Maple bugs make an appearance as weather gets warmer

Spring has sprung, and that means one thing: bugs.

One pest is already making an appearance, maple bugs.

Sean Sherwood with Poulin’s Pest Control said maple bugs are already back and smell when you crush them.

“These guys spent the winter in your walls or down beside your foundation. Now that it’s nice and warm they’re coming out and they’re all over the place. But it gets cool at night again and so they head back up to where they were hiding,” Sherwood explained.

“These guys are particularly tough, they have a waxy cuticle on the bottom of their body which means not much is going to penetrate through. You’re going to have to get, in this case, an insecticidal powder.”

Sherwood said you take the powder and pump it down into cracks along the foundation where the dirt has pulled away from the house and then pump the powder underneath the siding, particularly on the south and west sides.

When the bugs crawl through the powder, it gets all over their bodies and will kill them off. Sherwood said they sell the white powder at Poulin’s

“When you’re looking for powders … don’t get anything with diatomacious earth in it. In this case, that is not going to do the job for you, the waxy cuticle will prevent (the powder) from getting into and onto their body on the bottom and their wing covers will prevent it from doing anything to them from the top so you’re just wasting your money with that,” he said.

While maple bugs don’t do any damage, they are still a nuisance. Poulin’s has already received lots of calls regarding maple bugs.

“One of the real fun ways to control these, if you got nothing to do in an afternoon, you can sit out in the backyard with your shop-vac and you can suck them up out of the air, it’s actually kind of fun,” Sherwood said.