Colorado Potato Beetle
A round, hard-shelled beetle with ten black stripes down a cream-colored back, and a fat salmon-pink grub with a black head. Both eat leaves, and a bad group can strip a potato plant to the stems in a few days.
Pest checklist
Four things to look for. If most of them match what you are holding, you are in the right place.
What gets rid of them
Gentlest option first. For most backyard cases the first one is enough, so try these in order and stop as soon as it works. If you do spray something, the product label tells you how — please read the notice further down.
1Hand-pick and crush eggs
Walk the row every few days from emergence on, shake beetles and grubs into a bucket of soapy water, and rub off the yellow egg clusters.
Try this first2Cover and rotate
Move potatoes and eggplant to a different part of the garden each year and put row cover on until flowering, since the beetles walk in from last year's bed.
floating row cover garden fabric3Mulch deeply with straw
Lay thick straw over the bed at planting; it slows the walking beetles down and gives their predators cover.
straw mulch bale garden4Rotate sprays if you use them
Spinosad and Bt products labeled for this beetle work on small grubs, but this insect builds resistance fast, so never use the same product twice in a row.
spinosad garden insect spray
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Which plants get colorado potato beetle
Every plant we cover that gets colorado potato beetle, grouped by type — tap any one to open its page. A note beside a plant came from that plant’s own entry, because the same pest can be a minor nuisance on one plant and a serious problem on another. Plenty of plants we do not cover get it too.
Plant families hit hardest
Related plants often share the same problems, so if one plant in a family has it, check the others. The largest group here is Solanaceae, with 6 of the 6 affected plants.
- Solanaceae6 plants
When to treat
Start checking when the first shoots come up in spring and knock the beetles off then; the oldest grubs do most of the damage, so do not wait for them to get big.
Timing only — the label is the law
This page tells you when to watch for colorado potato beetle and when treating is worth considering. It is not a recommendation to apply any particular product. Read and follow the product label before you spray — under federal law the label is the legal instruction, and using a pesticide against it is illegal.
- Check the pre-harvest interval. Every product that’s cleared for an edible crop sets a minimum number of days between spraying and picking. Find it on the label before you spray anything you intend to eat.
- Check the re-entry interval before you or anyone else works in the treated area again, and use the protective equipment the label names.
- Confirm the product is registered for your crop in your state. This page groups many different crops together, and a product legal on one of them is not legal on all of them — state registrations differ too. Your state pesticide agency or local extension office can confirm both.
- Rates and mixing instructions come from the label, never from us. We don’t publish them because they differ by product and formulation.
Other problems on the same plants
If a plant gets colorado potato beetle, these are the problems it most often gets as well, so they are worth checking for while you are out there. They tend to appear together; one does not cause another.