A Geranium a Day May Keep Japanese Beetles Away
First posted on 03-09-2010
When Japanese beetles invade, they lay waste to plants, trees and bushes to satisfy their voracious appetites. These destructive creatures find almost 300 species of plant quite tasty and the Agricultural Research Services (ARS) estimates the beetles cost $450 million in damage annually to the ornamental plant industry alone.
Researchers have discovered one plant that seems to act as a sort of anesthetic to Japanese beetles: geraniums. Japanese beetles will eat geranium petals, but within thirty minutes of ingesting a few bites, they fall on their backs, slowly twitch their legs and antennae and fall into a paralysis for hours. In the laboratory, these beetles come around again in twenty-four hours or so but in the wild, they fall 
victim to predators who can’t resist what appears to be a struggling insect.
Scientists have known about geranium’s near-lethal effect on beetles for a long time, at least since the 1920s, but the reason geraniums paralyze Japanese beetles has not come under scrutiny until recently.
Chris Ranger, an entomologist for ARS, is trying to come up with a way to use geraniums to battle Japanese beetles on a large scale. He hopes his research will lead to a natural formula of paralytic compounds that can be used to ward off Japanese beetles. Ranger has enlisted the support of Rutgers University’s Ajay Singh, a natural products chemist, in the effort.
Hopefully, the ongoing research will result in an environmentally safe product the horticulture industry and individual gardeners can use to finally keep Japanese beetles at bay.
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Comments:
Pelargonium zonale is the genus and species of the particular type of geraniums ARS scientists studied. Jan, you had the same thought I did when I wrote this article, and you expressed it so very well!
Are you talking about real geraniums or pelargoniums, which many people commonly call geraniums? It would be fabulous to think one could plant pots of red “geraniums” near tasty blackberries and watch the paralyzed little devil beetles be carried off by birds!