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Thursday - July 30, 2015
From: Lexington, TX
Region: Southwest
Topic: Pests, Trees
Title: Pests on Fan Tex Ash
Answered by: Anne Van Nest
QUESTION:
We planted a Fan Tex Ash last year on our property. It's doing very well, but there are a lot of large stink bugs, yellow jackets and red wasps on it daily. We cannot seem to find any information on what is attracting them or what we can safely use to get rid of them.ANSWER:
Fan Tex ash is a grafted cultivar of Fraxinus velutina (Arizona ash). A previous Mr. Smarty Plants answer described the background of the Fan Tex ash.
Ash trees are one of the preferred host trees for stink bugs. They eat the foliage. Bill Cary in an article on stink bugs published in USA Today says, "They tend to like to eat the foliage and seeds of black locust, maple, ash, Ailanthus altissima (tree of heaven) and catalpa trees."
But depending on the type of stink bug present, some are beneficial and others detrimental to agricultural crops. Stink bugs, yellow jackets and wasps are being attracted to the ash for some reason so a close up investigation is necessary to see if they are going after the honeydew produced by aphids for example (scale will also produce honeydew that also attracts bees and wasps). So before action is taken, it is important to determine what is attracting the stink bugs, bees and wasps to your tree. If you can't see anything that might be attracting the pests, perhaps a consultation with an arborist will solve the mystery. There is no use spraying a general insectide on the tree unless a pest is identified as doing damage to the ash.
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