| Elm Bark Beetle
What is a native elm bark beetle?
What does the elm bark beetle look like?
What is the life cycle of the beetle?
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What is a native elm bark beetle?
The native elm bark beetle is an insect that carries the fungus that
causes Dutch Elm Disease in American elm trees in Winnipeg.
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What does the elm bark beetle look like?
The adult beetle is small and cylindrical. The length of the beetle
measures 2 to 3.5 millimetres. It is brownish black in colour and
has short hairs over its body.
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What is the life cycle of the beetle?
The beetle has one generation per year in Winnipeg. Most of the population
spends the winter as an adult at the base of healthy elm trees.
Adults emerge in the spring to feed on healthy elms and then fly
to dead or dying trees to lay their eggs. The eggs hatch into larvae.
By the fall, the larvae develop into adults and emerge. If the dead
or dying tree has Dutch Elm Disease the beetle carries the fungus
to a healthy tree and infects the healthy tree.
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Helping your trees
Keep your trees healthy by watering and fertilizing. Prune dead or dying
branches immediately. You can control the native elm
bark beetle by contracting out tree care companies to spray chlorpyrifos on the lower
50 centimetres
of your elm trees.
Tanglefoot banding is also an alternative in decreasing the overwintering
success of the native elm bark beetle by preventing the adult beetles
from migrating down the trunk of elms where they burrow into the
bark on the lower trunk.To control the elm bark beetle, you must
put your band on by late September and it should remain on the tree
until the May long weekend.For information on how to band your tree,
please refer to the tree banding section of the cankerworm page.
For Further information visit the
Urban
Forestry Web Page.
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