As temperatures cool around the D.C. area, some outdoor pests may start moving into your home, but stepping on these bugs could leave you holding your nose.
The brown marmorated stink bug is making its annual move indoors for the winter months.
Michael “The Bug Guy” Raupp, an entomologist and professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, said the bugs have been preparing for this trip inside your home for months.
“What they’ve been doing all summer is fattening up,” Raupp said. “The brown marmorated stink bugs have been fattening up on plants, basically storing a lot of fatty tissue.”
In the wild, the bugs seek refuge under rocks and tree bark, but in urban areas, homes are inviting too.
“It just turns out that your home looks like a big, rocky outcropping to one of these bugs and they’re going to try to get up in the attic or maybe under the shingles, or perhaps underneath the siding,” he said.
Raupp said once they move in, the bugs will go into a stage similar to hibernation and will only come out when temperatures warm up. Unfortunately, they can appear well before spring if there’s a warm spell — and when they wake up, they could appear anywhere.
“They’re going to come down out of the attic and you’re going to see them on the interior windows, they’re going to be on your computer screen at nighttime,” Raupp said.
In years past, Raupp said the D.C. area lucked out with fewer bugs around because predators would chow down on them before winter. This year, another invasive insect is giving stink bugs a break from predators.
“I think some of those predators and parasites perhaps now are attacking spotted lanternflies, and I think they may have actually eased off the stink bugs a little bit,” Raupp said. “It’s a treacherous and precarious situation when they choose to ‘overwinter’ in an attic or someplace like that.”
Raupp said that in order to prevent the stink bugs, along with other bugs like ladybugs, from moving in, people should check the weather stripping around windows and doors and make sure there are no entry points for them.
If the bugs do get in, do not step on them. Instead, Raupp said, get a small glass with soap and water and brush them into it, or they can be vacuumed up, emptied into a Ziplock bag and frozen for two weeks.
“Then, you can take them out, put them in the compost and just recycle them,” Raupp said.
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