The top halves of my apple trees are brown with skeletonized leaves now. I'm going to reapply diatomaceous earth this evening. It seems to help until it gets wet from rain or a heavy dew.
I was catching so many beetles they split the plastic away from the plastic sides of the reusable bags of the pheromone traps, so I converted them to bucket traps by cutting off the bottoms of the bags and letting the beetles fall into soapy water. This works well, but I can't feed them to chickens then.
After a day of bucket traps, there were so many beetles in the 5 gallon pails that the bugs were falling onto the bodies of their predecessors and not hitting the soapy water, so now I have to make sure the water in the pail is deep enough that there isn't a gap between the water and the bottom of the bought trap. This leaves live beetles built up inside the plastic tube, so I started emptying the buckets into a big trash can so the live beetles would still have a chance to drown.
This smelled AWFUL after a day. So yesterday I spread the dead beetles under the apple trees and I have hopes that the smell will drive away the live beetles. They are supposed to avoid areas where their kind have died in large numbers, so maybe this will repel them from the trees and they'll be attracted to the traps more?
I dunno.
I've taken to calling the dead beetle water "beetle juice". My husband gets upset if I say it twice in a row.... "NO! Don't say it a third time!!!!"
(movie reference)