Yes, they will hurt your plants, or at least some of the plants. They absolutely will find their way to your new vegetable garden in the back yard. They especially love tomatoes, but feed on several different kinds of veggies.

Stink bugs are incredibly hard to kill and have developed a tolerance of or resistance to many pesticides.

They are easiest to kill while they are still nymphs. Usually you can kill the nymphs by spraying them directly with neem oil or insecticidal soap.

To kill the adults, I have the most success with carrying a bowl of soapy water with me and flicking them (using a gloved hand because I don't want their stinky smell on me) into the bowl where they drown. You have to be quick because they are smart and, when they see you coming, they fly away or hide. I keep a box of disposable blue nitrile medical gloves (I buy them on the first aid aisle at Wal-mart) in my garden tool bucket so I am ready to kill stink bugs (and their relatives, the equally disgusting leaf-footed bugs) whenever I see them.

When you have a lot of them, you can carry a hand-vacuum (it needs to be a good-quality one with good suction) or a shop vac out to the garden. Have a bucket of water handy. Vaccum up all the bugs you can and then open the vac over the bucket of soapy water and dump them into it to drown.

Sometimes I carry a lint roller with me and roll it right over a leaf that has a lot of nymphs on it. They stick to it and then I peel off that layer of the lint roller and wrap them up in it and squeeze it tightly closed all around them and throw it into the trash.

The worst thing you can do with stink bugs is to spray the entire garden with a broad spectrum pesticide because it will kill the beneficial insects that help control them. Then, the stink bug population will rebuild first (herbivore pests rebound more quickly than the carnivore insects who feed on them) and it will get big quickly without any beneficial insects to feed upon them. Eventually you will have beneficial insects show up again, but maybe not in time or in large enough quantity to help control the stink bugs this year.

I saw my first stink bug of the year in the veggie garden in either late March or early April, which is earlier than usual, but they have been early in my garden every year since 2011. I was afraid we'd have a major problem with them this year, but haven't seen very many since then. What I have been seeing in my garden is wheel bugs, big eyed bugs and spined soldier bugs, (both adults and nymphs), all of which are beneficial insects that feed upon various pests, including stink bugs. Look up photos of those beneficial insects and watch for them in your garden. Normally, when you have a stink bug outbreak, assuming you aren't using chemical pesticides that will kill them, the beneficial insects show up shortly after the pest insects and help to control them. If you have been using chemical pesticides, any surviving beneficial insects that have survived the use of those pesticides may have fled your property and gone somewhere else.

True bugs, a group which includes stink bugs, squash bugs and leaf-footed bugs, are among the garden pests that are hardest to control because many pesticides are not effective on them so you mostly have to rely on other methods. You have to watch for their arrival, and aggressively go after every single one that you see. You'll never get rid of all of them because more and more just keep coming, but with a consistent effort, you can keep their numbers at a low enough level that the damage they do to you crops will be minimal.

With some garden vegetables, the best control is to cover the plants with floating row cover held down tightly to the ground, but this method is most effective if the row cover is in place before the pests find your garden.

You also need to google and find a photo of their eggs and learn how to spot them. Search the back of the plant leaves daily, and remove and destroy all stink bug eggs you find. When they are in the egg stage, they're easy to find and destroy since they are a captive audience, so to speak, and can't get away from you.

You didn't mention if your stink bugs are the brown ones or the green ones, so I thought I'd mention that they come in both colors. Also, the spined soldier bugs that help control stink bugs actually look at great deal like stink bugs, so look at the photos of both and learn to differentiate between the two. You wouldn't want to be killing the good guys who will help you control the bad guys,

Dawn

Wow. I wonder if my bug is a stage of these.

I have been so proud of avoiding sprays for all these years, but hundreds of bugs against the wall of my home changed my mind.

I am glad you mentioned, Dawn, the bad idea of using a major insecticide. I also hate the idea of poisoning the bugs, and ending up killing bees and birds.

Sammy

Now I don't know what I have. Did you look at the link I provided? If so, spined ones look JUST like stink bugs in the nymph stage (BTW both are stink bugs).

There were far too many to deal with manually. I wish I had taken photos. It was like a scene from a movie- there were thousands of them and there is no way to deal with them by hand. I also do not have a vacuum to suck them up in.

More importantly, I would not know how to tell them apart- so I am not sure what to do. We went out last night to check the nests and there were several survivors, and many hundreds hiding under the branches on the ground I had cut off.

This is my first year for a garden in this house and I 've not sprayed- I put down some ant granules where the ants got in my only raised bed- and I have two lovely squashes, two tomatoes, several new trees and morning glories planted. Will the bugs bother these?

Will insecticide or soapy water be more use in controlling the bugs on my crepe myrtles- which is the only place I have so far found them? If it is soapy water, how much and how often? I have a gallon sprayer I can use. Many thanks for all your help and advice.

Here is a link that might be useful: spined nyphms

Sammy, Your black and red bugs continue to puzzle me. The only way I know to describe them, from what I remember is that they were half red, half black, shaped similarly to lady bugs and flea beetles and somewhere in between the two in size. Do you see them get much bigger than the ones in the photo you posted a couple of years ago or does their shape become more elongated? Do you see them damaging anything? With there being so many insects in the world, it is extremely hard to figure out what less common ones are, and sometimes I wonder if we'll ever know what you have. If you see them damaging a specific type of plant, we can search for info about pests of that sort of plant and maybe get an ID that way.

polyd, The stink bugs in the link you provided look to me like the brown marmorated stink bug, which has become a serious pest in Pennsylvania and some of the surrounding states during the last few years. It was not known to exist previously in this country prior to the recent outbreak in those northeastern states. It is not the same as the common brown stinkbug we have had here in this part of the country for decades and decades. You can tell the brown marmorated stinkbug by the black and white banding on its body and antenna. Regular brown stinkbugs that we have here do not have that banding.

I am very well aware of the similarity in the appearance of the brown stink bugs and the spined soldier bugs. I mentioned it in my response to your original post. The only way to tell them apart is to study them carefully and hope for the best when you decide to kill one. Because their appearance is so similar, you need to rely on other information when trying to determine who is a bad guy and who is a good guy. The bad guys generally crawl around on your plants and feed on them. They don't chew. They insert their piercing mouth parts and suck the juice out of plants. I most often see them on tomato plants where they damage the fruit, causing a condition called cloudy spot that can ruin the fruit. I also see them a lot on corn plants, bean plants and okra. I believe they are a problem on some fruit trees. Sometimes you'll see several on one plant, but often they are solitary. When a brown stink bug sees a human, he or she knows to disappear and quickly crawls under a leaf or drops to the ground to hide. Spined soldier bugs prowl around looking for pest bugs to eat. Sometimes they find a spot and just sit there stationary waiting for a pest bug to come along. You'll see them sitting still in places---on a tomato leaf for example, but you won't see them crawling on the fruit feeding on it. They also generally aren't as scared of me as brown stink bugs are. Maybe they somehow sense I am not going to hurt them, though I don't know how they'd know that. The spined soldier bugs have spinier shoulders, and that's the main way I can distinguish them. I never see spined soldier bugs in huge numbers. I might see one of them for every 30 or 40 brown and green stink bugs I see. There is a biological reason for that---the spined soldier bugs generally do not appear until there is a large population of stink bugs to feed them. The spined soldier bugs don't reproduce until there's enough stink bugs (and other bugs they prey upon) to feed their young. This is common with beneficial insects---their population builds up in response to how many pests there are available to eat. It is one reason the beneficial insect population rebounds more slowly if a person uses a broad-spectrum pesticide.

So, if I had to offer a guess, you might have one of two things going on here:

--If your pests have the black and white banding on the body and antenna, then you have the brown marmorated stinkbugs. This would be the first time I've heard of them being present in OK. The fact that you found your stink bugs in such huge numbers sounds more typical to me of brown marmorated stink bugs than regular old brown stink bugs. I've lived in TX and OK all my life, have been a lifelong gardener from a family of lifelong gardeners, and never once have I seen a nest of stinkbugs like you describe. I only have seen stink bugs here and there on plants. Maybe when a new batch has hatched in the garden, I'll find 20 to 40 small nymphs on a plant, but even that doesn't happen more than a dozen times a year, and that is if I count all my sightings of the leaf-footed bugs in that dozen sightings. I've never seen them in huge nests like you describe. However, maybe you are in an urban or suburban setting where the landscapes are more refined and there aren't as many wild areas for the stink bugs to nest and hatch. I am in a rural area, surrounded by tens of thousands of acres of land left largely in its native state, so the stink bugs have oodles of good hiding places where they can hatch out their young and then move into farm fields, ranch pastures, home gardens, orchards and landscapes to feed.

--You have an unusually large hatching/nesting area for a huge infestation of common brown stink bugs. I've never seen this occur with regular brown stink bugs, and never heard of it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I've always had crape myrtles and never have seen stink bugs on them. Usually the main pest I'll see on crape myrtles is aphids.

--Could you have a huge nest of spined soldier bugs? It seems unlikely since they only would hatch in numbers like that if there was a plentiful food source for them.

The easiest way to figure out what you have is to put on gloves and squish a mature one. If it is a brown stink bug, you'll smell their stinky little aroma. If it is a spined soldier bug, you won't smell that stink bug smell.

Insects of all kinds live in your yard. Your yard is an ecosystem. In a perfect world, particularly one in which broad-spectrum pesticides are not used, you will have a balance ecosystem where you have beneficial insects that help control the pest insects. My garden is chock full of insects every day, but I'd say 98% of the damage is done by 2% of the bugs. If I am patient, the beneficial insects will take care of the majority of the pest insects for me. I've seen that in action in my garden this week. However, even in organic gardens that are very friendly to beneficial insects, there are some pests that appear in such huge numbers that the beneficial insects have a hard time controlling them. With pest insects in that group, I help out the beneficials by handpicking and destroying the pests that show up in huge numbers. I recently has my first-ever outbreak of harlequin bugs. I hand-picked all I could find over an 2-day period and removed most of the plants (broccoli, cabbage, kale, Swiss chard) they were feeding on. If allowed to stay and multiply, the harlequin bugs would move to tomato plants and inflict upon them the same damage stink bugs cause. I knew I didn't get them all. This week I have found a few more and hand-picked and drowned them. Two of the ones I found, though, were being dealt with by beneficial insects---a spider had one and a spined soldier bug had the other. I don't think I'll have to worry about handpicking them again unless their population soars again. Since I spent hours scouring the garden searching the backs of leaves for their eggs, I don't expect a big outbreak will happen again, but I'll be watchful.

The few insects that get to large enough levels that I need to worry about controlling them will vary from year to year. One year it might be Colorado Potato Beetles, and another year it might be squash bugs. It isn't every pest in every year, so I just keep my eyes open, pay attention to what is going on, and watch the interaction between good insects and bad insects in my garden to see if the beneficial insects need any help controlling the pest insects. Every year we always have far too many spider mites, and generally far too many grasshoppers. Stink bugs are a problem every year but some years they are a small problem and other years they are a large problem. If they are a small problem aren't doing much damage, I ignore them because at the lower population level, the spined soldier bugs, big-eyed bugs, and wheel bugs will handle them. If they are a large problem, I spend time trying to help keep them under control.

Sometimes I will see pests at such a high level that I think that my beneficial insects aren't controlling them, but then I'll visit other gardens in my area and see that they have a truly huge problem with the same pest and have many more of those pests than I have....and that shows me that my beneficial insects indeed are controlling the pest insects to some degree. Sometimes it is hard for me to stay calm and let the beneficial insects do their job, but I know I have to do it. I am adamantly opposed to spraying any kind of broad-spectrum pesticide on my property. I've never done it, and likely never will. I haven't spent 15 years cultivating a healthy population of beneficial insects only to turn around and kill them myself. However, I always support any individual gardener's right to use whatever pesticide they choose in whatever way they feel they must. What they do on their property is their decision, not mine. I know several mostly-organic gardeners who have felt compelled, at times, to use a broad-spectrum pesticide like Malathion, for example, because they felt they had to do that at that point in time to save their garden. I understand that. I've just never yet reached the point where I have felt like I have to do that in my garden. Using a broad-spectrum pesticide is a two-edged sword, and since it wipes out the beneficial insects, the place where they are used may struggle with pest issues more than usual for a few years afterward until the beneficial insect population rebuilds.

There was a time in our early years here when we had an outrageously bad grasshopper outbreak. It was so bad I cannot even describe it. You'd take a step in the grass and 12 or 15 grasshoppers would fly up. You'd take another step in the grass and 15-20 more would fly up. They would land right on you and hang on to your skin, your clothing, your hair. I'd look outside through the window, and they'd be clinging to the window screens,eating them. Being in a rural area, I watched as farmers and ranchers sprayed and sprayed and sprayed. I relied on organic methods, and still had far too many grasshoppers but was determined I would not spray a broad-spectrum pesticide. It was the worst summer ever. What I didn't yet know was that things would go from bad to worse.

Because I wasn't spraying a pesticide, we still had songbirds which spent a significant time on our property eating insects, including grasshoppers. Before that grasshopper summer, we had tons of bluebirds. I loved watching them every day. People sprayed pesticides all summer long. All the bluebirds went away. I always have assumed they ate the sprayed insects and died. We didn't see another bluebird that summer or for the next three summers. Not a single one. Finally we began to see a few, but very few. That was just over a decade ago, and our bluebird population now is still only about 10% of what it was before that year. I really miss them. The oddest thing? A couple of our neighbors who were life-long local residents and both farmed and ranched noticed as they drove by our property that the grass in our bar ditches was not coated with wall-to-wall grasshoppers. They thought I had some big secret pesticide I was using and demanded I tell them what it was and how to get it. I tried to give them the whole organic scenario of the many ways you work to control them without using pesticides and told them that was all I was doing. They didn't believe me. It wasn't that we didn't have grasshoppers---we had huge hordes of them on our property. It is just that our huge hordes of them actually were smaller than their really huge hordes of them. More than anything else, that experience has stuck with me and made me more determined than ever to garden as organically as possible and to do as little harm to the beneficial insect population as I can.

When I see a pest outbreak of something in huge numbers, do I get panicky and wish I "could" use a pesticide that would just kill them instantly on the spot. Hmmm. Maybe a thought like that crosses my mind, but then I remind myself that we all live in this ecosystem together---people, animals, birds, fish, frogs, lizards, etc. and the poisons that would hurt the pest insect could potentially harm all the rest of us. So, when dealing with a pest, I start with the least harmful method---something like hand-picking and destroying just that kind of pest, and then I move up to stronger and stronger control methods. Most of the time, hand-picking pest, spraying nymphs with insecticidal soap, and finding and destroying their eggs before they hatch is all that I do. So, as you battle your stink bugs, try to do what targets only them without harming your beneficial insects. It is the best thing for you and for the ecosystem on your property in the long run.

You can google and find insecticidal soap recipes all over the internet. I am not a big fan of homemade soap sprays, especially in the hands of new gardeners. I prefer to use commercially produced formulas that will not harm plants when diluted and used per the label directions. I have seen many people harm their own plants by making soap sprays that are too strong, by spraying them on their plants in hot weather in direct sunlight, and by spraying far too much soap spray on the plants. I've also seen people inadvertently kill their plants by using detergent instead of soap. Detergent and soap are not the same thing. I will sometimes make my own soap spray and when I do, I use one tablespoon of a vegetable- based castille soap to one gallon of water. I only spray in the evening hours, and I aim the spray at the pests themselves and do not spray it all over the whole plant---I just spray where the pests are. Remember that at lower concentrations, soap sprays are a pretty benign pesticide. At higher concentrations, soap sprays can be used as herbicides, and that is why you need to be careful when using them, especially if you've never used one before. I use Dr. Bronner's soap to make a soap spray, usually either his lavender soap or peppermint soap, depending on what scent I am in the mood to smell that evening. Some people use "dish soap" but if you choose to do that, you need to check and make sure it is a soap and not a detergent. It really does matter. I'd hate for you to inadvertently damage or kill a plant when you were trying to kill stink bugs.

Regarding the spined soldier bugs, they are my favorite bug in the world and I know how to recognize all their instars. I suggest you print out the photos and carry them with you and learn to recognize them in your garden. If you are lucky enough to have them, they are a true treasure because they will provide you with tons of pest control. People who don't have spined soldier bugs can purchase them, but they are very pricey, so when you see them in your garden, treat them like royalty!

I've never seen spined soldier bugs appear in huge hordes---I just see an occasional hatch of a few dozen nymphs here or there. I'd be really surprised if the nest of insects in your crape myrtle or underneath it is spined soldier bugs. You normally wouldn't see them in huge numbers like that unless you already had thousands of pest insects for them to feed upon.

Hope this helps,

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Look-Alike Insects

So glad to have read this post. I see something.. not exactly sure but believe it's just a common brown stink bunk on my corn plants showing a "little" damage on the smaller weaker corn. He was foolishly sitting at the very top of a corn leaf and I'm betting a bird probably snatched him up. And green stink bug elsewhere. But there are so many beneficial bugs around I'm just not going to worry about it except looking for eggs in and around my corn plants.

I'm seeing other evidence of beneficial bugs doing their jobs like missing squash bug eggs. I love seeing the birds dive bomb that sea of buckwheat growing. And the birds are louder and noisier than ever at a time when the baby grasshoppers are increasing. We also spotted a strikingly beautiful young tarantula in a clearing among the jungle. We called the kids and all of us were standing there admiring his beauty and formidable presence.

From here on out, I will just plant MORE of those that I want and avoid monoculture as much as possible. Like this fall, I want much more tomatoes and peppers so, I guess, I will plant them in little clusters throughout the garden. If bad bugs take hold of one cluster, they're not likely to bother another cluster. I'm grateful to have the space to consider this, actually.

Except the stupid army worms..... ugh. I mean, unless I go out at night with a flashlight (in that new jungle with unknown critters) ....

"but there are so many beneficial insects around I'm just not going to worry about it"......

Really? Hmmm. I don't even know what to say in response to that.

Of all the possible pest problems you can encounter in your garden, stink bugs are one of the absolute worst in our region along with their dear friends---the leaf-footed bugs. Some years they aren't much of a problem, but other years they are a huge issue. I'm going to guess that in my garden stink bugs are a major issue probably 7 years out of 10. How much damage can they do? I've had years when every single tomato seems to have cloudy spot on it from the stink bugs, and that includes every single bite-sized tomato. How in the world there can be enough stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs to hit every tomato just baffles me, but it happens some years. They also can really ruin southern peas.

Your idea that if bad bugs take hold of one cluster of tomatoes, then they're not likely to bother another cluster? That does not reflect what I have observed in my garden. Maybe it is because I'm more rural, but what I see all summer is that the occasional sightings of a stink bug here or there from March through June eventually morph into a huge onslaught of them in July and August.

In general, I don't worry or fret about the various insects. There's maybe 10 different ones that do enough damage that I make any effort at all to limit their population. On that list, though, the stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs probably come in as No. 1 and No. 2.

Since your garden is relatively young, you may not have a lot of trouble with stink bugs for a few years. I didn't have squash bug and squash vine borer trouble for the first 6 or 7 years we lived here. .I had spider mitess, grasshopers, stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs from our first year here.

I have never, ever, not once in my life sprayed my veggie garden with a broad-spectrum synthetic pesticide and I have gardened for several decades, but if ever there is a pest that might drive me to the point of no return and result in me spraying with such a product, it likely will be stink bugs and/or leaf-footed bugs (and I link them together because they do similar damage).

By the time their populations are skyrocketing at mid-summer, the poor song birds are so fat from eating grasshoppers and other pests that they can barely fly and they don't visit the garden looking for breakfast, lunch or dinner nearly as much as they did earlier in the season.

For army worms, you can just hand-pick them (but watch for snakes that are active at night) or spray/dust the affected plants with Bt 'kurstaki'.

if you ignore stink bugs and leave them for the beneficial insects to control. you need a Plan B in case the beneficials cannot control them all. Our garden is a virtual Wonderland or Disneyland for beneficial insects, but they cannot keep the stink bug numbers low enough to suit me.

Yeah, the garden as is it really is a jungle without established foot paths in the most needed spots and the ground surface is still furrowed. I noticed that the garter snake liked the furrows. Yikes. I can imagine what else likes those furrows. Until I get that worked out night stepping into the buckwheat abyss is precarious and frightful. lol

I'll be scouting for stink bug nests and eggs, but I decided not to worry.. or get all worked up about it, like I do most times. I'm learning real quick as soon as I gain ground on one hurdle out comes another.. real quick. I'm also learning how the garden needs to be set up because bug-fighting isn't easy. I'll try to put the squash plants in a zone closer to the house, next time.

Heck, the best solutions seem to pop out of the blue as I'm strutting through the garden for a walk rather than from any intensity. Not to discredit discipline. Some things need regularity like squash bugs and that darned nutsedge, I suppose.

But, yeah, I'm finding some permaculture techniques very interesting. That black maur tomato plant is the healthiest veggie plant in the garden. I intentionally transplanted native lambsquarters next to it and seeded alfalfa nearby. But the most important techniques are the ones you described many times. And those are where the soil is healthiest, the plant is healthier and it can fight off stuff. so, when I'm thinking of the permaculture its with that in mind. It really works.

My store-bought Cherokee purple is pathetic. I've babied it but it's solo on amended soil. Not even bearing fruit.

Like this beautiful cauliflower plant that was growing. Just one. It was pristine even though it didn't have a head. Still doesn't. I brought it up to someone and she suggested I take off the larger leaves on the under side. Bad idea. The next day it was full of holes. Fascinating, though. Well, I won't do that again. But why didn't the army worms know it was there before it was damaged?

Totally fascinating.