Today I worked on controlling the harlequin beetles that were ravaging the kale. The adult beetles are very good at disappearing when knocked off something. It happened to me a few times that I went to pick one off a leaf, and it fell, and it was effectively invisible. Harlequin beetles are pretty slow and make for easy targets. They can fly a little bit, they seem to prefer walking.

My method is carefully inspecting both sides of each leaf of every plant, whther the leaf is wilted, dried, or healthy.

The beetles had laid eggs all over the place. The egg groups were always on the underside of a leaf, and I often found a group that had been laid where the leaf had dried and curled up. So I became diligent about thoroughly searching each leaf. I spent about an hour on pest control.

I also found some unexpected guests: wooly bear caterpillars, a black and yellow caterpillar with white stripes on its back, and some green caterpillars (which I think were cabbage works).

All in all I removed:

• 630 harlequin eggs (63 groups of eggs, they are 10-14 in each group)
• 30 adult harlequin beetles
• 25 juvenile beetles
• 1 dark brown non-fuzzy caterpillar
• 3 wooly bear caterpillars (identified afterwards…)
• 1 Cabbage worm caterpillar
• 30 cabbage worm juveniles

Control of Harlequin beetles by hand by mehron is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International