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

DATE: TUESDAY, May 23, 1995                   TAG: 9505240041
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

DE-BUGGED

IN LABORATORIES in Hawaii and Kansas and New York and places in between, scientists are watching bugs eat. The Anisopteromalus calandrae, for example, an alluring little wasp, bores its stingerlike drill into a corn kernel and deposits an egg on a weevil larva. Baby wasp hatches and eats larva. Yum.

Mandible-licking good.

Another "ridiculous waste" of time and resources that could be better spent on saving Medicare? Time to haul out that old Golden-Fleece Award again?

No. Scientists are researching how to put good bugs to work eliminating bad bugs. Little A. calandrae's target, the maize weevil beetle, is the world's biggest corn pest. In a two-year test involving bins of 1,500 bushels of corn, Science News reports, the wasps destroyed 90 percent of the weevil population. The few left were not damaging the grain. (Most natural parasites or predators - being unafflicted by human greed - don't destroy all of their prey because that would leave them nothing to eat.)

So, what's the use? Haven't these eggheads heard about Raid?

Oh, yeah. Some among their number invented it. But scientists have found that biological controls can have advantages over pesticides. One is that insects can destroy the eggs that pests lay inside grain kernels, where chemicals don't reach. And some pests are becoming resistant to some pesticides.

Scientists, therefore, have been busily studying when to add insects to grain bins, how to raise colonies of worker bugs, and even whether good bugs can go bad and attack other good bugs. What they need to do, though - and soon - is hire some marketing talent.

For it's one thing to know that a certain species of beetle can control the fly population or that the offspring of Aprostocetus hagenowii, a nonstinging wasp, devours cockroach eggs. It's another to get such biocontrols in from the outdoors, where farmers have long used them in their fields.

The food industry has shown an interest in the research, the magazine reports, but sanitation standards require bug-free surroundings. What would one say to the health inspector when the friendly wasp flew by? "Oh, she's OK. She's with us. That's April, our cockroach-killing wasp?"

This is going to take rethinking.

by CNB