Protect Your Roses From Japanese Beetles

If you grow roses you’ve probably seen Japanese beetles. These beautiful but destructive bugs are found across the US and beyond, and some gardeners have to go to great lengths to protect their cherished roses from these persistent creatures.

Japanese beetles are small, shiny insects with coppery brown bodies, white tufts of hair on their undersides, and green heads. Japanese beetle grubs can be found under grass by slicing through the turf with a shovel and lifting the sod up. Look around the roots of the grass for greyish white “C”s with brown heads. If you haven’t guessed already, the juvenile grubs can do pretty bad damage to your lawn while the adults are busy munching on your roses.

Though they are beautiful creatures in their own right, Japanese beetles spell disaster for roses. Adult beetles fly in and first eat flower buds and flowers, then the leaves. They can ruin an otherwise perfect bunch of rose blooms within a day of their arrival. They are mainly attracted to yellow and pastel-colored roses, but they will eat any rose they find.

If any children or pets play in the area where your roses are planted, use only organic methods of removal. Do this by applying Milky Spore Disease to your lawn (where grubs feed) over a course of three years. Milky Spore Disease is widely available at garden centers. It is a bacteria that primarily kills the beetle grubs, and it can minimize the damage from all kinds of grubs, not just Japanese beetles. It will not harm pets or humans and is a good way to knock out a lot of beetles without doing too much harm to the beneficial bugs in your garden.

Another preventative measure is to dig up the soil around your plants as deeply as possible in the fall. To rid your bush of adults, place a tarp around the base of your bush early in the morning when the beetles are lethargic, and shake vigorously. You can also pluck them off by hand. Kill the removed beetles by dropping them in soapy or salty water. You may also try planting geraniums nearby — the beetles are attracted to the flowers but will die when they eat the leaves. Do not use pheromone-laced traps to try to control your beetle population; the traps will only attract more beetles to your garden.

For chemical Japanese beetle control, use Diazinon in early spring and/or Merit mid-summer to kill nearly all the grubs. Sevin will kill adult beetles. Time the use of insecticides carefully and follow all the instructions on the labels. This is definitely a case where more is not better. If you do not get all the beetles on your first dose you can usually apply a second treatment about ten days later, but only if the insecticide’s instructions say it is okay.

Some gardeners have had good luck skipping the insecticides entirely, and just hire a few children and pay them a quarter or so for every Japanese beetle they kill. Depending on the group of children, this can be either wildly effective or nearly as hard on the roses as the beetles would have been.

By: Katie Hoffman

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