I don't necessarily use a specific website because I usually have an idea of what I'm seeing, so just google the name to see if what comes up via the search verfifies my suspicion.

Bugguide.net is a website that's pretty easy to use, and I'll link it below. On its home page, you can click on a line drawing that most resembles the pest you want to identify and it takes you to the related section. Then you can look through the insects in that section to find the specific pest you're seeing.

Here is a link that might be useful: Bugguide.net

I use Bug Guide a lot, as well as What's That Bug.

Susan

Here is a link that might be useful: What's That Bug?

I'll link another one that is pretty user friendly. It lets you input information, including your state, and then it searches for the pest found in or near your state that best fits the description. The only thing about websites like these is that they don't have all the insects that exist in them since there are so many different kinds. Thus, if you're seeing something that's not very common, it may not be in the database.

If you can't find an insect on this website using "Oklahoma", insert one of the adjacent states and see if you get a match

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Insect Identification

Thanks gals! I really don't want to end up smashing a beneficial out of ignorance.
Amanda

Amanda,

I never kill an insect or arachnid of any kind unless I can see with my own eyes that it is doing damage. Remember that your garden is an ecosystem, and every insect in it has a purpose even if we sometimes don't know what that purpose is.

I have a big garden and it is full of insects. I'd say there's hundreds of different kinds. I bet there's only about 10 to 20 kinds out of those hundreds that I worry about.

With most insects, the beneficial insects will take care of the pest insects. You can run into problems some years, as we did with cutworms this year, when weather or other conditions cause a low beneficial insect population and then your garden is lacking the balance it needs and the pests get out of control. Over a period of weeks or months, the population of the beneficial insects does grow and eventually they begin controlling the pest insect. That is true in most cases.

Back when I was having all the cutworm damage in late March and early April, there weren't many beneficial insects around. Now, here we are a few weeks later, and I am seeing the green lacewings and parasitic wasps in my garden that I desperately needed back then.

What insects do enough damage that I will try to do something to repel them or kill them? Let's see....cutworms and any other caterpillar that damages plants like cabbage worms for example, blister beetles, squash bugs, red (two-spotted) spider mites, stink bugs, leaf-footed bugs, corn earworms, European corn borers, Colorado potato beetles, squash vine borers and squash bugs. With all of the above, I do my best to control them without resorting to synthetic chemicals.

Grasshoppers are a special case. Their population cycles up and down so while I am never really thrilled to see them, they only arrive in large enough numbers to do great damage about two years out of 7 or 8. In the years when their numbers are relatively low, I tolerate them. In years when their numbers are high, I fight them tooth and nail.

Some insects are a problem in parts of Oklahoma where they do a lot of damage, but I rarely see them here. Japanese Beetles fall into that category. If I had them here like Carol and Dorothy have them in eastern OK, they'd be on my Enemies List.

I have noticed this year that I am seeing oodles of insects that I never see. That worries me somewhat because if you haven't had them before and don't know what they are or how much damage they can do, you don't know if you should tolerate them or not. I am taking a wait-and-see approach to see if I find them doing any damage.

Another sometimes-pest in my garden is pill bugs and sow bugs which are crustaceans and not actually insects. Some years their numbers are incredibly high and they do a lot of damage. In years like that, I use Slug-Go Plus. In other years, I see them around here and there, but not doing actual damage. (So far that's the kind of year I'm having this year--low numbers of them, no discernable damage.)

Tomato and tobacco hornworms can cause a lot of damage in vegetable gardens, and even on some ornamental plants. I understand that. However, in my garden they are rarely an issue on the tomato plants so I tend to tolerate them. For as large of a garden as I have and for as many tomato plants as I grow, I rarely have hornworm damage on a tomato plant. So, either some of my companion plants are repelling them from my tomato plants or some beneficial insect in the garden kills them before they reach the levels that cause damage. However, I see the sphinx moths visiting my night-blooming flowers every night, so I know they're "here" even if I am not seeing large numbers of hornworms. While I don't feel the need to kill them, I would defend to the death the right of any gardener to kill them if they need to do so in order to protect their plants.

Cucumber beetles cause a lot of problems, but I have found there's no point in trying to fight them here. We have acreage and they are found on literally every square foot of it. So, nothing I do in the garden is going to help with them because even if I could wipe them out, more will just move in from the adjacent lawn, pasture or woodland area. You have to pick your battles with the bugs, and I don't think a battle against cucumber beetles can be won in my specific area.

Even though I grow tons of beans, I see very little bean beetle damage, so some beneficial insect in my garden must take care of them for me. The other day I picked 5 gallons of bush beans and found bean beetle damage on three beans. That's about typical.

Whenever I see a bug I think might be doing damage to my veggies, I try to find it online and research it so that I can make an informed decision about what to do about it. Blister beetles are one of those pests that I don't fight terribly hard, but probably should. Because blister beetles can damage tomato plants and fruit, I don't like them. However, they eat grasshopper eggs, which I appreciate. So, I try to tolerate them as mush as possible. Some years they start spending a lot of time on the tomato plants, and then I try to kill them. As long as they are anywhere else (and frequently they are everywhere else), I tolerate them because they are, I hope, helping keep the grasshopper population under control.

The insect world is a complex one and it can be very frustrating as a gardener to see a lot of insects and not know if they're the good guys or the bad guys. One thing I've noticed is that, generally, if one of us is having a big issue with a certain pest, then most of us are. So, if you follow the discussions here, you'll learn about what is a problem in everyone else's garden and that likely will help you determine if it is being a problem in your garden too.

Instead of trying to learn to recognize the potentially thousands of kinds of bad bugs who do damage to your garden, it might be easier to learn about the beneficial insects, since there's far fewer of them.

Dawn

Thank you so much for your advice Dawn. let me just take a minute to let you know you're preaching to the choir on the low/no chemical issue and give you a little reference to my situation.
It is a goal of mine to use no chemicals at all in my gardening. I am well acquainted with the local and global consequences of our current pest management strategies. I actually have a degree in environmental conservation, and did graduate work in terrestrial ecosystem ecology. I love this forum for the hands on experience of the users, because although I understand much of the biology behind environmental issues I lack experience in landscape
management. I focused on native plant populations and phenology, so crop science is new (and exciting) to me.
In my specific gardening situation I'm really focused on pest management for several reasons. First I'm comfortable with my understanding of seed selection, germination, growth habits, and harvest (at least I'm getting there). The other reason is based on the history of the land we live on. We bought our home and three acres near a wildlife sanctuary around 5 years ago. The land had several well established gardens and an orchard (that I tend to ask a lot of questions about on the forum) but it also had an established schedule of herbicide and pesticide use. I have to say they were very effective because through the years that we have been here we haven't used anything besides the occasional selective poison ivy spray and I have seen a huge increase in the bug population. Which makes sense that the population would peak at some point after being left fallow. On top of that right after we bought the place we had a series of events that left either one or both of us gone from the land for around 4 years. So where I am at is trying to reclaim the landscaping (and add natives), trying to produce as much of our own food as I can and doing it organically at least.
So I'm learning. I'd say I have a high tolerance for bugs, and bug damage on my plants. I've used Bt and Neem with success (and I'm trying out some new methods on squash bugs and grasshoppers this year) but I just don't know enough yet. My main concern for this post was all the larve/worms that we are seeing. It is common wisdom with many people to just kill everything except ladybugs and bees, so I find myself in the
position of needing to explain and educate the good people around me about alternative methods (which I love to do). But I've got to understand it myself before I can explain it to anyone else. That's why I come here! I am really grateful for everyone's input, this place is great.
So I'm going to check out these sites, and it's a really good suggestion to start with the beneficials, the volume of bug variety is mind boggling.
Amanda

Amanda, lol I didn't know I was preaching to the choir.

When we moved here, we moved onto fallow farm land that hadn't been farmed in quite a while but probably had been chemically farmed. It also had an oil well at one point, but that well has been gone since sometimes in the 1970s, I gather, from what locals say. However, our garden is nowhere near the old oil well site (a deliberate choice).

If there's anything that will teach you about insects, it is moving to the middle of nowhere to fallow farm land. Every insect you can imagine hit everything I planted the first couple of years. The good news, though, was that the predatory wasps, green lacewings, lady bugs and many less well known beneficial insects showed up too.

I tried to focus on soil health and on attracting beneficials and I didn't use any pesticides of any kind the first few years, not even organic ones. By about 2001 or 2002, we had huge numbers of beneficials. That sounds good, except what it really meant was that we had really huge numbers of pest insects for them to feed upon, of course. I tried to interfere as little as possible, and as I watched over the months and years, I could see that the beneficial insects mostly keep the pest insects controlled to a certain level as long as nothing hurts the beneficial population.

In horror one year, I realized my beneficial insects were mostly gone. Just gone. Couldn't find them anywhere at all. I tried not to panic as I was simultaneously trying to figure out what was going on. Gradually it dawned (oops no pun intended) on me that we also had low levels of pest insects. Finally, I concluded the beneficial insects weren't really gone, but rather that our land's ecosystem was in balance so that there were some pest insects, though not excessive numbers, so that there was not a large food supply for the beneficials. Hence, most of the beneficial insects went elsewhere. That was sort of a cool realization.

Since then, while I have an occasional pest insect problem--like this year's massive cutworm outbreak--I don't have a big issue. Most years, I don't use anything much at all on anything in my garden. Maybe I'll use Bt on Colorado Potato Bugs or something, but generally I use nothing. My farming, ranching and gardening neighbors find this hard to believe because they rely more heavily on regular chemical use. You know how that goes....I'm not likely to convert them, so I don't try. That's a decision each person has to make for themselves.

In my early years here, I felt like I spent an inordinate amount of time learning about the various insects---for example, the first time I found a lady bug larvae in my garden, I had no clue what it was. I'd always had ladybugs in Texas, but guess I wasn't observing them closely enough to see the larvae. I wasn't familiar with spined soldier bugs, and didn't know blister beetles could be both harmful and beneficial. I think if you watch the insects, they teach you a lot themselves.

Grasshoppers have driven me to distraction some years, and I've used Nolo Bait and Semaspore both for about 15 or 20 years, usually using whichever one I find first in stores since their performance is more or less identical. I always have to check the expiration date on the containers because the stores don't always pull expired nosema locuste off their shelves when they expire. One year when the grasshoppers were so bad that they were eating the bark off the fruit trees, every living thing in my garden, the cotton rag rugs on the wraparound porch and even the fiberglass window screens on our house, I thought that the nosema locuste had failed me and I was pretty disgusted. That's because I was all wrapped up in our little world here on our land. A neighbor stopped by one day and asked what I was doing to control the grasshoppers. I told him about the Nolo Bait but said I didn't think it was working. He told me he knew it was working because he saw "barely" any grasshoppers on our property when he drove by daily, whereas on his property there were so many that it looked like the grass was moving in the absence of wind. It was, of course, the grasshoppers that were moving. That's when I realized that even organic products can only do so much sometimes, and you have to be content with that they do.

Last summer I thought we had bad grasshoppers here (and they'd been a huge issue in 2010). Then, one day I went to a large, uncontrolled wildfire in western Love County where I spent much of the next two days. Oh my. They had 10 times as many grasshoppers there as we had at our house, and I mostly was staying on the grounds of a local church where we had set up a rehab station to feed and rehydrate the firefighters. Some of the firefighters told me the hoppers weren't as bad at the church as they were out in the pastures and fields, where they'd been eating the grass right down to the ground. (Apparently they hadn't eaten all of it, since there was plenty of it burning in that wildfire.) That was another reminder for me that sometimes when I think I have a high level of grasshoppers, it likely isn't as high as it would be if I wasn't using Nolo Bait.

Last year I tried a new (to me) grasshopper bait called EcoBran. It does contain 2% Sevin, and while I normally do not use Sevin, I was feeling pretty nervous about the grasshoppers. In 2010, they had stripped some of my tomato plants down to bare stems, and those were mature plants with heavy foliage and loads of fruit. I was determined to avoid a repeat of that, but didn't want to spray a broad-spectrum pesticide. So, the EcoBran seemed like a good choice in that only insects that ingested the bait would be harmed by it. I put it out at the first appearance of hoppers that were beyond the stage/size where Nolo Bait is effective on them. Then, about two weeks later, I put it out again. While I had minor grasshopper damage, I didn't have major damage last summer and didn't have to use it again. I still have EcoBran in a bucket in the potting shed, but don't think I'll need it this year. While some parts of OK seem to have had an early arrival of lots of hoppers, here we only have had a few, and certainly not in numbers that worry me.

That's the only time I've used a chemical pest product here, other than using one for fire ants in 2004. Since then, I've used the organic fire ant baits.

The pests that plague me the most are spider mites, which seem to come in huge waves nonstop every summer, and squash vine borers. I've been pretty successful catching the squash bugs in the egg or nymph stage and disposing of them before they multiply enough to do much damage. . Last year, I was ready for war with the squash bugs and squash vine borers and never saw a single one of either of them for whatever reason. That's pretty rare, and it got to the point where I was sick of harvesting squash and sick of eating it and started hoping the plants would die. They didn't, not even after I stopped watering. That's an unusual summer though. The bugs and borers probably will show up in huge numbers this year to make up for last year.

One of my favorite methods of grasshopper control is guinea fowl, but this will be our third summer without them. During the year of the cougar and bobcat issues, we lost so many chickens and guineas that I haven't even attempted to have guineas again, and the chickens only free-range when I am out in the yard and can keep an eye on them. I really miss the guineas. They would chase and eat hoppers all day long every day all summer long. We just have too much wildlife here for the guineas to be able to roam as freely as they like to roam.

Dawn