House stink bugs are common pests invading homes, particularly in the cold seasons of the year. The shield-shaped bugs with a reputation for releasing an odious smell usually feed on plants in their natural habitat. This trend changes when they manage to get into your home.
In this blog, we detail the diet of stink bugs, their behavior once inside homes, and how you can protect your living space from these pesky invaders.
They normally hibernate during winter, moving indoors as the temperature starts to fall. The house is invaded through all cracks, crevices, or other small openings. Once inside the house, stink bugs may be on the lookout for food sources to enable survival.
Indoors, stink bugs like to congregate in warm, undisturbed areas like attics, basements, and wall voids. Let's look at their normal diet when they're inside your home.
Stink bugs have a great fondness for fruits like apples, peaches, and berries. In your home, apples and other fruits are typically exposed and, as such, are an easy target for stink bugs. They utilize their piercing, sharp, pointed mouthparts to prick the skin of the fruit and suck the juice from it.
Scarring normally would occur because the bugs feed by sucking on unblemished parts, usually leaving dark marks or sunken areas on the skin. With time, the fruit will start to rot at the site of the injury, becoming unsightly and unfit for consumption.
Besides fruits, stink bugs also like vegetables. Tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers, among other garden crops, could face an attack even when well stored indoors. These insects feed by inserting their mouthparts into the flesh of the vegetable and sucking out the sap.
Very often, it results in a discolored, shriveled, or deformed vegetable that is no longer fresh or appealing. Sometimes this damage renders vegetables more sensitive to rot or disease, which themselves cause further deterioration.
Even your favorite houseplants are not safe from these bugs. They also like to feed on the leaves and stems of houseplants. By sucking the sap from a plant, a stink bug may weaken its general health, which can cause yellowing and the eventual dropping of leaves from the plant too early.
This type of damage does more than threaten the aesthetic appeal of your houseplants; it can stunt their growth. These can be one of the most damaging insects to your indoor garden if left untreated.
Leftovers in the bowls are a sure magnet for stink bugs when you have pets. This pest surely will get attracted to the moisture and nutrients of pet food, especially if it is left for a fairly long time.
From dry kibble down to crumbs, including wet food, stink bugs will take advantage of an easy meal. This could, over time, invite stink bug contamination leaving behind bacteria and other harmful pathogens. This obviously would beg the need for promptly cleaning up pet food and storing it in airtight containers.
Stink bugs are opportunistic feeders, and your garbage can be a smorgasbord of options. Organic waste, food scraps, and leftovers in the trash might act as an appeal to these pests, especially when not regularly taken out.
Stink bugs will rummage through the garbage for anything from decaying fruits and vegetables to discarded food packaging with residual crumbs. Not only does it make your garbage smell worse, but it can also result in a more considerable stink bug problem in your home.
They may also infest your pantry and target cereals, rice, and gains stored in the same. If these staples are left without storing them in sealed containers, they will become a food source that attracts these insects.
Eventually, this would affect the quality and safety of your reserve food, making it undesirable, or even inedible. Store cereals and grains in tight containers to protect your pantry from stink bugs and check their activity periodically.
Sweet temptations: cakes, candies, and sweet drinks may turn out to be rather luring for stink bugs. They are much attracted by sugar in food, thus feeding willingly on everything that contains sugar.
When stink bugs locate a source containing sugar, they become almost impossible to deter, and the contamination or spoilage of food can result from their feeding. To prevent stink bugs, immediately clean up all sugary spills and store sweet foods in tightly sealed containers.
While plant-based foods are the primary source of nutrition for stink bugs, they are not beyond consuming meat if the opportunity arises. Since meat contains a high level of protein, leftover meat, whether raw or cooked, may be most appealing to stink bugs if left uncovered.
This will give a good avenue for possible contamination and spoilage, making the meat unsafe to eat. Always store meat in the refrigerator or enclosed containers to avoid targeting your meat by stink bugs and clean up leftovers right after meals.
Stink bugs are common pests indoors and outdoors that cause damage to several plants and crops. These insects in the wild feed opportunistically on a wide range of organisms, including fruits, vegetables, sap of trees, and even other insects.
Their ability to feed on a wide range of food sources enables them to spread over a wide range of ecological zones and, as such, becomes a major agricultural and ecological issue.
Although usually plant feeders, some stink bugs are omnivorous and may feed on smaller insects including caterpillars, beetles, and aphids. They use their piercing-sucking mouthparts to inject digestive enzymes into their prey and then suck out the internal fluids.
This predatory behavior becomes useful in certain instances since stink bugs can help control pest populations in the wild. However, they are nonselective hunters while feeding, and this can disturb the populations of harmful and beneficial insects alike.
The food sources for stink bugs also include wild plant seeds. They perforate the outer seed shell and suck the nutrient from within. This feeding itself may prevent the seed from germinating, hence reducing the ability of the plant to reproduce and spread.
Seeds from wildflowers, grasses, and trees are all potential targets for stink bugs. Over time, this foraging behavior might have a trickling effect on plant species diversity in the wild due to fewer seeds sprouting and coming to maturity.
Other sources of nourishment for the stink bugs are the flowers that grow in the wild. They are mostly attracted to the nectar within the blooms of every other kind of flower. These sweet waters give energy but also provide a deadly force on flowers since the feeding may bring damage to the flower.
The plant is made weak from reproducing or growing because the petals or stems have been pierced. This can, over time, reduce the overall number of wildflowers in an area, therefore affecting local pollinators such as bees and butterflies.
The stink bug primarily feeds on various types of nuts that have already cracked or been damaged in some manner. When sucking out the moisture and nutrients, this insect reduces the quality and may make them a little less viable as a food source for wildlife.
This is especially problematic for animals relying on nuts for food, like squirrels or birds. Stink bugs shrivel nuts or make them rotten and, due to this fact, nuts become very rarely available; in this respect, the natural food chain suffers.
They also feed on sap from trees in the wild. Stink bugs pierce the bark to tap into the nutrient-rich sap of the tree as an important food source. Although the immediate destruction of a single tree might not seem significant, with substantial groups of stink bugs inflicting injuries repeatedly, the tree weakens over time.
This feeding can lead to dieback of branches, poor growth, and susceptibility to diseases. Trees like maples, oaks, and fruit trees are highly susceptible because they produce a large quantity of sap.
Even weeds are fair game for this insect. Certain weed species, particularly those having succulent leaves or stems, provide an easy source of nutrition when more preferred hosts are less available.
Though weeds might not be the preferred plant by humans, they play a very important ecological role in most natural ecosystems through food and shelter provisions and erosion controls. Stink bugs feeding on weeds disrupt these ecological roles.
Other preferred targets of stink bugs include peaches, apples, and berries, which are mostly wild fruits. They use their sharp mouthparts to pierce the skin for sucking the juice from within. Puncture wounds brought about by these bugs may further lead to symptoms such as discoloration and scarring of fruits.
On fruits that grow in the wild, the damage may sometimes be almost imperceptible, but over time, stink bug feeding can affect the general health and productivity of plants.
Stink bugs are no less problematic in the wild than they are in home vegetable gardens. Wild-grown tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and other vegetables are among the most common objects of attack by these pests. Discoloration, shriveling, and deformation of vegetables take place from this bug.
The wild patches of vegetables, if left unattended, may serve as a source for multiplying stink bugs that eventually cause widespread damage. Wild vegetable crops do play a vital role in the local ecosystems where the wildlife and plant diversity might be affected by crop losses.
Most of all, stink bugs like beans and peas, are both wild-growing and cultivated. Wild, they attack the pods and suck the juice from developing seeds, the result being that the pod shrivels while inside the seeds die.
Stink bug damage to legumes can also lead to less plant growth in the future due to fewer seeds able to germinate properly. This could disturb the ecosystem for many years, especially in those areas where legumes play a great role in the nitrogen balance.
Generally, stink bugs live for about 6 to 8 months; however, this number can change concerning the surrounding environment, including temperature, nutrition, and habitat. In the summer season, they turn out to be more energetic, consuming several types of fruits, vegetables, and plants.
Meanwhile, in areas with cold climates, these insects retreat into hibernation-like states, called diapause, by which they manage to survive the winter months without too much activity. When the weather heats up again, they become active again and start taking foods and reproducing to live longer in general terms.
Stink bugs can go for weeks without food, based on the ambient temperature and humidity. They are much more durable in cooler conditions because their metabolism rate is lower. But under hotter and more active conditions, their needs for nutrition increase, and they can only survive for merely a week or two without food.
Indeed, this capability of surviving for long periods without food renders them quite resilient pests, especially when they infest households or are in hiding during colder months.
The major means by which stink bugs feed and hunt largely depends on their piercing-sucking mouthparts. They have a more specialized mouthpart called a proboscis, which they utilize in piercing through plant tissues, fruits, or seeds through which juices inside are sucked out.
Some species of stink bugs are also predators, such as omnivores. These feed on small insects, such as caterpillars and beetles. They locate their prey through both chemical and visual means. Having found an insect, they puncture the exoskeleton with the snout and inject digestive enzymes into the target animal, liquefying its innards.
Most stink bugs feed on plants. In the spring, their food consists of weeds and grasses but later becomes crops, orchards, and gardens once these are full-grown. Apples and peaches are some of the fruits commonly targeted, vegetables like peppers and beans, and field crops like cotton, and sorghum.
The bugs cause scarring to fruits by injecting their toxic saliva with their piercing mouthparts, and frequently the scar from this takes on the appearance of a cat's face; hence the popular nickname "cat-facing insects."
In addition to the plant damage, their feeding allows entry into the plant by other insects, as well as entry for disease infection.
The shield-shaped stink bugs are generally 1/2 to 3/4 inch in length. Their bodies are broadly oval and typically flat. A distinctive characteristic of a stink bug is a triangular-shaped plate on its back called a "scutellum." Many species of stink bugs color in shades of brown, green, or gray.
They have long, slender antennae and six legs. The head is small in comparison to the body. Their wings are leathery at its base, and membrane-like on its tip. Stink bugs have an infamous capability to yield a foul odor once disturbed as a form of defense.
