How to get rid of mesquite girdlers?

Answer 1

The only way to get rid of the things is to cut the girdled branches off of the affected tree and burn the branch or send it to the landfill. Cut the branch just below the girdle, since the beetle will lay eggs above the girdle where the pest will hatch to eat the dead wood. I live on the east side of Tucson, AZ and the girdlers just arrived here last year. My neighbor and I only found about a dozen of them last year, but this year we have been tracking them for a month and have cut about 200 branches out of the mesquite and cat's claw trees on our two acres of land. We live in a mesquite forest, and have perhaps 80-100 trees for the little pests to attack. The various web pages say that people seldom see the beetles, but we have found six live ones in the last month. Needless to say, they were dispatched with the side of the clippers. If you have only a couple of small trees, you might try some kind of insecticide, but with a hundred trees, most of which are 50 feet tall, this is not practical for us. Be diligent with your clipping, each unclipped girdled branch could hatch 40 new beetles next fall.