Small Bug Is Big Threat to Trees in Illinois

It is hard for me to imagine anything more demoralizing than watching your trees get slowly killed off by some bug. Could an individual homeowner protect individual trees by persistent spraying?

After watching her stately ash trees lose leaves and sprout mysterious green shoots, ReBecca Mathewson discovered a tiny metallic green bug snared in a spider web hanging off one of the sorry trees.

She promptly trapped the culprit in a jar and sent it to the proper authorities (the United States Department of Agriculture), setting off an investigation by agriculture officials here. They deemed Ms. Mathewson's the first emerald ash borer beetle ever found in Illinois. The insect, deadly to trees, has threatened millions of ash in the Midwest in recent years.

As surveyors searched neighborhoods around this township about 40 miles west of Chicago for telltale signs of the beetles — thinning leaves, tiny holes in the trunks of ash trees and leafy shoots growing from their bases — officials began trying to identify the size and scope of an infestation they fear could destroy many of the roughly 131 million ash trees in this state, and perhaps more elsewhere.

Link: Small Bug Is Big Threat to Trees in Illinois - New York Times.