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Today, while scouting for bean leaf beetle south of Ames, my lab found a few early vegetative plants with soybean aphid. Actually, it was Ashley Dean who found them. It was the ants moving on plants that caught her eye. Taking a closer look revealed a few small aphid colonies feeding on the undersides of the trifoliates. That is pretty typical from my experience – finding the first soybean aphids of the season is by seeing ants or lady beetles. It is not unusual to see soybean aphid in mid-June.

As the snow melts and planters are made ready for spring, it is also time to think about crop scouting. The Crop Protection Network has many resources for new crop scouts or summer interns. These resources can also provide a refresher to help seasoned scouts before they walk back into a field. Check out the following videos and web tools to get started:

My lab has been collecting adult and larval soybean gall midge for a few weeks. We used emergence cages in several habitats to collect adults. This year, they were only collected from 2018 soybean fields in Iowa. Two of my trapping locations have identified second-generation adult captures this week.