Now is the time to strike, said fellow entomologist George Hamilton, of the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station at Rutgers University, who studied the insect's habits with Cooper.
Their work last year revealed the best time to attack the brown marmorated stinkbug: the end of August and first half of September, just before it heads indoors.
The Halyomorpha halys - which is native to China, Korea, and Japan - has flourished across the region since it showed up in Allentown about 15 years ago and has spread across several states.
Earlier efforts to eradicate this skunk of the insect world fell short. Exterminators didn't know when to apply insecticide.
"A lot of insects, like ladybird beetles - ladybugs - come into buildings in the fall, after the weather turns cold," said Cooper, author of The Bedbug Handbook and an owner of Cooper Pest Solutions in Lawrenceville.
Not these little stinkers. They're coming in now, necessitating treatment at entry points - attic vents, and door and window frames. Exterminators use pyrethroids, a synthetic insecticide of low toxicity. No organic alternatives are available, the entomologists said.
"We're talking about preventing them from coming into people's homes," Hamilton said.
Once indoors, "warm spells trick them into thinking it's time to go outside, and that's when people see them inside their houses," he said.
The insects are more a nuisance than anything else. They don't bite, but they do "like to get into the folds of things. They get into your clothes, into your shoes and papers," added Cooper. "Every time you turn around, there's another one."
From the study, "we learned when to kill them with insecticide and how to keep them out of structures," Hamilton said.
