You might want to look into one of the Spinosad products. When applied properly, it has little effect on non-target insects and arachnids, even if the product comes into contact with them. Spinosad had shown to be quite helpful in the fight against grasshopper nymphs, much more so than the adults. Spinosad, a biological agent, needs to be ingested for it to be effective. Use it to cover the foliage, not the flowers.

I have no suggestions for the grasshopper problem. If the brug is small I probably wouldn't cut it back much unless space is an issue. I'd just remove all the foliage. The thinner green stems will likely wither. You can deal with the dry stems in the spring. Oftentimes the withered portions will fall off on their own once new growth starts in the spring. Good luck.

Reed, We have had that in some drought years. At our house, 2003 (with less than 19" of rain that year) was the worst. It was similar in damage to what your grandparents had. It was pretty bad here in 2011, but was worse at Dorothy's and George's places in NE OK in 2012. We always get the traveling hordes of them in July-August. They just move in one day by the hundreds or thousands and eat everything. Still, I've never seen or even imagined 30 million. IN 2003, they ate our fiberglass window screens, and the rag rugs on the wraparound porch after they'd eaten every living thing they could find. That year they stripped bark off fruit trees and ate the fruit off the trees before they could ripen. A couple of years ago they were stripping every leaf off every tomato plant in the Peter Rabbit garden. Nowadays I only plant cool season plants in the Peter Rabbit garden because it is directly adjacent to the neighbor's pasture and when the weather gets hot and that pasture dries out, all the insects and snakes just move to the Peter Rabbit Garden, and then the insects demolish it and the snakes take all the fun out of the garden for me. We went to some wild fires in the Thackerville area and in western Love County last year where I know I saw grasshopper numbers 10 times higher than what we were seeing on our property, so I stopped feeling sorry for myself when I saw it was worse in other parts of the county. I normally put out Semaspore when I see the hoppers are about 1/4" long roughly in April of most years, and that helps a lot with the local ones that are hatching. Of course, it doesn't do a thing for the full-sized ones that migrate in hordes later in the season. When we had guineas, they controlled the hoppers really well, but we haven't had guineas since a big predator outbreak wiped out all the poultry in our neighborhood several years ago. We have chickens and they do a reasonable job, but they don't eat nearly as many grasshoppers per day as the guineas used to. However, the chickens stick around close to the house when they are free-ranging and don't roam as far and wide as the guineas did. When we lived in town, I might see a grasshopper or two a day in our yard. Out here in the sticks, you cannot even count them all some years. It is one of my least favorite things about living in the country. When we start seeing more than about 10 per square yard, the damage they are doing becomes really obvious. Dawn

Larry, I usually have the black ones. When the striped ones would show up, they'd strip the Sweet Autumn Clematis naked and then leave. The black ones would stick around and eat tomato plants. After they had striped the Sweet Autumn Clematis naked during the drought of 2008, it died and didn't come back and we didn't replace it. We haven't had many striped blister beetles since then. I think you're right about the insects invading heavily in search of food. That's exactly what happens here. It will seem like they are too bad around us for a long time, but not here, and then all of a sudden they reach us too and they're everywhere. That's one reason I don't think it pays to water heavily. If your garden or lawn or landscape beds are gorgeous and green when everything else around you is brown and dormant, guess where the insects will go? It drives me up the wall. I am seeing much more damage in the garden from grasshoppers the last week than I did prior to that. They're really eating the leaves of the okra and southern peas, and I need to do something about it quick. To think...when we first moved here, I was only concerned that cucumber beetles and tomato hornworms might be a problem. I had no idea many how problem pest type insects would show up in our garden every summer. Helen, Spraying garlic spray makes me hungry for anything Italian too, and it does a pretty good job of repelling all kinds of insects. I think it may repel mosquitoes because we just don't have them here near the garden or house very often at all. Dawn