Since 2002, the beetle from Asia has destroyed millions of ash trees in Ohio, a dozen other states and 2 provinces in Canada. Nicknamed the green menace, it has no known natural predator and kills a tree in up to 4 years. Efforts to stop it have failed, so volunteers are preparing for the day when most if not all ash trees are gone. They are collecting and saving ash tree seeds to be planted decades from now. Amy Stone,Ohio State Extension Educator, says seed collection is for after the emerald ash borer goes through and the population dies off to see if the North American ash tree can be replanted. Stone adds, experts assume that the borer will cover all of North America.

The national Ash Seed Collection Initiative was started in 2005 by David Burgdorf, a plant materials specialist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service in East Lansing, Michigan. He says the program save genetic material that originated in the U.S. for future generations to use.

Seed collection volunteer Steve Crawford travels Ohio warning people about the emerald ash borer and teaching them to collect seeds from ash trees. It’s not as simple as it sounds.

On the east side of Columbus, Crawford points out a large ash tree laden with seeds. Crawford says only female trees produce seeds and not every year. These seeds are still green, so anyone interested in volunteering to collect genetic material from ash trees must wait until they turn brown.

The seeds collected by Crawford cover the bottom of the large paper grocery bag, and he’s not finished. He asks anyone uncertain about the exact type of ash tree is asked to toss in a 5 section of twig with one or two leaves removed to help identify the type of ash tree.

After being collected in Columbus, the seeds begin a 26-hundred mile journey to the future. In Michigan, the seed packets are checked for viability. Then they head to Georgia where the U.S. Forest Service x-rays them, looking first for the existence of seeds and secondly for, believe it or not, the ash seed weevil, another insect threatening the future of ash trees. After that, it’s off to the Agricultural Research Service’s National Seed Preservation Lab in Fort Collins, Colorado. There, the ash seeds are cryogenically preserved in flood proof vaults.

There are collection programs for other types of seeds, but the National Resources Conservation Service ash seed project is the only one to rely on volunteers. In Columbus, Steve Crawford says he is more than to give many hours of work.

“It’s just if someday my grandchild or great grandchild climbs an ash tree or rests beneath one, it’s all worth it.”

In a cramped laboratory at Michigan State University in East Lansing, entomologist Debbie Miller is putting fresh greenhouse grown ash tree leaves into a container housing a pair of ash borers.

“It’s just a regular drinking cup that has had a window put into it for ventilation,” Miller says. “And they’re quite happy in there.”

So happy, in fact, they’re mating.

“Twice a week we replace the foliage so that they’ll have fresh food and favorable living conditions,” Miller says.

The U.S. Forest Service is hatching thousands of ash borers in another lab down the hall. They were brought to East Lansing on the bark of logs cut from areas in Michigan infested with EAB.

“Every week we set up a certain number of beetles in order to collect the eggs for the parasitoid,” says Miller.

A parasitoid is a parasite, which in this case has a deadly attraction to the Emerald Ash Borer. EAB has almost no enemies in the U.S., though a small number are eaten by woodpeckers. But there aren’t enough woodpeckers to to eat the rapidly expanding EAB population.

But in the past few years scientists have found several types of tiny, stingerless Chinese wasps that feed on EAB larvae.

“These little wasps are not a benign parasite,” says Leah Bauer, a Forest Service entomologist who’s directing the research in East Lansing. “These actually in a way are like predators.”

“These tiny little egg parasites will lay an egg in an EAB egg and the larva of the wasp grows inside that egg and it kills it,” Bauer says. “Instead of an ash borer hatching out, a little wasp will hatch out and fly away and look for more eggs. And they’re so tiny they can crawl all over the tree bark and in between the layers of bark and find the stages of Emerald Ash Borer they need to attack,” she says.

“Bauer says the wasp finds an ash trees the same way the borer does, searching for the tree’s aroma. She says the wasp can even hear borers eating beneath the bark. Because it’s so tiny, the wasp can move in and out of the crevices where the borer has laid its larvae.

This type of biological control has been used for decades and it’s not without risk. But Bauer says the project has passed federal scrutiny.

“The idea behind that is to bring in these natural enemies that have co-evolved with the pest in the country of origin and then you bring them over if they are safe to bring over in terms of risk to non-target organisms. In fact the two that we are working on here in our lab we found that they kill about 75 percent of them. And that’s nice. They become established in the population of the pest. We’ll never get rid of Emerald Ash Borer. All we can do is hope to manage it at a density low enough that the trees can actually survive,” says Bauer

The federal government’s stamp of approval came earlier this summer. Now the tiny Chinese wasps are being released in certain parts of Michigan. The problem is the complexity of rearing more, a task in the hands of research associate Houping Liu. He says an indispensable element is wood from an ash tree.

“This is how we do it,” Liu says. “We use different size of ash sticks; uninfested ash sticks. So first of all we need to dig out EAB from the field or cut uninfested trees from the field. And then insert the EAB larvae in this kind of ash stick, then put the bark back, wrap it up, then put in some water and honey as food.”

The entomologists in East Lansing also have to go to great lengths to get the borers to lay their own eggs. Debbie Miller says wrapping ash twigs with ribbon gets the job done.

“This is a stick wrapped with ribbon,” Miller says. “Since the ribbon creates a situation where the insect has a place to lay the egg underneath a surface. It does not like to lay eggs exposed. It doesn’t seem like much but it’s numbers and that’s where the damage occurs; it’s the numbers that cause the problem. An ash tree would easily survive if there were few Emerald Ash Borer present on it. But it’s destroyed because it’s too many.”

Even if the Great Lakes region’s ashes are saved, Leah Bauer does not believe they’ll ever return to their grandeur. Their wood may be so scared by borer attacks that baseball bat manufacturers may be forced to select another hardwood. But if the parasitoid approach is successful, millions of ash trees might have a fighting chance.

The Emerald Ash Borer is believed to have come to the U.S. in infected wooden crates through ports in Michigan. It was discovered two years ago in Ohio and was found this summer in a Delaware housing development

We noticed this tree wasn’t leafing out properly, and came over and looked at it and do you see the little holes

Underneath the bark of this young ornamental ash, resident Lannie Kaye says the insect larvae had already done damage

I’m not an entomologist but apparently they lay their eggs at the top and they make these galleries and that’s what kills the tree because it cuts off the sustenance that’s going up in this layer

12,000 trees within a half-mile radius of the neighborhood – including 18 ornamentals in Kaye’s subdivision – will be destroyed. According to the state agriculture department’s Melissa Brewer, it’s the most effective way to deal with the flying insect The emerald ash borer flies less than a half mile per year. So when we have an infestation going in and removing every infestation within that half-mile radius, removes all the tress that aren’t yet showing signs of infestation. Cutting them down and chipping them to less than half an inch has been proven to destroy the larvae.

235,000 of Ohio’s estimated 3.8 billion ash trees have already been destroyed by the ODA. Most of the ones to be removed in Delaware are less than 10 inches in diameter. Brewer says firewood should not be transported from the area where it’s cut because it spreads the Ash Borer. The state of Ohio has quarantines in place to help contain the pest. Sam Hendren, WOSU News.