PINE BEETLE OUTBREAK SPREADS FAST, KILLING TREES

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, February 21, 1993                   TAG: 9302210119
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C6   EDITION: STATE 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: KENTS STORE                                LENGTH: Medium
PINE BEETLE OUTBREAK SPREADS FAST, KILLING TREES
On a walk through his woods one summer day, Wayne Queen heard a crunching noise.
Queen suspected bugs were eating the trees next to his pastureland, but figured the insects would die by the time he returned to the woods for hunting season. "That sound would drive you crazy," he said.
Now that a logging company has removed the 50 acres of loblolly and shortleaf pine trees killed by the southern pine beetle, Queen's woods are very quiet. "I don't have any pines left."
Foresters and landowners say a beetle outbreak that began in late 1991 in the Shenandoah Valley has spread to the edge of the coastal plain, and is killing pines across central Virginia. Fluvanna and Louisa counties are the hardest hit, and in Queen's Fluvanna neighborhood dying trees and fields of fresh stumps can be seen along the roads.
"If you've got pine, you've got the beetle, whether you know it or not," said Queen's neighbor, Seldon Vines. The beetle has killed about 20 acres of pine on his land. "If it's green, you'd better cut it while it's still worth something."
The beetle is also in Albemarle, Amelia, Appomattox, Buckingham, Campbell, Chesterfield, Dinwiddie, Goochland, Hanover and Powhatan counties.
"This is shaping up to be one of the worst epidemics since the early '70s, when it destroyed several million dollars worth of trees," said Tim Tigner, chief of entomology for the state Department of Forestry.
"It seems to be fanning out and moving eastward - moving toward the `pine basket' of the state," said L.F. Southard, the forestry department spokesman. "It's a tremendous concern because there are contiguous pine plantations in the east, with a lot more of our pine resources."
The small, dark brown beetle - about the size of a grain of rice - bores into all types of pine trees and nests in the sap layer between the bark and the wood. The next generation, the grubs, feed just under the bark. As they disrupt the sap flow along the tree, the tree dies.
The beetle is native to Virginia and is a periodic problem, Tigner said. "There are some references to it in some letters by [James] Madison," the fourth U.S. president, who had stands of pine on his Orange County estate.
In normal years, the beetle is only found in weak trees, such as those struck by lightning, Tigner said.
But the current outbreak followed several years of dry summers that made trees susceptible. And mild winters failed to kill off the beetle. "We expect it to continue to get worse in 1993," Tigner said. "We're getting almost daily reports of new spots."
It would take at least several days of zero-degree weather to freeze the pine bark and wood and halt the beetle's spread, Southard said.
Worst of all, "There is no treatment short of removing the infected trees from the woods," Tigner said.
Aerial inspections by the forestry department spot the rust-colored needles of infested pines. Foresters locate the trees on the ground and send letters to landowners explaining the problem and describing how to identify pines with beetles.
Globs of white resin on the bark are often the first sign, as the tree tries to throw off the beetles by literally drowning them in sap. Brown needles on the tree, or green needles on the ground around it, are later signs. Cutting off a piece of bark will show the beetle paths, or "galleries," underneath.
Getting landowners to help end the spread of the beetle is the most frustrating part of the outbreak, said Rich Reuse, the state forester assigned to Chesterfield County.
He sent out 150 letters to landowners a month ago notifying them that trees on their lands were infested. Only about one-third have responded.
Reuse first noticed the beetle in Chesterfield last winter. It has killed about 2,500 acres of pine since then, mostly in the western part of the county.
Foresters emphasize that the value of the trees is not completely lost, as the harvested wood can still be sold. But landowners say loggers, flooded with jobs because of the outbreak, are getting picky about what they'll buy.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB