Marvin Enoe, a supervisory tree climber with the Ohio ALB, shows green industry professionals a maple tree infested by ALB in Bethel.

Marvin Enoe, a supervisory tree climber with the Ohio ALB, shows green industry professionals a maple tree infested by ALB in Bethel.

By Brett Milam
Editor

In celebration of Agriculture Week in March, members of the Asian Longhorned Beetle Eradication Program in Bethel demonstrated how to spot the infestation in a guided tour for green industry professionals on March 17.

On a private property wood lot in the 3000 block of Angel Drive near the site of the new Ohio Department of Agriculture office in Bethel, dozens of green industry leaders, members of ODA and the ALB program gathered for the demonstration.

Ohio’s largest industry is agriculture, responsible for one out of every seven jobs and that’s why the ALB Eradication Program is important, economic-wise, David Daniels, director of the Ohio Department of Agriculture, said before the demonstration.

“We play a very instrumental part in keeping the industry moving,” he said.

Their efforts include tracking every tree from beginning to end in program.

“We’ve got about 120 people involved in that,” Daniels said.

Marvin Enoe, a supervisory tree climber with the Ohio ALB, is one of those people and he was on hand to discuss how spot the infestation in the surrounding maple trees.

“We spend quite a bit of time scrutinizing branch unions, underside of branches,” Enoe said. “Somebody asked this question earlier: ‘Where does the initial infestation kinda start in a tree?’ The general rule is, it usually starts in the crown about two-thirds of the way up the tree, but that is not consistent.”

The adult beetle is hardly ever seen. In fact, it’s the damage that it leaves behind for surveyors or spotters, those on the ground, is how they determine an infestation has occurred. The ALB tunnel through the bark, referred to as a “feeding gallery.”

Surveyors work in crews of three, four or five and gather around a group of trees and try to find the tell-tale sign of an infestation: egg sites and exit holes, which are more roundish and oval with mandible marks and the exit holes are perfectly rounded.

When the surveyors aren’t sure from the ground 40-feet below, the tree gets marked as suspicious and the climbers, like Enoe, are brought in to climb.

The late fall and the winter provides the best opportunity to survey because the trees are bare. When the leaves return, it reduces the potential to spot ALB infestation in the trees, Kent Reed, Agricultural Inspection Manager with ODA.

“You’re lucky to find 60 percent of damage from the ground on average,” Reed said. “So when you look at it, if you have 10 trees that are infected, you’re only going to get six of those trees from the ground.”

Enoe said 120 out of 140 large-standing maples were found to be infested in an initial survey of the area near the private property.

“It was pretty significant,” he said. “Two large maples had over 100 egg holes. This has been an area of pretty prolific infestation.”

Most of the trees in the wood lot area were taken out by ODA, Enoe said.

“We try to minimize any damage to the property and we also restore the property after cut to the condition that we met it,” Enoe said. “Basically, when we’re done, it should like it did before minus the trees that we needed to take.”

ODA officials said they try to establish a relationship with property owners because of that need at times to take trees from the property and reoccurring visits to that property necessitate a good working relationship.

“Folks care about their trees,” Enoe said. “People are passionate about trees and we do have to be sensitive to that.”

The process of climbing a tree, like the maple tree Enoe’s climbers climbed for the demonstration, would take about 30 or 45 minutes, he said, but sometimes it could take up to two hours.

“And we have seen incidences where the only infestation is 70, 75-feet up in the crown, one or two egg sites,” he added.

Historically, Enoe said an industry professional or a resident has reported ALB.

“So you guys are our eyes out here and that’s very important, I can’t state that enough,” he said. “We can’t stress enough how important it is to educate folks on what to look for.”

Enoe added, “You look at a place like Bethel, where we don’t assume a lot of international import. This is not where we assumed we were going to find ALB.”

As of Feb. 25, 18,861 trees have been confirmed to have an ALB infestation since detection began on June 6, 2011, with 18,456 of those removed. An additional 71,756 high-risk host trees have been removed since those began in March 2013.

Residents can report suspected ALB infestations online at www.AsianLongHornedBeetle.com or call the program office at 513-381-7180.

Climbers with the Ohio ALB demonstrates what it’s like to go up into one of the trees, March 17, 2017.