Food for Flea Beatles

This is now the best time to start watching for flea beetle action in your young canola crops, as the tender cotyledons as like candy to those pesky little black insects. Flea beetle damage looks like little chew marks on the leaves; they will start to feed on the cotyledons first. Threshold levels are when there is 25% damage to the cotyledons.

When checking the varieties in the super crop plot, there was some flea beetle damage to all of them. All of the canola has emerged, but there were some varieties that were spottier than others. DuPont’s D 3150 is still leading the pack with the largest number of emerging plants, and most plants with the first leaf present.