How To Remove Spotted Lanternfly Eggs

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- [Instructor] You can stop spotted lanternfly before they hatch by destroying their egg masses.

Spotted lanternfly lay their eggs in the fall, and the first instar nymphs hatch starting in May.

Therefore, the best time to find and destroy viable egg masses is winter through early spring.

Spotted lanternfly will lay their eggs on almost any nearby flat surface, so be sure to check tree trunks and branches, rocks and equipment stored outdoors.

Once you find them, destroying them is easy.

Let's see how.

So this is what appears to be about as fresh as you can get on an egg mass.

Here's a egg mass that's been laid in the past couple weeks.

And you can see the eggs poking out underneath here.

And then here's a few more untouched, uncovered eggs.

As all of these dry down closer to end of winter or beginning of spring, you'll see them as kinda cracked, light tan or maybe gray splotches of mud on trees, but those will be these same egg masses.

There's about 30 or 50 eggs in each of these egg masses.

And by applying enough pressure to them, you'll pop them and kill the nymphs that are gestating inside, that are growing inside.

But what I am going to do is sit here and actually just take my scraper card, my handy scraper card, and just really press down.

And you can hear that sound of those eggs just popping along and you can see the juice coming out, right?

So that just means that we have really done a good job of killing those nymphs for next year.

If you fail to properly scrape those eggs and really get that juice out, those are still viable egg masses.

It's one of the reasons why you really wanna press down and make sure you hear that popping sound when you do this.

So here I have an egg mass that I'm gonna scrape into a baggy filled with hand sanitizer in order to kill the eggs.

You can fill your baggy with either hand sanitizer or alcohol as long as when you scrape these eggs into the bag, the eggs get in contact with that alcohol.

That'll make sure you kill them.

So here I'm taking my bag right up underneath, and I'll put my scraper card here on top.

And just with the long edge, I'm gonna scrape an egg mass down in.

And you can kinda see that I killed some of those eggs anyway.

And then I'll sit here and seal the bag.

Make sure to get all those eggs inside.

And now I'm gonna take the alcohol that's settled down at the bottom and make sure that all those eggs I just scraped in get in contact with that alcohol to make sure that they die off.

And then when I'm done doing my scraping, I'll take this bag, I'll put it in a second bag and throw it in the trash and take that trash to the dump, and I'll have killed all these eggs.