Can sunflower and buckwheat enhance the attractiveness of an attract-and-kill method for brown marmorated stink bug in Massachusetts fruit orchards?

Management of the Brown Marmorated Stink Bug (BMSB) has historically relied on chemical controls. Alternatively, cultural controls are ecologically-viable strategies that may help relieve pest pressure on the cash crop. While trap cropping and semiochemical-based traps have been developed to attract-and-kill BMSB, studies about how these strategies can work in conjunction are lacking, especially under field conditions. Here, we investigate if sunflower and buckwheat (known BMSB trap crops) enhance the attractiveness of a trap baited with BMSB sex pheromone. We recruited commercial fruit orchards (5 in 2021, 11 in 2022) in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. At each farm, one 30 x 10 m plot was used to plant sunflower and buckwheat and install a trap equipped with insecticide-treated netting and pheromone, while an identical plot had the trap alone. Mortality data for BMSB adults was recorded from July through September and analyzed using analyses of variance. In 2021, there was a higher number of BSMB caught in the trap crop plot than in the trap alone, with significant differences observed in September but not in July or August. In 2022, we observed significant differences in August, but not in July, September, or on average across the summer. Overall, we observed that trap cropping with sunflower and buckwheat enhanced the attractiveness of a lure-based trap in less than half of the summer months that the study ran for. Future field studies will elucidate the impact of trap cropping on BMSB control and feeding-damage prevention in Massachusetts fruit orchards.