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Despite a frigid winter that killed many of them off, destructive mountain pine beetles continue to thrive in Alberta and could spread farther east.
Field surveys show low temperatures last winter and fall killed off most of the bugs in the mountains and foothills of Southern Alberta, but new swarms of the tree-killing insects are expected to fly into the area this summer from British Columbia.
In northeastern Alberta, more of the tenacious beetles survived the cold and have hatched new offspring that could now fly east through a band of boreal forest.
"These results show we need more than cold winters to be successful in our fight against the pine beetle," Ted Morton, Alberta`s Minister of Sustainable Resource Development, said yesterday.
The province plans to continue cutting trees and setting controlled forest fires to try to contain the threat.
The black beetles, which are about the size of a grain of rice, have already ravaged more than eight million hectares of lodgepole pine forest in B.C.
Read the full article here.
Field surveys show low temperatures last winter and fall killed off most of the bugs in the mountains and foothills of Southern Alberta, but new swarms of the tree-killing insects are expected to fly into the area this summer from British Columbia.
In northeastern Alberta, more of the tenacious beetles survived the cold and have hatched new offspring that could now fly east through a band of boreal forest.
"These results show we need more than cold winters to be successful in our fight against the pine beetle," Ted Morton, Alberta`s Minister of Sustainable Resource Development, said yesterday.
The province plans to continue cutting trees and setting controlled forest fires to try to contain the threat.
The black beetles, which are about the size of a grain of rice, have already ravaged more than eight million hectares of lodgepole pine forest in B.C.
Read the full article here.