Creepy Crawly Season: Tent Caterpillars Invading Local Yards

CANONSBURG (KDKA) -- On the back deck of Bobbi Kapis's home they are everywhere.

Hundreds of tent caterpillars crawling in search of a special place.

"They're leaving the trees and looking for a place to pupate," says Ehrlich Pest Control entomologist Chad Gore, Ph.D.

Bobbi Kapis is not quite so clinical, "They are just creepy, I don't know why but they just unnerve me."

The little crawlers have been coming out of Kapis's neighbor's tree and making a beeline for her backyard and deck to spin cocoons.

"I was talking to my neighbor right here in the yard and we were both picking them off of us. We even had to cancel our Memorial Day party because no one wants to have these things crawling on them," she says.

But Kapis isn't taking this invasion without a fight.

"I've been using dawn dish detergent and water and spraying them," she says adding, "It kills them fairly quickly but as fast as I kill them more keep coming."

Dr. Gore says the tent caterpillars are mostly a nuisance and are harmless to people. They do, however, like your hardwood trees, "They'll eat the foliage from the trees. They have a few hardwoods that are their primary host, cherry, ornamental and wild cherries."

While there are chemicals that you can buy in your home and garden store to spray along the edges of your home and decks Dr. Gore points out the caterpillars will be gone in a few weeks.

If you do want to speed along the process he says you can destroy the nest, "You can take a stick and just untwine it and open it up and it exposes them to predators and the sun and the elements."

Bobbi Kapis's patience ran out with the caterpillars days ago.

When we left her Monday afternoon she was armed with her dish detergent spray bottle blasting away at everything that crawled.

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