Experts scramble to save hemlocks
by Nanci Bompey, published August 31, 2007 12:15 am on citizen-times.com
Asheville – Nate Royalty stood beneath a hemlock tree at the Biltmore Estate and dropped a few white gumball-shaped pellets into a small hole in the ground.
He used his boot to cover the divot and moved around the tree, repeating the procedure as a group of arborists and tree-care professionals evaluated the newest line of defense against the woolly adelgid.
“It looks promising,” Frank Varvoutis, owner of Hemlock Healers in Waynesville, said of the CoreTect tablets, which will be available this fall. “I used some this spring, so I’ll go back in October and see what happens. I think it’s got its place.”
Bayer Environmental Science and Arborjet were in Asheville on Tuesday to show off their products at an invasive pest field day at the Biltmore Estate. The companies invited arborists, tree-care professionals and experts to share their research and explore the newest techniques in woolly adelgid maintenance.
“Asheville is right at the center of the hemlock woolly adelgid fire,” said Royalty, director of product development at Bayer Environmental Science. “It is the area under the most pressure.”
The small pests started showing up in the southern Appalachian Mountains in 2002 and are quickly moving through the region, leaving dead hemlocks in their path. Scientists say all of the hemlocks in Western North Carolina’s forests could be gone in the next five years.
“The hemlocks in the eastern U.S. will be gone if we don’t figure out a way to manage them,” he said.
Companies like Bayer have been working on new ways to fight the adelgids.
Insecticides containing imidacloprid are traditionally drenched onto the soil surrounding a hemlock or injected directly into the trees. The new tablets that Royalty was demonstrating also contain imidacloprid but alleviate the need for water, which can be useful when treating trees in the backcountry.
Along with the demonstrations of the tablets and other treatment products, the group also heard from researchers like Rusty Rhea, an entomologist with the Forest Service, who is working on strategies to control the adelgids in WNC’s national forests.
The forest service is using both imidacloprid and beetles to save as many hemlocks that they can and also saving seeds so they can repopulate the hemlock population in the future.
“We can’t save them all,” Rhea said. “We don’t have enough resources, personnel or finances to save all the hemlocks in the national forest.”