Page 14 - index

One day in the middle of May, as the frst Siberians began to show buds, Marty and
I were in our seedling feld and we noticed a lot of insect activity around the siberians
and thought they were fies – were these Neorthocheta dissimilis? We couldn’t catch one
and they didn’t
stay still long
enough to get
a good look. I
remembered
that years ago
we had bought
some yellow
sticky cards
for monitoring
insects in the
attic where we
over-winter a
few plants. I
don’t think we
ever used them.
With a bit of
deep digging
Demo-yellow sticky trap with orthochaeta we found the
package of
sticky cards and put one on a plastic stick in the feld near all the activity. Within hours
we had caught several fies and gnats. We took our card up to the house and ran to get
the TSI and its photograph of Neorthocheta dissimilis. There was a perfect match, right
down to the orange legs! We quickly reread the article about the size of the fy and sure
enough it was the same as ours. We fnally had the culprit. Now what?

We decided to fll
the feld with yellow
sticky traps on sticks.
We only had 25 in our
package so I got on
the phone and ordered
more from The Green
Spot (greenmethods.
com). Within a week
we had about 100 traps
in the feld. The early
ones flled up quickly
with Neorthocheta
dissimilis and many
of the later ones were
just as successful.
Some spots were more Demo-yellow sticky trap with orthochaeta

12 Canadian Iris Society Newsletter