 I'm Ron Smith, extension entomologist at Auburn University. I'm here today with Dr. Scott Graham, and we want to talk a little bit about stink bugs in cotton. And let me just say a few things up front. Stink bugs really became a pest in cotton. Once the weevils were eradicated, and we went to the genetically altered cotton, the BT cotton, so we really eliminated a lot of the need for hard chemistry. And the stink bugs have come in and filled that window. Now, stink bugs, as far as scouting for them, we don't do it quite like we do some of the other insect. But if anybody remembers the old days of the bull weevil, we didn't look and count bull weevils. We looked and see the damage on the squares. Well, stink bugs are similar to that. We don't necessarily look for stink bugs because they're very hard to find in the field. They'll get away from it. But what we do is, since we know they feed primarily on bulls or almost solely on bulls, then we examine bulls. And beginning about the third week of bloom, we are in a critical window for stink bugs in the season. And that lasts really through about the sixth week of bloom. We have a really, really good threshold there. We won't, after the third week of bloom, we don't want to see any more than 10% damage to the internal damage to the bulls for the next four or five weeks. So that's our sensitive window. And that's when most of our bulls are being set on the cotton plant. So that's when we get our greatest return from stink bug injury. Now, as far as scouting, we want to select bulls from the plant and examine bulls about 10 days old. That'd be about a quarter in diameter. And we want to burst those bulls. If when you're picking them and selecting them, you want to get a bull that's a little spongy to the touch. And that way you can press it between your thumb and fingers and burst it open. Look internally for warts or any sign that the stink bug pierced the bull wall or maybe even a little bit of stained lint, which is going to result in either an entire bull being damaged or damaged lops that will never go through the picker at harvest time. So that's it. With stink bugs, we have to use a very hard chemical. And that normally at that time of the year, that's either a pyrethroid at a high-label rate or a bydron. It's basically our two choices, I think, in Alabama on stink bugs. OK, here we are, prep for Alabama about the middle of July. And we're beginning to change our focus now to some stink bugs. And just want to talk about a little bit about how we're going to scout them. We pull some quarter-diameter bulls that are still kind of soft and mushy to the touch. Those can be easily crushed between the finger and the thumb. And what we're going to do, we're going to look for internal injury. That's a real important thing. It's OK to look for the external dark circle incisions that the stink bug has made. But the real important thing is what's happening inside the bull when the stink bug is feeding. And some examples here in my hand is we'll see the lint will begin to stain. And show an off color or a brown color if it has internal feeding damage. And I think that's just bull rod organisms that's been introduced into the bull. You see what the stink bug's trying to do is get in there to feed on the seed and get some protein out of it. So we're looking internally in quarter-diameter bulls that could crush by the hand. We're looking for internal discoloration on the lint. And the other thing that we want to look for is Dr. Graham here is going to hand me some that we found. We'll have warts on the inside of the bull wall. I don't know if you can see them here, but all of these have the bull trying to try to seep to try to heal itself. And there'll be warts on the inside of the bull. And sometimes you won't see a wart, but you'll actually see where the mouth part of the stink bug went through the bull wall. Any of those may cause one or more lobs to deteriorate, maybe a whole bull to be deformed or hard locked in harvest time. And that's just something we don't pitch. That's the reason we like to keep our threshold during the peak of the fruiting season, the bullset season from weeks three through about six. We want to keep our damage from stink bugs to 10% or less.