Some people do this, but if they JBs are really bad, they will devour the leaves too. Harry might post some of his photos as an illustration.

Spraying Sevin will kill them, but it must be repeated frequently.

Life used to be so much less complicated before Japanese Beetles. It is too bad that there are not better natural controls.

If you live in a climate congenial to them repeated sprayings of Sevin will encourage the proliferation of spider mites.

Trap them before they reproduce. Rather simple even if the ARS doesn't think it works.
It does work, and when you get a serious drought, that will set them back, as well.

Doing nothing means every female will lay 40 eggs this year. and 20 of those eggs each will lay 40 eggs in 2012.

You could always get rid of your lawn.....one of the best breeding grounds for next year's crop of JB's is a well-watered lawn. The worse the grass looks, the better the roses look. Then again, maybe the roses just look good in comparison to the lawn--who knows?

My husband was watering & fertilizing the front yard while allowing the back yard to be the kids' & dog's playground. We had a massive infestation on the roses in the front yard, but not the back yard. I'm fighting a losing battle, but maybe someday I'll eliminate all the lawn and they'll have nowhere to breed. In the meantime, I put lots of birdseed out to attract the only thing that has more fun picking JB's than I do.

The best way to get rid of the beetles is to drown then in a bucket of soapy water. It kills the beetles and doesn't hurt anything else.

Cutting off the blooms wouldn't work for me. I've got too many things the beetles like to eat. I actually prefer it when they eat the roses since eating rose blooms doesn't hurt the plant much, but when they eat all the leaves off my cherry tree then that hurts my tree. They also like apple leaves.

We don't have JB's here, but I do hear it said that planting four o'clocks under your roses as a ground cover is a decent natural control for JB's. Apparently, the JB's eat the four o'clocks first, which are toxic to them. I do plant four oclocks under my roses, but more because I like four o'clocks than for any other reason. They stay short here and do not compete with the roses. After the first year, however, they do come up naturally from self-sown seed and tubers. So, once you have four o'clocks, you'll always have four o'clocks. But for me, that's good.

The problem with that is that in our heat, the pansies and four o'clocks are dead by the time JBs show up :)

Ann, do you mean the traps you hang in your yard? My neighbor and I have used those for the past two years but I wasn't sure whether to continue or not.

Harry's photos could be photos from MY yard.

I checked my notes and JBs showed up at the end of May last year. Yeesh.

Hey Diane,
Olga is the one who has a good shot of what Japanese Beetles can do to rose foliage. It can be viewed on the other current beetle thread.

This is the best I can offer:

{{gwi:224808}}

Harry, I'll match that pic with one of my own this summer if my Beetle Death Plans don't work well. Ugh, disgusting!

I'm surprised birds eat them. I'll definitely be putting out feeders this year along with another bird bath.

The traps are what we use. And our first beetle date is June 7, every year.

A friend did keep ducks for a while and when she'd call the ducks over to her New Dawn, they'd come a'quackin' because they devoured with gusto the Japanese Beetles she'd knock off New Dawn after the sun set and the Beetles lost their get up and go. (So now you know a possible reason why duck eggs smell different.)

Ewww, lol. No duck eggs for me, thank you.

Last year I spilled a full trap in the backyard. I just left the beetles there until I could decide what to do once my gagging stopped. Later that day I looked out to find my dogs gobbling them up.

Why that's so disgusting with dogs and not birds I do not know.

Dogs love the crunch and that great nutty flavor!

Makes for some hearty soup:

{{gwi:229490}}

AAAAA! That's disgusting! I'm generally not squeamish about bugs or snakes or anything like that, but JBs give me the heebie jeebies in a fingernails-on-chalkboard way.

Is that PVC tied to the bucket? Is that a homemade trap of some sort?

That was my homemade trap made with a piece of PVC over a bucket of water. I attached the yellow top and scent sticker to the pipe and it worked like a charm. When the beetles were heavy, I could fill one of those black bags in an afternoon. At empty time, the little b@*^%#!'s were still alive and I had to dump them in water anyway. So I decided to skip the bag.

I only used it for one year because the beetles have not been present the last few years.

{{gwi:229491}}

That's interesting that you have not seen beetles the last couple of years, Harry. Do you see them in other places in your area? Beetle numbers were way down here the last couple of years too. I wondered if it was drought or some natural predator or illness. I read somewhere that squashing beetles causes them to release a pheromone that attracts other beetles.

According to one of the entomologists at the UW here, the japanese beetle numbers have a tendency to rise for about 10 years and then go down again. They aren't sure why. It might have something to do with natural diseases catching up to them when their population peaks. Unfortunately, they're only about year 4 or 5 in my area so we have a ton.