The bioefficacy experiment has convincingly showed that both the native Bt isolates are pathogenic to
blister beetle, however, comparatively the commercial insecticide was found to be superior.
Featured creature:
blister beetles [University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences web site].
Blister beetles and false
blister beetles produce the chemical cantharidin that causes skin blistering.
Blister beetles (Epicauta vittata and other closely related species) appear in swarms in summer, just as tomatoes, beans and other crops start looking good.
The name
blister beetle comes from the fact that they do cause blisters on humans.
Make sure if you are feeding alfalfa to horses that it is from a later cutting and is free of
blister beetles.
Spinosad controls all types of caterpillars, Colorado potato beetle larvae and
blister beetles, and works best on pests that consume a lot of leaf tissue.
Despite the title, which depending on personal tastes can be a plus or a minus for a commuter read, the book gives clear accounts of a wide range of research beyond sex: insect personalities, wasp facial recognition, fruit flies artificially bred for intelligence, slavemaking ants, hitchhiking
blister beetles and much more.
Sure to appeal to middle school students, this book highlights the peculiar and gross aspects of individual deaths, such as Henry VIII exploding in his coffin, or the use of
blister beetles to treat George Washington.
He talked of
blister beetles and antibiotics and insect sex attractants.
The different groups that are dealt with in detail include mites from the family Cunaxidae, pseudoscorpions (Pseudoscorpionides), springtails (Collembola), booklice (Psocoptera), earwigs (Dermaptera), beetles (Coleoptera) belonging to some 17 different families, including such important ones as the ground beetles (Carabidae), hide and carpet beetles (Dermestidae),
blister beetles (Meloidae) and weevils (Curculionoidea).
Although this genus contains approximately 17% of all known species of meloids in the Nearctic (n = 410) (Pinto & Bologna 2002), little is known about many of these species of
blister beetles.
