Olpea, my impression is the vast majority of the beetles do not fly far at all. They can fly far but they usually don't, since they pupated by a good food source by definition (there was enough food for a female to lay eggs). Back when I had a big population I would find JB grubs in the soil when digging a fruit tree hole about half the time. I mainly eliminated them by squishing them at night with a flashlight. After about two years of this I had very few beetles, only the dozen or so that would fly in each year. I used Surround with success for some periods as well. If they were flying all over I would get more than a couple dozen every year. They are still all around my neighborhood, just not in my yard anymore. In that MSU study it sounds like there was a large population directly incident on the field. A couple beetles came right over, found food and called over their buddies. Milky spore has been proven effective around here, I think the evidence is about as strong as for any widely recognized pest treatment. It may not work as well in other climates however. Scott

Thanks to everyone for the responses. Nandina, I've been doing some research on diseases of asters, including aster yellows, but nothing seems to fit exactly. My best guess is either aster yellows or botrytis blight. I'm leaning toward botrytis blight, since the plants went downhill so quickly and botrytis likes wet conditions. We've had a very wet summer here in central NC (almost 2x normal amounts of rain in July & August). I'll keep up the online research, but from my reading so far it seems like the best way to manage fungal diseases without harming pollinators is to encourage healthy bacteria through things like compost teas.

Thanks MichaelG and Dan for your responses... Michael, (smiley face) thanks so much for the very helpful link and yes, the sulfur seems like a really effective more broad application. Thanks to you I also now have a new link that I can clip on the Organic Roses Forum... I didn't notice/find the forum until you mentioned it to me so now I'll have some comparisons to find out the ingredient components before I do any buying for so called organic insecticides... some of the organics I would have concern about in terms of the effects on good versus bad insects, so with that forum I can quickly gleen out which ones I'd be more comfortable with... I am leaning more toward the Canola oil application for the "insecticide"...but back to the subject of organic fungicides, the sulfur it seems like a really good option for me... Again, tons of thanks, appreciation...

I drew that conclusion, Henry, because you fail to note two things in the real world. #1: many rose growers have serious BS problems in their gardens, despite their good garden/rose-growing practices. If they go fungicide-free, there is only one possible outcome: roses devastated by BS. Your advice to them is a guarantee that their roses will suffer serious harm from BS. #2: My post (which you failed to note) was NOT about those articles. It was about the new group of posters every year who come to this forum asking about the baking soda cure or proclaiming its virtues and wondering why those of us who have been growing roses for years are so ignorant that we don't realize we could go 100% organic and just sprinkle a bit of baking soda around--and all BS problems would disappear. Variation on this was the new poster who put manure around her roses and proclaimed the manure kept her roses free of BS and us ignorant ones ought to go organic and just spread around the manure instead. The same questions/assertions get made every year by some newcomers who visited an organic forum and think banana peels or coffee grounds or some such quick fix that is organic in nature is the obvious answer to any rose-growing problems. Strange how we do not hear from them in subsequent years about the tried and true organic methods of curing BS--or if we do, they confess that none of those methods worked after all. It was those kinds of so-called organic cures that I was referring to. Now if you want to believe that the Cornell baking soda formula supercedes chemical fungicides, you just go ahead and see how well your roses resist BS. In the meantime, I will engage in practices (such as buying disease-resistant roses) that CUT DOWN ON THE NEED FOR SPRAYING--which was the point of my previous post. And I don't mean, cut down on spraying by learning to tolerate ugly BS-ridden roses. I mean, buying roses that don't get BS or only get it a little bit once in a while--that is how you can cut down on the need to spray. But until a whole new generation of disease-proof roses are created, I honestly don't see how fungicide spraying can be completely eliminated. It can only be cut down on by exercising good judgment and wise choices --such as, in searching for and growing only the roses that rarely get BS and therefore rarely need any remedial action. Buford, I know what you mean. I had to do some long hours of searching to find roses that rarely or never needed spraying, and like I admitted, I still have a few that are much less disease-resistant than I want, but I do love those roses, so ......... Sigh! Kate