Heliothine Trap Catches, May 22, 2025

Here is the first Heliothine trap catch report for 2025. We will strive to report our pheromone trap catches here weekly throughout the growing season. Each county reported is the average weekly catch per trap from 3-4 traps. The traps are placed beside agricultural fields and the pheromone lures are changed every 2 weeks. We do not recommend making insecticide applications based on these trap catch data alone, as the attractiveness of an individual field in comparison to other nearby habitats can strongly influence the number of eggs laid in the field. The best use of these data is to give an alert for when scouting should be focusing on bollworm and tobacco budworm eggs and larvae due to a recent large flight of moths. In addition to the current weekly catch, I will also provide the previous week’s catch, last year’s catch at the same time, and a 10-year average catch for that county. The purpose of these historical data are to help provide a context for the current trap numbers.

For this week, Lowndes and Sunflower counties had very high catches of bollworms, and most counties in both the Delta and northeastern Hills regions had larger than average bollworm catches. However, very few tobacco budworm were caught in any traps.