Eight years ago Brain Mitchell, a manager at Burns Pest Control, 1649 Carlisle Lane, was standing in a phone booth and he couldn’t even see the outside. The booth was completely covered with Asian beetles.

Although the amount of Asian beetles this year isn’t as extreme, the bugs are still moving into the residential areas of DeKalb in large numbers.

Both Burns Pest Control and Bacon’s Termite and Pest Control, 1106 Vienna Blvd., are receiving a higher amount of Asian beetle complaints.

Although it’s the time of the year for Asian beetles to migrate from soybean fields, Mitchell said compared to the last few years, the amount of beetles is worse this year because of warmer temperatures.

Robert Bacon, owner of Bacon’s Pest Control, disagreed, and said this year’s amount of Asian beetles is less than last year because farmers didn’t grow as many soybeans.

The beetles are prominent in DeKalb because their food source, aphids, live in DeKalb’s soybean fields.

Biology professor Bethia King said the beetles’ food source of aphids disappears each year when soybean crops are harvested, forcing them to move into town. The beetles are also looking to hibernate and often go inside the walls of people’s homes, King said.

The Asian beetles move into town because aphids also live in buckthorn, an evasive and non-native tree-bush species that can be found in residential areas, said Lyle Paul, an agronomist at the Northern Illinois Agronomy Research Center.

While the beetles may be a nuisance to most, farmers actually benefit from the large amount of Asian beetles. Paul said Asian beetles eat aphids that do a lot of harm to plants, including soybean crops.

Paul also said farmers did not bring Asian beetles to the area.

The beetles pose few problems to people besides being a nuisance.

Compared to the similar looking ladybug, the Asian beetles are a little more aggressive when they are eating bugs, Paul said. Mitchell said Asian beetles also bite.

Although McKenzie Luxmore, junior nursing major, has never been bitten by the Asian beetle, she said there are a lot by her apartment door.

Senior nutrition major Julie Van Pelt finds the beetles more of a nuisance.

“We study in the grass a lot; sometimes they crawl on us and interrupt our studying,” she said.

King said the bugs have a reflex that if a predator bothers them they leak stuff out of their joints that can stain.

Bacon said their exterminators can get rid of the bugs completely by spraying pesticides on the outside of people’s homes. Burns Pest Control also treats the exterior of homes to get rid of the bugs.

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