Photo: Rick Collins
UFV student Rita Broekhuis uses lung power to suck Dicyphus bugs into a tube in order to prepare them for transport to a local greenhouse. The bugs are popular with local growers.
A little buggy UFV gets a little help from its friends to raise bugs for pest control management By Patty Wellborn
P
ardon the pun, but something is driving the folks at the University of the Fraser Valley Agriculture department a little buggy. Several thousand Dicyphus hesperus (a small mosquito-size insect) are also keeping the students, staff, and instructors extremely busy. As part of UFV’s AGRI 206 Field Techniques in Pesticide Management course, university students have been raising the Dicyphus, harvesting them, and then shipping them to local greenhouses to help with pest control. “The first colony of Dicyphus arrived at UFV in 2008, when Dr. Dave Gillespie 14 Skookum | Spring 2011 | Volume 1 | Issue 2
from the Pacific Agri-Food Research Centre in Agassiz offered the bugs to the university,” explains UFV agriculture technician Brent Bailey. The idea was that UFV could enhance its pest management courses and give the students more hands-on opportunities. “The Dicyphus is a native species that is a predator to several insects including the whitefly,” adds Bailey. “And the whitefly is a particular pest for local greenhouse growers. Dave was doing research on the Dicyphus in Agassiz and once his research was done, he gave us this colony, which we have since been
able to turn into a class project for our second-year students.” Bailey says the Dicyphus project is the perfect example of partnerships that work within the university’s communities. The bugs came from the research centre of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and, are used for educational purposes in the classroom and greenhouses at UFV, and are then harvested by students and shipped to greenhouse growers. In return, the students visit the greenhouses and learn about integrated pest control on local fruits and vegetables. As part of the course, students learn how to tend the Dicyphus, care for the plants where the bugs live, harvest the bugs, and then watch as they are distributed inside commercial greenhouses. Course instructor Renee Prasad explains that while the students are learning about pest management, they also learn how to raise and nurture the Dicyphus from nymph to mature (and