By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: September 5, 2010

Michigan State University, via Associated Press

The emerald ash borer has spread to New York State.

You have perhaps heard about the bugs. In fact, it’s hard to turn on the television or read a newspaper without hearing more about bedbugs. In your mattress, at the office, the theater, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, the Empire State Building — from New York to Portland, it’s the summer’s It bug.

But at the Cornell University Agroforestry Resource Center in the Catskills, they are more concerned with a less celebrated bug, the emerald ash borer. Native to China, it was first detected in the United States in Michigan in 2002 — perhaps arriving in packing material with shipments to auto plants. Since then it has spread across the upper Midwest and into Canada, killing tens of millions of ash trees. It was first reported in New York in June 2009 in Cattaraugus County in southwestern New York.

This June it was discovered in Ulster and Greene Counties in the Catskills, including in the Catskill Forest Preserve. The larvae of the ash borer, a beetle with metallic green wing covers, burrow into tree bark, killing the tree in one to three years. There is no known systemic way to stop its spread or to save infested trees.

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