Bottle of Wine and Bucket of Beer: Experimental Evaluation of Fermenting Baits and Trap Designs for Capturing Longhorned Beetles (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae, Disteniidae)

Two fermenting bait types of sweet red wine and a mixture of beer/molasses/water, and two trap types, were assessed as to how they influenced the abundance and diversity of longhorned beetles caught in woodlands of Iowa, Missouri, and the Florida Keys, USA. Traps of two sizes, 3.8 L (Iowa bucket) or 2 L (Missouri bucket) in size, were predominantly used to trap beetles. Baits were evaluated for five years in Iowa, four years in Missouri, and in a short duration study in Florida. Clear plastic bottles, 3 L and 2 L, were also evaluated during one-year studies. The baited traps captured 3,969 beetles of 60 species in the Cerambycidae subfamilies Cerambycinae, Lamiinae, Lepturinae, Parandrinae, and Prioninae, and one species in the family Disteniidae. The two species caught in the largest numbers were the cerambycines Elaphidion mucronatum (Say) and Eburia quadrigeminata (Say), representing 69.1% and 69.0% of all beetles collected in Iowa and Missouri, respectively. In Iowa, 19 of the 39 species encountered were collected in numbers sufficient for analysis, 13 of which were significantly more attracted to sweet red wine bait than the beer/molasses/water bait. In the Missouri experiments, 13 of the 27 species encountered were collected in numbers sufficient for analysis. Only one of these was significantly more attracted to sweet red wine bait than the beer/molasses/water bait, while three species were significantly more attracted to the beer/ molasses/water bait. Our findings indicate that both sweet red wine and beer/molasses/water can be highly attractive baits for certain species of longhorned beetles.