top is the red shoulder stink bug. Next to the brown marmorated stink bug. The first stink bug on the bottom on the left is the brown stink bug. It's the second stink bug and then you've got a stink bug that feeds on trees on the very bottom right-hand corner. Stink bug economic injury levels except for red banded bloom to mid pod field. We have one for three row feet or two for 15 sweeps. Mid pod field to maturity one per row foot or three for 15 sweeps. For the red banded stink bug the treatment threshold is one for three row feet or two per 15 sweeps. Kudzu bug is now it's about the fifth year that we've had this pest across the state. It has not been an extremely serious pest during the last two years because of the Bavaria fungus and the parasitic wasps that have reduced the populations. Initially we thought that this was going to be a very serious pest as they would cover the the main stem of seedling soybeans pretty early in the growing season. They reduced the number of pods per plant, the number of seeds per pod, and they reduced seed size and they reduced yields about 20 percent in their studies at prapostation for two years in a row. And then the populations declined due to the fungus and the parasitic wasp. This is the immature stage. It's flat-bodied and a very hairy insect. The eggs are laid in two rows. Parasitic wasp will lay its egg inside that egg and then it will kill the immature kudzu bug as it tries to develop. Economic threshold for kudzu bug prior to first bloom treat when there is an average of five kudzu bugs per plant for the whole field. After first bloom through R6, apply insecticide when the sweet net catches 10 adults per sweep or you have one or more nymph per sweep. Talk about now the caterpillar pest of soybeans. The soybean looper is the most difficult to control caterpillar in soybeans. It starts usually in the lower part of the plant and the larvae move up. It's uh it will stick to your pants legs when you walk out in the field and you'll bring them out with uh with you when you come out of the field. Our foliage feeders have a defoliation threshold prior to bloom of 35 percent. It's uh 20 percent defoliation threshold from pod set to maturity. You need to treat prior to 20 percent leaf loss when you have five to eight loopers or have been caterpillars that are a quarter of inch longer or longer the foot of row or you can treat when you catch an average 1.5 worms per sweep since loopers are harder to dislodge you count them twice and this is per sweep across two rows. You need to make sure before you go out into the field that you calibrate your your mind to be able to recognize the 20 percent defoliation level. This slide here shows different defoliation levels and you can see that 20 defoliation to me it looks like a a heavier level of defoliation than 20 percent. You can then distinguish caterpillars by their abdominal proleg number. The abdominal prolegs are in the middle part of the body green clover worm has three abdominal prolegs. The caterpillar has four abdominal prolegs. Podworm has four abdominal prolegs. Pallarworm has four abdominal prolegs and it also has fewer seti or hairs on its back than a that a podworm has. It's a slicker back of caterpillar. There are many color phases of falls and and podworms especially podworms and so you can't use color to tell apart. Of caterpillar treatment options we can control all the caterpillars that attack soybeans easily with pyrethroids and we can get 30 plus days residual control on caterpillars except for lupors with with the pyrethroids. The products that are preferred for soybean lupor control or prevathon and trippin and trippin-edge and besiege. You can have severe defoliation in your soybean fields in some situations if you don't keep them checked they can totally denude the field. Beanleaf beetles can feed on soybean pods and they can graze through the pod and allow water to get into the pod and right the bean. Mexican bean beetle can also feed on foliage. Blister beetles are present in soybean fields usually they're clumped in spots in the field it can be in very large numbers maybe a half acre or so and they can be difficult to get to especially in Naruto soybeans to where you can actually find them. You may want to use binoculars to look across the field to find the spots where these insects are defoliating your soybeans. Blister beetles can cause blisters so you don't want to let them get on they have cantheridin which is a toxic substance that can be very harmful to horses when they eat them in the hay. Remember that when you plant late planted beans double crop beans you're going to have a lot of different kinds of insects present. You may have sub-threshold levels of these insect presence. The president's going to be very difficult for you to make treatment decisions sometimes with these low levels present but having many different species and I will close with that I hope you enjoyed the presentation and we'll be back again soon.