@glumshoe ,Sorry for the slow reply, it’s harvest season right now and things can be hectic. They slowly increased in number over the first few years then suddenly you couldn’t go 10 feet without seeing a dozen. We currently are having the lowest crop yields we’ve ever seen and we aren’t equipped to handle such low quantities of fruit. We normally can produce enough to have 200+ cases of our Rosé but, at best we’ve got maybe 30 cases if we can manage it. and right now that’s a big if. In general its rough. In the summer the sidewalks in town are littered with smashed red wings and ‘honeydew’ {read:the sap like dropping from the lantern fly} . The high school marching band would have a contest to see what section could kill the most without breaking formation (saxophone with 67 during a single practice if I recall). The only pesticides that seem to affect them are frankly horrible and kill all insect life that it comes in contact with. It’s so bad that you legally where only permitted by the government to use it twice a year due to its effects, but local farms and I suspect a few exterminators in the area have been given permission to use it more frequently. It helped a bit, and I could be paranoid but I haven’t seen any bees this year. Not even the carpenter bees that lived in our deck. The paper/mud wasps and hornets are still there, but even their hives seem less abundant. Normally they love harvest as the sugars in the grapes draw the yellow jackets, but I think I only saw one or two instead of the dozens that I’m used to. There also have been gradually less wild fruit as the lantern flies drain the sap and leave them open to mold before they can even properly produce.

A few local colleges are trying to study them, Penn state and the department of agriculture in particular are leading the efforts. They banded a lot of trees with sticky tapes and it works alright when they are still nymphs, but the adults just walk right over them. The best way we’ve found has been where they remove as many of the Tree of Heaven(Ailanthus), a highly invasive species it its own right and shared native favorite to spotted lantern flies, and leave only a handful as poisoned bait trees. Since they are one of their only predators in the us it’s safer. I can say first hand, it’s a strange sight to see a tree surrounded by a 2-3 inch deep carpet of dead lantern flies. It helps, but they just keep coming.

We were placed in a “voluntary quarantine” a few years ago, but you can guess how help full the voluntary part made it. large shipping trucks constantly move through our area. Their eggs just look like a splash of mud. And my family watched as a full adult sat on the front of our car and stayed there like it was nothing as we drove at highway speeds. I’m not going to lie and say it doesn’t scare the hell out of me. This one insect is the reason that the entire wine industry in the Koreas was nearly wiped out and we have less research and next to native predators to help fight back. If these reach any big fruit producing region I don’t know what we can do.

so yeah, If you see one kill it on sight. 

(helpful tip, if you try to come at it from behind it will take off, but if it sees you coming from the front it accepts the inevitable)  

The insect in question:

Penn State Extension people talk about these guys like it is only a matter of time until they are everywhere simply because of their life cycle and how prolifically they spread. Don’t move your firewood, don’t buy Christmas trees from this area and move them out, don’t buy nursery stock from this area, don’t buy masonry or vehicles or basically anything from this area without careful inspection lol basically we fucked

The extension officer at the grower’s meeting last year talked about one picture she had seen in a lanternfly infested area of their fave host tree (Ailanthus) overhanging a railyard with trains that shipped all over. It’s only a matter of time.

This being the specific area (as of 2018 but I can’t find a more recent map). Berks County is specifically where it started as is still the worst. The isolated bit in Virginia apparently received stone shipments from the location where it started.

i live right in the middle of the external quarantine zones and i can’t even begin to explain how bad it is

they were swarming downtown where i live (while i’m not at school) to the point that they completely covered the bases of four lamp posts, and there were hundreds (if not thousands) flying and hopping around

if you see one, kill it immediately

by the way, their egg sacks look like this:

scrape them off of trees and destroy them immediately if you see them, but just know they can be extremely hard to spot