Ayrporte

The universities studied the variant beetles laying eggs in the soybeans. Those beetles hatched out of nearby corn fields. They have to have corn roots to survive as larvae. Then of course, they stayed in the corn & started chewing the silks. Then, when it was egg-laying time they would move to the adjoining soybean fields & lay eggs. The beetles had discovered that "secret" of rotation. We saw it happen & couldn't figure it out for a while. I remember disctinctly the couple of years when the phenominon first started occuring. We had chemical reps out looking at our corn. Most said we had Banvel damage to our corn (bowed plants) since we were using more Banvel back in those days. But anyway, universities found the beetles would occasionally chew on bean leaves, but not often. The corn silk was still the soup du jour of their appetite. They would travel back to the corn field to eat.

My point is, it doesn't work to just say "oh, just do this & this & you won't have any trouble....you're causing your own trouble and I won't have any trouble because....". That is wrong. Actually, we (& universities) found there was less root feeding on multi-year corn. The 1st yr corn suffered the most root & subsequent silk damage from CRW. I suppose you are right that if we grew no corn then CRW would leave here also.

I won't say I didn't see any CRW beetles this year (2011). I saw maybe 5 beetles in total and I watch for them. I especially watch for them as we travel around the state (IL) in the summer. It's not hard to spot where they were flying, if they existed at all. We used to see 10-15 per silk.  What would you think has changed their population so dramatically in the last 5 years? We saw the same situation in 2009 & 10. Maybe they'll come back...but they haven't yet.