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["Wendy" <crazygardens AT verizon.net>]

James,  try this on flea beetles.  Thin down molasses, kayro, pancake syrup, 
honey or any other sticky sweet goo (your own simple syrup will work too) 
until it will spray easily through your sprayer.  When you see flea beetles, 
just mist them with the sweet liquid.  It doesn't kill them, but the flies 
won't leave them alone and they can't feed.  This really honestly works. I 
have a serious problem with flea beetles here, and someone recommended this 
to me.  If it doesn't work for you, just go back to the pyrhethrins.

Wendy



> I can go over the 4' x 12' plots of October beans and pick off the bean
> beetles and rup out the eggs with no pesticides at all.  But if I had an 
> acre of
> them, I couldn't.  The more "efficient" a farm (in the agribusiness 
> definition
> of efficient), the more it must use pesticides.  But flea beetles will eat 
> the
> eggplants to the ground.  There is a small sprayer with pyrhethrin on a 
> stake
> beside the eggplants and during the growing season it's either mist the
> eggplants every other day or they die.