I don’t care what anybody says. Baby stink bugs are NOT cute!
Typically babies of most every species of living thing on the face of the Earth can be regarded as cute, for the most part. But stink bugs are, in my opinion, the exception to that rule.
If grown up, adult stink bugs are as hideous and creepy looking as they are, then their offspring cannot be that much far off in terms of lack of cuteness.
But I digress. Let’s focus on what are some of the important things you may need to know about baby stink bugs, how they may affect your life, and what can we do keep the stink bug population from multiplying and producing more offspring.
Do Stink Bugs Lay Eggs Indoors?
First and foremost, one common misconception is that once a bunch of stink bugs invade your house they will lay their eggs and multiply. This particular misconception has, thankfully, been debunked. The good news is that stink bugs will not lay eggs within the confines of the four walls of your home.
They need a particular habitat in order to mate and to multiply. The most common place where they will lay their eggs is on the underside of the leaves on trees, and that too, they will only reproduce during warm, temperate weather. In other words, they don’t lay their eggs within the walls of your home. The average female stink bug will lay as many as 400 eggs over the course of her lifetime. And that lifetime will typically be not more than several months to a year at most. With a gestational period of 50 days from the time the egg is laid until it hatches into a baby stink bug and then grows into a full blown adult, it is no wonder that the stink bug population has grown as explosively as it has over the past couple of decades since they were first brought over to the western hemisphere from Asia.
So thankfully that’s one less thing you have to worry about. You can rest assured that if a finite number of stink bugs invade your house, they will not reproduce. You won’t have to worry about an army of baby stink bugs appearing out of nowhere within your house. (They may be able to attract other stink bugs from the outside, but that’s a whole different problem.)
Population Control: Killing Baby Stink Bugs Before They Hatch
In an effort to find a solution to the stink bug population crisis, one of the things that researches are looking it as a means to keep their birth rates down. If there are no other animals or insects out there in the wild to prey upon stink bugs, then surely there must be a way to stunt their population growth by slowing down the rate at which new stink bugs are born.
Researchers have yet to identify whether stink bugs have any natural predators in the food chain. But what they have discovered is that there is a particular species of wasp that happens to feed upon eggs of unborn baby stink bugs. So here’s an idea that sounds crazy enough that it just might work: Introduce these wasps into the habitat where there are colonies of unborn baby stink bug eggs. In theory, these wasps will devour the eggs, thus preventing them from ever hatching and thus being born. So one way how to kill stink bugs is by siccing predators on them.
This sounds like a good idea, but the only problem with this is that you would be exchanging one problem for another: You’re getting rid of the stink bugs, but then now you’ve got a potential wasp problem on your hands. This cyclical problem is sometimes referred to as the “scorched earth policy” – in order to defend your land against an invader, you destroy the very land you are trying to defend!
Killing baby stink bugs is seen as one viable means to keep their population in check. While it’s not feasible for the average person to do this (after all, how often does the average Tom, Dick, or Harry walk around inspecting the underside of leaves for stink bug eggs?), it is something that entomologists, farmers, and gardeners should be aware of and be on the look out for.