I have lived with seasonal stink bugs several years now. Our wonderful exterminator assures me there is really no way to eliminate them. Invasive species are difficult. When it’s stink bug season, I vacuum them up morning and evening, and use a sock to block the hose so they don’t just fly right back out. I have light weight vacuums up and downstairs for that purpose. Same with the invasive species of ladybugs. Exterminator tells me another invasive bug is headed our way and asked me to be on the look out. He seems to assume it will show up at my house first.
A neighbor decided she was going to just coexist with the stink bugs. She says they are social creatures. However, after I read that article posted upthread when it first came out, I decided to fight rather than accept them. I can’t live with thousands. I am successfully holding the line at dozens at each window.
My D1’s college dorm was invaded her freshman year. They were crawling all over the ceiling of the hallway! She insisted on coming home one weekend, it was so bad. I think the school “bombed” the building over the winter break.
In MD, I was part of a UMD stinkbug experiment involving tomatoes. But I was in the control group, and I had a rather urban community garden that they hadn’t found yet. Still, they suck the cholorphyll out of unripe fruit, leaving spots that have a hard and corky texture underneath. I can see how it would be an agricultural disaster.
Here in the upper Midwest, we have an unprecedented amount of toads and frogs. I don’t mind, as i would imagine that they eat insects…in the past, ants were common. Not so much, this year.
Ugh, I agree with @HImom we don’t want them in Southern CA either. @BunsenBurner please tell me this is a Northern insect that won’t be marching south to Los Angeles. We might have terrible traffic here in LA but there are a lot of bugs that just don’t like our arid/semi-arid climate. And the ones that do can be dispatched by the exterminator…
It’s really important to follow agricultural rules—they exist to protect our state and other places from getting MORE critters that have no natural predators and can do tremendous damage to our ecosystem.
All bags leaving our state are scanned to try to catch things that shouldn’t be going out of state. We have to rely on the honor system for things coming in.
I don’t like the idea of breeding a natural enemy for these critters. What will kill the natural enemy of the stinkbug when it starts breeding? I just don’t think we have the wisdom to do pest control this way. One of our favorite children’s books is “The King, the Mouse, and the Cheese,” which addresses this very topic.
Not that spraying chemicals is the answer, but at least if they prove to be harmful, we can end their use. Once you’ve introduced a critter where it doesn’t normally belong, you can’t really stop it.
Agree—wasps have their own issues. In HI, we had the mongoose introduced to help catch rats and mice in the fields. Sadly, they are on different sleep/activity schedules and the mongoose is a huge pest with NO natural predators.
Similarly, abezia trees were imported and planted widely and are now huge hazard, especially as they can and do topple with their shallow root system and growing so quickly. The wood is also too soft to be useful for much.
I am not a fan of that plan either. Although sometimes biocontrol measures worked quite successfully (mosquito control in Sochi, for example), quite often the artificially introduced predator becomes a new pest.
Maybe if there is not a whole lot of other, tastier stuff to peck at… 
