TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTHI) – If you haven’t seen the armored shaped bugs around, you will. They’re out in full force this year.
The brown marmorated stink bugs are all over. They get into your homes, cars, on your windows and are basically everywhere.
“We get them in everything this time of year,” Carissa Lovett, Naturalist at Dobbs Park said. “They come in every little crack and crevice.”
With the fall and winter seasons coming quickly, we all try to stay inside and so are these bugs. That’s why you might see them more and more inside your home.
“It’s not all over the United States yet, but in a couple of years it probably will be,” Lovett said.
They’ve been a growing issue here in the Wabash Valley.
Stink bugs came to the United State by accident from Asia in 1998.
They’re slowly making their way across the United States, bringing their smell with them, but why are they so bad right now?
“Things happen in cycles. So, you get a boom year and then for a few years they might be good and then they’ll kind of taper off,” Lovett said.
Since the bugs aren’t originally from here, they don’t have natural predators as they did back in Asia. So, there’s really only one way you can prevent them from coming into your home.
“We recommend you get the treatment done about mid-September, “Brooke Taylor, a certified applicator for the Bug Man. “We’re seeing a lot of them right now.”
Taylor says they have a special treatment for stink bugs.
They’ll spray around doors, overhangs, and window. Anyplace that the stink bug will go to try and get into your home and out of the cold.
“It’s important to try to get ahead of them if you’re going to do something about it,” Taylor said.
She says that once the bugs are in your home they can’t do much about it.
Taylor and Lovett both recommend you vacuum the bugs up, or put them back outside.
They warn you not to squish them since they are called stink bugs for a reason.
