Boxelder bugs may annoy you, but won’t make you, your family, your pets, or other insects sick. Think carefully before using a pesticide. Sucked-up bugs can be dumped in the garbage. Grab an extension cord and your shop vac and go to town. If you want a direct approach, physical removal is a good option. Prevention is fine, but I want them gone! They can fly a few miles, so removing a tree on your property doesn’t mean you will never see another boxelder bug. Sometimes people think “I have boxelder bugs, I have boxelder trees, the trees are my problem!” Trees provide a lot of abstract and concrete benefits to people, so cutting a boxelder tree down because of a bug problem every five years isn’t a good solution.īesides, boxelder bugs fly (though not necessarily gracefully). Mice only need a quarter-inch (think the size of a dime) to get into a house, so by bug-proofing your house, you can keep out pests that actually cause damage to your home. Look at areas where cords, cables, and vents leave your house and seal those areas.Ĭhecking the exterior of your home and making it bug-proof can have other benefits.Check around window screens and doors for gaps.Instead of spending your energy removing bugs, allocate your energy to plugging up the cracks in your home where they can make their way inside. The bugs are looking for somewhere warm to spend the winter. Keeping the bugs on the outside of your house out of your home Other insects you might run into are brown marmorated stinkbug and multicolored asian ladybeetle. This is especially true if the building is the tallest thing around. They love the warm sun on buildings with southern and western exposure. There are a couple of reasons that boxelder bugs end up in certain spots. The worst they do is give people the heebie-jeebies, and smell a little bad when crushed. They don’t cause meaningful damage to plants, trees or people, they don’t bite people, and they don’t spread disease. They are now sensing the seasons are changing, and looking for a warm place to hunker down for the winter.īoxelder bugs are nothing more than an annoyance. Boxelder bugs tend to have high populations during hot, dry summers (records show their populations skyrocketed during the Dust Bowl in the 1930s), meaning a summer like we had can produce a lot of boxelder bugs. Boxelder bugs: Why my house, and what do they want from me?īoxelder bug is an insect that is native to Minnesota, feeding on boxelder, maple and ash trees. This year’s big bug nuisance is boxelder bugs. This often leads them to aggregate in large numbers on the sunny sides of trees, buildings and other structures. The cool weather draws them from the places where they’ve been feeding on plants or on other insects to find places to ride out the winter. Cooler days and especially cooler mornings send signals to certain insects: winter is coming. Photo: Whitney Cranshaw, Colorado State University, Īs Minnesotans make the seasonal switch to sweaters and pumpkin spice lattes, insects are making a seasonal switch as well. Adult boxelder bugs are black with red banding.
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