Have you seen this bug? It’s about two centimeters long with a flat, speckled brown body. It's shaped like an arrowhead, with six skinny legs and long antennae. It’s known as the brown marmorated stink bug — and for good reason. Picking it up or moving it will cause the bug to expel a smelly liquid.
The stink bug has become an increasingly common sight in Milwaukee homes. Russ Groves, the chair of the Department of Entomology at UW-Madison shares why.
"It's an exotic and invasive species. It was introduced into North America, actually decades ago. It's come in through the east coast and it's really been slowly making its way across the U.S. It's generally a hitchhiker, meaning that it it gets inside of people's vehicles and so forth," he explains.
Established populations of stink bugs are found across the southern half of the state. Groves says Wisconsin doesn't have a big population in the northern half of the state.
He adds that the stink bugs people see in the house are typically not feeding and are resting. Around this time, they'll want to make their way back outside where they start feeding again on a host of plants.
Most of the time farmers and gardeners can remove the bug by hand. If a producer does need to resort to using a type of pesticide, they can reach out to local pest control.
"From an agricultural standpoint, they can reach out to county extension or they can reach out to state specialists like myself to get a recommendation on what options might be available, depending upon what their market is," he says.
