Yo, what's going on everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Show. Now today I'm going to talk about probably my least favorite pest. This is such an annoying bug. I mean, honestly, it's beautiful in its adult format if you don't

know what it will do to your plants. If you if you were a non-gardener and you saw this

bug you would say oh my gosh what beautiful plant, or sorry what a beautiful bug.

But man, as a gardener, it just, I hate it so much.

And that would be the Japanese beetle.

So, so annoying.

It can quickly decimate your plants.

And it's somewhat hard to get rid of.

At least I've had some trouble with it in the past. So let's talk about it. First of all, what is it? It's

very distinct. It has a copper-colored back, its reflective, metallic blue-green head, and it

has these small white hairs that line the sides of its abdomen and it's fairly large.

It looks exotic and rightly so as it didn't originate in North America.

Up until the early 20th century these bugs were only found in Japan.

So geographic isolation, certain predators native to the island kept that beetle from spreading

to the mainland, but that all changed when plants and flowers were imported to the US from

Japan in the early 1900s and what happens is the bug probably in its larval

form came along for the ride and then basically that bug came out of its larval form and found itself in a world with no predators and just went absolutely crazy.

So this is an interesting one from a life cycle perspective because it spreads out over an entire year.

Each female will produce 40 to 60 eggs and it will lay them in the soil about three inches deep so what you'll see

is you'll see the bug land on your your soil and dig down this big old beetle will

just dig into the soil and that's when you know it's trying to lay its eggs.

Then by mid-summer those eggs begin to hatch. After hatching the grub

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