GIO I'm going to look into finding the red dye as well. Are you planning on water, clove oil, and the red dye? I'd much rather use that than the Sevin... Yes, I'll be using the red dye, water, clove oil and other containers with the dye and tayuya root powder, which I have. No Sevin. The only place I could find the dental disclosing tablets was online. Your dentist might have some tucked away in a cabinet somewhere -- I'm not sure how common their use is these days, though I think they're used to help children brush thoroughly! But check to be sure the dye is #28 red, since #40 red is used sometimes. Also, about the clove oil. One woman tried it when we were experimenting but apparently put it full-strength and *some* liquid Sevin in a plastic cup. She reported that the next morning the bottom of the cup had melted away! I read later that undiluted clove oil WILL melt plastic. I used styrofoam cups and probably a greater dilution of the clove oil with water and didn't have any problems at all. Good point about the yellow containers. I got excited about making it more effective without considering the consequences to the pollinators. However, is the red dye toxic to the pollinators? The red dye will be consumed only by the insects attracted to the lure it's mixed with, and that's ONLY cuke beetles, not the pollinators or other insects. The reason is that the chemical compound, cucurbitacin , is in the lure that attracts cucumber beetles. It exists in varying degrees in all cucurbits, but the beetles flock to some cucurbit plants in droves and less to others, quite likely because of the strength of the odor. OTOH, pollinators are attracted to the cucurbit flowers, mostly through the kind of light emitted by various colors and probably the nectar in them, and cucurbitacin is of no interest to them. (Thus my reluctance to use anything yellow as a container in hopes of attracting the cuke beetles -- that might indeed attract the pollinators, too.) I hope your garden won't be as infested with cuke beetles this summer as last year! The kind of cucurbits you planted may have been the lure for so many (I didn't check your list against the list in the link), so if you can avoid growing them again, maybe the beetles will be smaller in numbers and it won't be a losing battle to keep the numbers low enough that you can harvest most of what you plant. That's about all we can ask of nature! I have Crenshaw melons, tomatoes, and beans out in the garden right now and haven't seem any insects so far except for flea beetles. So when these pests show up (and I know they will) that's when I'll set out the baited traps. I'll report back occasionally on how well it's working. It would be great if you (and anybody else who tries it) could do that, too. Report success OR failure. People have a tendency to not think about insect problems until they show up in THEIR garden, so it's possible that some who aren't interested in killing every insect on their plants will look for a solution a bit later in the season. I've never had to deal with Japanese beetles, but a zapper over a koi or other pond sounds like a great way to get rid of them! Sounds like you have some fun projects to think about!

Hand-picking the adult beetles and large rubs is easy. The adults are very slow and can't fly. If you take a large bowl you can just gently shake the tops of the plants where they congregate and they fall into the bowl. The juvenile beetles can fly and are more skittish, but if you go out in very early morning they are sluggish from the coolness. The main problem is the small grubs which are to see and hard to get off, and can get very numerous. When you spray bt, concentrate on the growth buds of the foliage, that where the grubs are most concentrated. Don't bother with the powder it's expensive and less effective, get the soluble stuff. I mix it with water and a little dishsoap in a hand spray-bottle. If you already see larvae it's a bit late for spraying, gotta hand-pick every couple of days until the numbers are reduced.

I don't think the giant japanese beetles are actually Japanese Beetles. I think, like a lot of insects, all Japanese Beetles are more or less the same size. THere are many, many species of beetles, and most are more or less harmless. One nice thing about the large, night-flying beetles is that they are an important food for large, noctunal predators like Whip-poor-wills and Screech Owls (screech owls eat lots of insects in the summer)

Thank you very much for your excellent response. That's it. Not surprisingly (and unfortunately), there is milkweed in that garden. I was unable to tend to it for a long while and the spurge and milkweed took hold and have been tough to eradicate. Last fall while attempting pulling out the spurge, I got some of the caustic spurge sap in my eye and had to get my eyes irrigated. Very painful. There were very thick fleshy roots. The genus of that imported beetle being tested on leafy and cypress spurge is Aphthona. I don't believe any are in my spurge areas or that the beetle has been all that reliable.