The J-Man came to Bangor in 1938. He carried deadly traps made of cans, jars, boards and an unidentified “sweet fluid.”
His legal name was Weston Smith, and he belonged to a U.S. Department of Agriculture crew attempting to stop the spread of Japanese beetles. The Bangor Daily News reported the group found one beetle in Bangor that July and 80 in Brewer.
The program was part of Maine’s long fight to stop the shiny copper-green beetle with an appetite for crop leaves, berries and beans. It spends the winter in the ground, eating grass roots, and descends upon plants in July and August.
The state may be facing its biggest beetle population yet this summer, but for decades Maine fought them with uniformed inspectors, quarantines, now-banned chemicals and even other insects. It was a war with high economic stakes, fraud cases and airplane stowaways that took on moral dimensions for some at its forefront.
The beetles first appeared in the BDN in a 1923 wire report titled “Plant pests that cost billions: Government loses more by predacious bugs and blights than by bootleggers.”
“Dope peddlers, bootleggers and diamond smugglers have odd schemes to foil Uncle Sam’s sharp-eyed men,” the article began. “But their evil ways do not cost the taxpayer nearly so much as the plant pests that slip into the country.”
It recounts the beetle’s arrival on American soil in 1916 with a shipment of iris plants sent to New Jersey. In 1923, the federal government was heavily involved in monitoring and attempting to control the beetle nationwide among other pests such as the browntail moth, gypsy moth, corn borer, bean beetle and boll weevil.
The beetles cost millions of dollars a year in crop damage through the rest of the century. Farmers reported they “ravaged” crops.
Control options are limited even today — most people knock them into soapy water, or attempt to establish nematode populations — and Mainers have struggled to find solutions since the beginning.
In the 1920s, people imported Japanese flies to eat the beetle, used “coated arsenate of lead” or lead arsenic as a pesticide, and sprayed mysterious chemical vapor over fields using a stovepipe attached to a lantern (“Gas attack launched on Japanese beetles,” a 1930 headline announced).
Eastern states quarantined the movement of crops, flowers, peat moss, soil and anything that might house the beetle during their active period.
The beetle was first reported in Maine in 1932, but the hunt had been on for years. One 1930 arrest report for a jewelry thief said the suspect had been employed here by the USDA to look for beetles. Concerned residents brought suspicious beetles to the BDN offices at least twice.
Throughout that decade, federal inspectors arrived in special uniforms to set traps and hunt for the bugs, alerting the police and asking Bangor residents for their cooperation.
Seasonal quarantines began in southern and central Maine soon after and continued for decades. Nursery products entering the state needed certificates stating they were beetle-free, which led to fraud by sellers entering Maine under fake nursery names.
During World War II, some linked the beetle to the country’s war against Japan in inflamed rhetoric. National agriculture officials took a similar approach a decade before.
The USDA’s entomology bureau chief said in 1931 that the pest situation had become a critical war between humanity and the destructive forces working against it. He wrote that those insects, most of which came from outside the country, had become mankind’s “greatest rivals in the control of Nature.”
“Nations may, someday, abolish war between men,” he concluded. “But the battle on bugs, it seems likely, must go on forever.”
Wars between men did go on, and transportation expanded with them. In the 1940s, the beetles were found on airplanes and ships. USDA inspectors checked people for Japanese beetles at airports and state lines.
A BDN humor columnist said trying to enter California meant risking a nervous breakdown, recounting being yanked from the car, his luggage and vehicle ripped apart and himself bludgeoned by guards who appeared to have escaped from Alcatraz.
Airplanes are still a risk for beetle spread, and the federal government regulates a few quarantined airports today to manage hitchhiking bugs. In 1978, a Philadelphia airport was temporarily declared hazardous when swarmed by beetles. A USDA spokesperson said the beetles flock to aircraft on hot days, where they bounce along the fuselage until they find a way in.
Entering the 1950s, now-illegal pesticides became common beetle control methods. Popular choices included DDT, Dieldrin, heptachlor, chlordane and carbaryl, carcinogenic chemicals that have been banned for decades because of their deadly effects on human and animal health and persistence in the environment.
Quarantines continued through these years, but became less strict as the century wore on. Many of the materials, including compost, greenhouse-grown plants, bulbs and roots for planting were removed from the federal list in 1975.
In the 1970s, natural control options like the milky spore gained some traction (today it’s considered less effective because of Maine’s cold climate) and research showed starlings ate some beetles.
All the while, thousands of traps were set by the agriculture department each year in efforts to keep the beetles from spreading, and for years, it worked. They weren’t found in northern or Down East Maine until the 1990s.
Once they were detected in Aroostook and Washington counties, control efforts largely ended, recalled Jim Dill, a pest management specialist for the University of Maine Cooperative Extension who worked in the area.
Today, Maine is resigned to the presence of Japanese beetles, but the war goes on at home. One BDN commenter recently said they rely on the “Bug-A-Salt” gun, which fires table salt at beetles using a spray pattern similar to a shotgun’s.
How do you control Japanese beetles in your garden? Leave a comment and it may be featured in a future story.
