A lot of my crops have been harvested. The onions and garlic are in and curing. Except for some remnants the potatoes are out. The peas have long been eaten and the first few plantings of green beans, carrots and lettuce are all spent. These have left big gaps that I’m aching to fill with seedlings, but as hot as it is, winter is coming. Nevertheless, a neighbor commented that my garden looked very green to her. These days all I seem to see is insects, disease, and empty spaces I’d like to fill with plants: it’s late August.
I had an extra indigene for part of this last week and I put him and one of our own indigent boarders to work harvesting pinto beans. They demanded an unreasonably high sum, but they enjoyed the work and largely did it without complaining. I did have to finish the job, but that’s OK. The pinto beans themselves look beautiful this year and the dry finish to July means they’ve mostly dried quite nicely and so will store well into winter; at $1.50 a pound, I’ll probably save myself ten dollars (minus labor and seed costs).
Pintos are my favorite beans. I shouldn’t admit it, but I even like the ghastly refried pintos one can get at imitation Mexican restaurants. I am fully aware that “pinto” means speckled and that a pinto horse is just speckled, nevertheless the beans remind me of horses. Maybe it’s an association with cowboys and the bean scene from Blazing Saddles I’m sorry I mentioned that.
The pintos were rushed along to maturity both this year and last by a nasty little lady beetle species called the Mexican bean beetles Epilachna varivestis. Most people think of lady bugs, or ladybirds as the British would have it as beneficial insects (when will the Brits start making sense – I know it’s not a true bug, but a bird? Really?). Indeed most members of the Coccinellidae family are predators, but the Mexican bean beetle has chosen the vegetarian path. Apparently it still worries about protein intake so it sticks with beans.
Mexican bean beetles migrated to the US from a rainy high plateau in central Mexico and really enjoy that kind of weather. West of the Rockies, they are only trouble when there’s a lot of irrigation. Unfortunately they like our climate just fine. The Virginia Cooperative Extension has a map of Mexican bean beetle populations in the United States. There are a lot of reports around Virginia and West Virginia, but not so much in the rest of the US – unfortunately, western Mass is one of the few exceptions.
The MBB, like all beetles goes through complete metamorphosis. The adults emerge in spring and after chowing down lays eggs. Repulsive, spiky, yellow larvae emerge from these eggs and begin skeletonizing the first bean leaves they find. After a few weeks of feeding the larva pupate then turn into adults. At all stages they depend on beans for sustenance.
The population explodes quickly. I noticed a few in mid-July as the pintos were getting big, then in just a week noticed that the plants were pretty much dripping with the things. I began killing them, but they took the plants out. They’ve now moved on to the black beans.
Luckily they didn’t do much damage to the bean pods themselves and the harvest is pretty good. It’d be a lot better without the beetles I’m sure, but I guess I can’t complain too much.
In much of the world beetle larva are eaten. Meal worms, which are pretty popular as food are beetle larva. What I really need to do is convince the boarders to eat beetles.
