They're back!

After an exceptionally late start to spring, gardeners in eastern Ontario are finally enjoying some perfect spring weather.  Lilies are starting to sprout and the beetles are are emerging from their winter hiding places.  A.B. from Ottawa sent the photo above, and explains that the beetles are hammering her lilies, which are still only a couple inches tall.  I planted some lily bulbs on Sunday, in my tiny backyard garden.  We moved in last summer, and there were no lilies in the garden, which the neighbours tell me had been neglected and overrun with weeds for the last few years.  Yet despite the fact that the lilies I planted are nothing but tiny white nubs that had sprouted in the peat moss the bulbs had been packaged in, by this morning they had been colonized by the red menace.

The beetles are out in our experimental gardens too, where they will find refuge from all the local gardeners who would like to squish them.  These lucky beetles will be pampered.  We need them to produce plenty of offspring to provide hosts for the parasitic wasps we will release later this summer: Tetrastichus setifer and Lemophagus errabundus.

At home though, I will be merciless….