Geraniums intoxicate Japanese beetles.

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Thanks to my fellow blogger at Going Yard, I found this article on the sad, sad situation of habitual narcotic use on the family lives of Japanese Beetles. They just never learn.

Hatred.... It's a strong word. But I feel it for these beetles. I like this article.


Geraniums intoxicate Japanese beetles.


Several bites of a garden-variety geranium geranium, common name for some members of the Geraniaceae, a family of herbs and small shrubs of temperate and subtropical regions. Their long, beak-shaped fruits give them the popular names crane's-bill (for species of the genus Geranium, , and a Japanese beetle falls to the ground in a stupor stupor that lasts some 8 hours. It's hardly a great way to avoid predators or get on with beetle business, like reproduction. Yet researchers now find that the beetles never learn. They choose geraniums over perfectly good linden leaves and get paralyzed day after day.

Researchers described the knockout effect on Japanese beetles in 1929, notes Daniel A. Potter. He and David W. Held, both of the University of Kentucky Coordinates: The University of Kentucky, also referred to as UK, is a public, co-educational university located in Lexington, Kentucky. in Lexington, have studied beetle learning and the sad effects of geranium intoxication intoxication, condition of body tissue affected by a poisonous substance. Poisonous materials, or toxins, are to be found in heavy metals such as lead and mercury, in drugs, in chemicals such as alcohol and carbon tetrachloride, in gases such as carbon monoxide, and on family life. Their results will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata.

In theory, insects with wide-ranging tastes are the most likely to learn to avoid noxious foods, according to the few studies that have tested this idea, Potter says. However, Japanese beetles eat nearly 300 U.S. plant species but don't avoid geraniums.

The flower petals, especially from plants in full sunlight, seem the most narcotic narcotic, any of a number of substances that have a depressant effect on the nervous system. The chief narcotic drugs are opium, its constituents morphine and codeine, and the morphine derivative heroin.

See also drug addiction and drug abuse. , Potter reports. His most extensive tests were of red geraniums, but flowers of white, coral, and other colors also slammed the beetles. So did a water-soluble leaf extract.

A geranium "is like candy to them," Potter says. Beetle pairs offered a choice picked geranium flowers so often that they laid just half as many eggs as pairs provided only with linden leaves. Intoxication is dangerous for the beetle, but is it fun? Potter won't speculate.

Geraniums intoxicate Japanese beetles.

I'll be shopping for White Geraniums.

~Faith

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