How to Get Rid of Cucumber Beetles

Hello, my friend, hello again; today we come together to talk about How to Get Rid of Cucumber Beetles and hope the blog can help you.

Do you want cucumber beetles to beetle off and leave your vegetables alone? Here are a few tricks that might work.

If your vining vegetables are crawling with striped or spotted beetles, chances are that they aren’t ladybugs but the yellow-bellied, er, yellow-backed villains of the insect world—cucumber beetles. Their somewhat sickly greenish-yellow hues hint at how ill they can make your plants.

When considering how to get rid of cucumber beetles, keep in mind that they generally do the most damage in late spring and early summer when seedlings are young and tender. Mature plants tolerate pests more easily. Although this article concentrates on the beetles’ effect on cucumber cultivation, the solutions suggested should work for other vegetables too.

How to Identify Cucumber Beetles

You can easily use beetle stripes or spots to identify which type of pest problem you have, though cucumber beetle control actually is similar for both varieties.

Striped Cucumber Beetle

how to get rid of cucumber beetles — Photo: istockphoto.com

The striped cucumber beetle (Acalymma vittatum) varies in length from 3/16 to 1/4 inch. Yellow in color, it has three vertical black stripes running down its back, as well as a black head, antenna, and abdomen. It spends the winter beneath leaf litter and emerges in late spring or early summer to lay tiny orange or yellow cucumber beetle eggs in the soil around the bases of your plants.

After hatching in a couple weeks or so, the white larvae with black heads feed on the plants’ roots before pupating in late summer. Although this small beetle prefers cucurbits—vining crops such as cucumbers, melons, squashes, and pumpkins—it often can be found on other vegetables and ornamental plants too.

Spotted Cucumber Beetle

Mostly similar in size and appearance to the striped beetle, the spotted cucumber bug (Diabrotica undecimpunctata howardi) comes in a greenish-yellow shade decorated with a dozen black spots instead of stripes. Because it can’t survive frigid winters, it migrates north in late June to early July, so it generally doesn’t cause as much cucumber carnage there as the striped version does.

However, the spotted type does feed on a wider range of plants than its striped “brother” and can inflict plenty of damage in the South, where more than one generation of beetles will be “hatched” over the course of a longer growing season.

Plant Damage

Cucumber beetle damage can be extensive since a heavy population of the insects may slaughter sprouting seedlings by consuming the new leaves and girdling (chewing all the way around) the stems. The beetles also interfere with pollination and fruit set by chowing down on the plants’ blooms.

However, the insects cause even more damage by transmitting the incurable bacterial wilt disease, which literally will cause plants to curl up and die. The cucurbits most affected by bacterial wilt are cucumbers and muskmelons. Although squashes are more resistant to the malady and have their own squash bugs with which they must contend, they can suffer from squash mosaic virus carried by cucumber beetles—which causes mottled leaves and distorted fruits.