 Hey everybody this is Scott Graham extension entomologist Alabama Cooperative Extension Service at Auburn University. Today we want to talk a little bit about a newer invasive pest that we have in our soybean fields and that's the red bandage stink bug. So this pest is a semi-tropical insect normally doesn't overwinter in Alabama maybe in the some parts of the coast but generally we get too cold for this pest to overwinter in the state with when we have back-to-back years of relatively warm winters. This pest can overwinter as far north we found it this year in Prattville Alabama so we're on the research station here and we've got a block of beans that are pretty pretty heavily infested with red bandage stink bugs. So this this pest is important because it's it's more aggressive than our native stink bugs if you think of of things like green stink bugs brown stink bugs and southern green stink bugs which can absolutely be a problem in our soybean fields but this red bandage stink bug it does more damage when it feeds it can potentially feed on beans that are much more mature and cause damage than our native stink bugs so that really causes an issue for us. Now these uh these insects are are pretty mobile when scouting for them it can be difficult to do because as we're walking through the field with a sweep net or trying to find a good place to stop and and sample with the drop cloth they can easily fall off the plant or move in front of us so they can be difficult to find. Depending on the growth habit of your beans in an indeterminate soybean variety where we begin reproductive at the bottom of the plant and move our way up we'll find early infestations of red bandage stink bugs in the lower uh six to eight maybe ten inches of the canopy and that's an issue because it's difficult to get a sweep net down that far and perhaps we're not finding red bandage stink bugs just because of our sampling method. So sometimes you have to walk through maybe early in the morning or late in the evening when it's a little bit cooler just kind of creep through the field and and look for adults flying around within the canopy. So for controller it's something that we have to be a little bit more aggressive on than our native stink bugs so for these we're looking at anywhere from probably about four per 25 sweeps of red bandage stink bugs is when we're going to want to treat. We've got a lot of different options we're really like using tank mixtures of products like acid fade or neonicotinoids or even the pyrethroids if we can tank mix those products together they tend to give us good control. Now one issue with this is when we start seeing overlay of of populations where we have adults and immature red bandage stink bugs in the field at the same time we can really run into issues when this pest establishes itself in the field and a lot of times when that happens it really becomes the dominant stink bug species in the field and we don't see a lot of greens or southern green stink bugs we're primarily dealing with red bandage stink bugs. And one other thought is that uh you know as I mentioned earlier this red bandage stink bug can do a lot of injury on more mature beans so if we've got good uh dry down conditions where our our beans are maturing they're turning and and it's you know hot and dry maybe we don't have to spray red red bandage stink bugs later in the season but if we're in a wet period where those pods are staying those beans are staying soft there's potential for red bandage stink bugs to continue to do damage really all the way up until harvest so that's just something to keep in mind with this insect as we kind of try to figure out what it's going to look like for the rest of 2020 and future years as we see you know some some subtle differences in our weather patterns in the future. So another thing we need to mention about red bandage stink bugs is identification so these stink bugs are green in color they're going to be a little bit smaller than our green and southern green stink bugs but one way to tell them apart is they have a red band on the on their back right at the top of their wings now that is not always the dead giveaway there's also a stink bug called the red shoulder stink bug which can look similar and we may see in our fields from time to time so really the key characteristic of the red bandage stink bug if you flip it over on its back and look at its stomach it has a short spine sticking from the the bottom of their where their their legs come out back up towards their mouth so if you flip it over and you look and if you're looking in the right spot you can see it with with your naked eye but there will be a spine going from its belly back up towards its face and then also there's a difference in the eggs so generally when we think about stink bugs we think of big big clumps of barrel shaped eggs on the on on leaves and things like that now these red bandage stink bugs they are still barrel shaped eggs but they're they're gray in color and they're laid in rows of two so if you see gray eggs that are laid in rows of two with maybe 12 to 15 eggs in a row that's a good idea that you may have red bandage stink bug eggs in your field that they could hatch out in coming days