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Test your flea beetle management skills…
Flea beetle
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Here are five important points to help with flea beetle scouting and management: 1. Flea beetle damage can advance quickly. 2. Flea beetles will keep eating on cool days. 3. Spray can be effective on cool days, but not wet days. 4. Stem feeding can be more damaging than leaf feeding. 5. Seed treatments are less effective on striped flea… -
Flea beetle pressure is quite high in many locations. Spraying may be necessary. If damage was quick and devastating, growers may face a reseeding decision. Early scouting is necessary to make sure the seed treatment provides enough protection…
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Flea beetle thresholds don’t change with frost, but frost may have changed the crop assessment situation. Here’s how… -
Slow canola emergence due to cool soils can increase the risks from seedling diseases and from flea beetles… -
Flea beetles feeding on pods is unlikely to cause an economic loss. Entomologists have not set thresholds for late season flea beetle feeding, but it’s generally believed that numbers have to be very high — perhaps 100 per plant — before economic losses occur. You may also note that flea beetles can be highly variable at this time of year,… -
Striped flea beetles, shown above, seem to have become the dominant species in many regions, with crucifer species harder to find. This has been observed in fields in central Alberta, in particular. Research shows that striped flea beetles emerge earlier than crucifer flea beetles, so one thought is that the crucifers have not emerged, yet. However entomologists expect that most,… -
High winds may force flea beetles off leaf tops and down to leaf undersides and leaf stems. Stem feeding could make the flea beetle situation worse, since it takes just a few bites on a stem to nip off a whole cotyledon or sever the stem. Stem feeding, if it’s happening on a lot of plants, has a lower control…
