Stink Bugs Invade Homes, Are Called Menace to Agriculture
Maryland man finds 21,965 stink bugs in his house in just 97 days.
April 15, 2011 — -- It's spring and that means the stink bugs are back, invading homes with their peculiar odor.
Stink bugs are invasive insects from Asia that first were spotted in Pennsylvania in the mid 1990s.
Entomologists say the brown marmorated stink bug is now in 33 states. And this year they expect them to turn up in other places.
Tips for fighting stink bugs in your home
Doug Inkley uses a vacuum cleaner to hunt the stink bugs that invaded his Maryland house by the thousands.
"Good Morning America" visited Inkley, and Mike Raupp -- an entomologist from the University of Maryland -- met us there.
With sick fascination, Inkley counts the stink bugs as he vacuums them up.
"Here I work for the National Wildlife Federation as a senior scientist and I work on this issue of invasive species, and my home has become an example of the huge problem of invasive species," Inkley said.
He's gone through 30 tubes of caulk for cracks and spent $10,000 on new windows. And still, they are everywhere.
"I wear a night guard at night, and I didn't realize one was on my night guard, and I put it in my mouth. And closed down on it," he said.
Inkley dares us to crawl into the eaves of his attic where he once found 8,000 stink bugs in a single day.
When we peel back the insulation, we find lots of bugs.
Raupp collects dozens of live stink bugs for his research colony. Entomologists are searching feverishly for creative solutions such as stink bug birth control.
Raupp told "GMA" that stink bugs don't hurt people.
"You know they don't bite," Raupp said of the bugs. "I've handled thousands of these things. Never been bitten."
