By Brian Hefty
Get a sweep net. Check your fields for bugs before you spray. Always carry insecticide with you when spraying just in case you need it. Throw insecticide in with your herbicide and/or fungicide in wheat when you see enough harmful insects.
It’s really that simple. Insecticide is dirt cheap – $1.50 to $2 per acre for pyrethroids like Silencer – so why would you not spray if you find harmful insects like aphids, grasshoppers, cereal leaf beetles, cutworms and more? If you don’t want to get a sweep net, just take your baseball cap and sweep through the wheat leaves a few times to see what you have for insects. If you can’t identify the bugs, ask an agronomist to help you.
Many people are concerned about beneficial insects, and we are, too. That’s why we want you to look at your fields before you spray. If you don’t have bugs, save your money. However, if you have threshold levels of insects, apparently the beneficials aren’t taking care of your harmful insect problem fast enough and spraying is warranted. Keep in mind, too, that thresholds are incredibly low when insecticide is $2 an acre or less and you are out there spraying for something else (weeds or diseases) already. If all you have out there are greenbugs, you can use Transform. Transform is around $6 an acre, so it’s much more expensive than Silencer, but it doesn’t kill lady beetles, which are a primary natural predator of aphids.
Another thing I want you to consider is bees. When spraying insecticide in wheat, you are usually pretty safe from damaging bee colonies, but use some caution. The most harmful post-emerge insecticides to bees contain neonicotinoids. You will know these products as the seed treatments called Gaucho, Poncho or Cruiser. Our point is simply do not use these products or anything containing these products post-emerge. That will help keep these products on the market as seed treatments.
Again, scout your fields and be prepared to spray. It’s cheap, and the payoff could be very good.