Thanks so much everyone! So glad you enjoyed the photos. Kathy, you do know that you are invited to come and visit any time. I love having company during fall foliage season. It gives me an excuse to get out of here and go for a foliage drive, something I don't do often enough.

Thanks for the link, terrijean, emailed you privately. In the meantime do you think some of us could brainstorm and try that mixture? What proportions would be safe? I'm not real confident it would work, that maybe they had gorged enough there and sought a more plentiful food source elsewhere. Still usually they dwindle in numbers and wouldn't leave en masse like that, could be coincidence, just don't know at this point if it was due to what she sprayed. Since I have a one-gallon sprayer, I was thinking of trying 1/2 cup of each, using RealLemon, white vinegar and Ivory Liquid and fill the sprayer up with water and mix well, probably not this year. I'd have to refill that sprayer a lot to spray all the stuff they have been on. Also the article did not jive with a link anntn6b TN posted about the origin of the beetles in the US. That article said the JB's came in a shipment in the soil of the roots of iris or some plant and got loose in NJ was it, don't know which thread that link was on but read the article in its entirety? Anyway it had nothing to do with what the article said, that they were deliberately imported to control mites. Maybe the person quoted had them confused with those orange ladybugs that became such a nuisance in the fall. I see the red ones are back in my yard in small numbers, had not seen any in years. Finally, the article mentioned Sevin. I will read more on that, but but thought the residual effects of that were harmful to bees because of an ingredient in it. Since it said not to spray flowers, unless it acts as a repellant, I don't see how that would work very well for blooming roses. I'm trying not to use anything with the ingredient imidacloprin in many Bayer products because I saw with my own eyes the residual effects kill/disable/disorient bees even at around the 48-hour mark and after a fairly heavy rain (see pesticides and bees thread on the OGR forum now on p2). Wow, she REALLY had them bad, sounds almost as bad or worse than that old Alfred Hitchcock movie, "The Birds" the way they were swarming so she couldn't even go outside. So they must be really bad where you are. I'm not too far from you, maybe 100 mi or so in E. IA, and I'm still counting about 20 or so a day. I'd cut off the rest of my blooms as so few are going now but fear they would still just attack something else, and they are easier to find and pick out of rose blooms. Shaking my bushes would not work. Most are too big, most would land on the ground and not bucket, even a 5-gal one, and some are deep in blooms and cling stubbornly or would fly away.

At least you have snow! The little we had, was melted the moment it hit the ground. LOL I'm not even concerned about landscaping. If I can just get the cement poured and the brick steps and front complete, that will add so much to the house. Heck, I'm not above putting in some fakes temporarily. LOL

Carol: Some doctors mistake phytoestrogen (God-made & natural) with chemical estrogen (man-made). My Swedish mother-in-law grew up drinking tons of cow-milk (zero flax, zero soy), and had a mastectomy at 40 year old. No history of breast-cancer in my family of 9 girls (I'm the youngest girl), nor in my Mom nor Dad's side ... we eat tons of soy-products in Vietnam & zero cow milk. I got curious about phytoestrogen (occur naturally in plants) versus chemical hormones added to cow milk .. found this article from Cornell University: "A diet rich in phytoestrogens has been proposed as a way to decrease breast cancer risk. Some, but not all studies show that women with a diet high in phytoestrogens, including vegans (who eat no animal foods) and women who eat diets high in soy products, have lower rates of breast cancer. Why is this so? Most phytoestrogens are not stored in the body, but are quickly broken down. Phytoestrogens are weak estrogens, and may prevent stronger human estrogens from binding to the estrogen receptor. If the weaker estrogens bind to the receptor instead of the stronger ones, there may be less breast cell division. Women with diets rich in phytoestrogens also excrete more estrogens into their urine, and have lower blood estrogen levels. Some studies have shown that women with a diet rich in phytoestrogens have longer, and hence fewer, menstrual cycles. All of these factors may contribute to reduced breast cancer risk." http://www.envirocancer.cornell.edu/FactSheet/General/fs10.estrogen.cfm Below excerpt is from Oncology nutrition - Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics " Animal studies have shown that both flaxseed oil and lignans can reduce breast tumor growth and spread, even for ER- cancer cells. This result suggests that flaxseeds may have anti-cancer benefits that are unrelated to any type of effect on estrogen or estrogen metabolism." https://www.oncologynutrition.org/erfc/hot-topics/flaxseeds-and-breast-cancer/ Phytoestrogen is DIFFERENT from chemical hormones injected into cow to make them produce milk longer. An excerpt from below link: "new study out of Harvard University showing that pasteurized milk product from factory farms is linked to causing hormone-dependent cancers. It turns out that the concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO) model of raising cows on factory farms churns out milk with dangerously high levels of estrone sulfate, an estrogen compound linked to testicular, prostate, and breast cancers. Dr. Ganmaa Davaasambuu, Ph.D., and her colleagues specifically identified "milk from modern dairy farms" as the culprit, referring to large-scale confinement operations where cows are milked 300 days of the year, including while they are pregnant. Compared to raw milk from her native Mongolia, which is extracted only during the first six months after cows have already given birth, pasteurized factory milk was found to contain up to 33 times more estrone sulfate. http://www.naturalnews.com/035081_pasteurized_milk_cancer_dairy.html#ixzz3uj5y7wGc Havard-trained doctor Andrew Weil, M.D. stated "Among women, milk consumption has been associated with an increased risk of ovarian cancer in both the Nurses' Health Study and in a 2005 study from Sweden's Karolinska Institute. Organic milk is better in many respects than conventional milk but still may be full of natural hormones. My advice: cut down on dairy products. Substitute soy milk for cow's milk when possible. Andrew Weil, M.D." From Physicians committee for responsible medicine "In international and interregional correlational studies, dairy product consumption has been consistently associated with prostate cancer mortality.3-7 The largest and most recent of these, based on World Health Organization mortality figures for 1985-1989 from 59 countries and United Nations food balance data for 1979-1981, reported a strong correlation between per capita milk consumption and prostate cancer mortality (r = 0.78, P<0.0001).7 A more geographically restricted study, conducted in 20 Italian regions, found a similar correlation between prostate cancer mortality and milk consumption (r = 0.75, P <0.01).6 http://www.pcrm.org/health/health-topics/milk-consumption-and-prostate-cancer *** From Straw: Agree with all the above researches, I gave flax oil to my kid to improve her eczema (skin-rash). I'm taking flax oil & flax seeds to improve my skin-rash. I develop an allergic reaction to the new batch of fish-oil (really stinky) .. and I still need Omega-3 for my dry-hands.