One of the more common pests in our yards and gardens on ornamental plants is the tent caterpillar.
If you have webbing like that in your trees, you have a problem. Let me pull this branch down and show you these critters. Tent caterpillars hide by day inside this dense webbing. They’ll come out through these holes and feed on the foliage at night and they’ll eat all the leaves off all around this. When they’re small that’s not too big a problem. But as they get larger, their appetite gets larger as well. And they’ll strip all the leaves off this plant.
Now basically short of cutting the branch off and throwing it in the trash we’ve got two main methods of control. The first is chemical. We could spray the entire tree with a stomach poison like Sevin that when the worms eat it they would die.
A second method of control would be called mechanically control. Something like swatting a fly with a fly swatter. Now of course you always want to wear gloves for this because our next step would be to apply the mechanical pest control. You would use a fly swat for flies, but for tent caterpillars, well for tent caterpillars I tap dance.
Tent Caterpillars…
- Hide by day inside dense webbing in trees
- Come out and feed on foliage at night, eating the leaves off trees
- Can be controlled chemically by spraying an entire tree with a stomach poison like Sevin that will kill the worms when they eat it
- Can be controlled mechanically, by wearing gloves to apply the mechanical pest control