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Rocky Mountain Gardening

Heads up re pine bark beetles

17 years ago

I live on the corner of two fairly busy section roads, and 12 years ago I planted a windbreak / privacy shield of Scots Pine. The trees are healthy, growing well, and most are now over 20 feet high. Two days ago, in a gust of wind, one of them broke off about 4 feet off the ground. The break was at a swollen part of the trunk, right below an annual growth bunch of branches, the trunk was ringed with tiny holes and sap. Inside, the tree, the outer two rings were blue with blue stain fungus, which had so weakened the tree that it broke.

I just got back spraying the rest of them with a systemic, and I'll loose another 8 or 9 to what ever it is attacking them, some kind of bark beetle. It's interesting that the trees, from a distance, look totally healthy, with new candle growth starting up and so on.

So if you have pine trees, it would be a good idea to check and see if you find small, match-stick sized extrusions of sap. They might well be the beetles.

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Comments (8)

luckybottom
17 years ago
David,
I am so sorry for your loss. It is like losing one of the family, especially to an uninvited invader. Thanks for sharing and I will be checking our Blue Spruce and Ponderosas today.
screenbuilder
16 years ago
Sorry about the tree loss. Can you tell me what type of spray you used to control the beetles?
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david52 Zone 6
Original Author
16 years ago
I mixed what ever has replaced Ortho 'Orthene' at the highest recommended concentration, 4 TBS/gal, and sprayed it heavily on the trunks. This is easy, turn the nozzle so its a stream, not a mist, and have it run down the trunk. There is no way I'd try to spray all the foliage.

Sorry, I don't have a container to check what the new stuff is, but its a slight chemical variation on the original Seems, so far, to have worked. I will do it again sometime in Aug, when the beetles move around.
michelle_co
16 years ago
Sorry about your trees. Hopefully it hasn't spread through them all.

Did you have that horrible pinon beetle kill a few years back? I think at the time permethrin was the recommended beetle killer. We lost ~100 acres of pinon. I could live without pine beetles.

Cheers,
Michelle
david52 Zone 6
Original Author
16 years ago
Lost almost all of them, Michelle, but I have a couple 3 ft high babies around, but the others were toast. No more piÃ±on nuts. I left a few of the dead ones, peeled off the bar, grow some vines to block out traffic. Wisteria and clematis, but I cut down the rest for firewood and various garden beds and stuff.
chuckiebtoo
16 years ago
I just discovered I've got 2 infested pine trees (huge ones), out of 10 total, in my backyard.

After doing lots of googling and talking to the county extension agent, I, also, sprayed all my trees (with a specdtricide product containing permethrin)...mainly as a preventative measure for the uninfestated (I hope) trees.

From all information I gathered, once infected, you can kiss them goodbye.

I'm told you'll know they're dying when the pine needles in the tops of the trees start turning brown.

The two I'll have to take down have trunks about 3 feet across. Large dollars. If all were to croak, I'd be up the creek financially.

Chuckiebtoo
david52 Zone 6
Original Author
16 years ago
Resurrecting this thread reminded me to go out and check the Scots Pines. Just in time, I think, I saw, on several of them, the tiny drops of fresh sap coming out of the trunk. So I did what I did earlier, ie sprayed a very strong solution of systemic insecticide on the trunk. Seems to have worked. There are a few that look pretty awful, sort of a 10 " dia trunk, the place where all the branches come out, then a 7" dia trunk up to the next place, riddled with holes and covered in sap, up to where all the branches come out, then back to a 10" dia.
michelle_co
16 years ago
Chuck, it didn't kill all of our pines. Maybe some of yours will endure, too. Some of the pines developed yellow needles, and survived anyway. I suspect the next generation will be more drought and beetle resistant.

Cheers,
Michelle

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