Around grape harvest time about three years ago, an employee at Zephaniah Farm Vineyard in Leesburg, Virginia, noticed bugs, about 1in long with gray and black wings and a bright red underwing, atop some trees.
While the insects were pretty, they were there for the grapevines and not welcome guests at the vineyard, which sits atop a farm that the Zephaniah family has run since 1949.
They were spotted lanternflies, invasive insects that probably played a role in the fact that the vineyard produced about half as many grapes in 2025 as the previous year, according to Tremain Hatch, a co-owner and viticulturist.
“If we spend as much time farming the grapes but we have half the crop and we’re able to make half the wine, that is not a good thing,” Hatch said.
Zephaniah Farm is not the only US business that has seen lanternflies suck away their revenue.
Their US population has increased in recent years and affected the winemaking and forestry sectors. In New York, for example, researchers estimated that the bugs could cost wineries millions of dollars.
Scientists are uncertain what the lanternfly population numbers could look like this summer and fall, but they expect them to continue to spread across the country. As such, researchers are looking for ways to protect vegetation – and the wine industry – from the bugs.
One solution? Smash them.
“I absolutely understand why wine growers or grape growers are concerned and should be concerned,” Nathan Derstine, a visiting assistant professor of biology at the University of Richmond.
The spotted lanternflies are native to China and were first detected in the US in 2014 in Berks county, Pennsylvania. They have since spread to 19 states – with the largest infestations in the north-east – and Washington DC, according to an August 2025 report by the US Department of Agriculture.
“It’s pretty common with invasive insects that if they get established in a new place, they are not constrained by some of their natural enemies that were in their native range, so here they have expanded quite rapidly,” Derstine said.
The bugs suck the sap from a variety of plants, including grapevines, hops and fruit trees, and then secrete honeydew, a sugary liquid which can then facilitate the growth of sooty mould.
When that happens on grapes, “that is not something you want to harvest or incorporate into wine or sell, so they can cause problems for those commodity crops, in addition to being somewhat of a problem in a forest,” said Derstine, who expects them to continue to spread across the country.
David All, an arborist, sees lanternflies everywhere during daily walks with his dog in Upper Arlington, Ohio, which the Arbor Day Foundation has designated as a Tree City USA because of its dedication to community trees.
When the bugs infest a tree during the summer and that is followed by an especially cold winter, that can cause branches to break or roots to decay, All said.
For homeowners, the key is smashing the bugs.
“It might be a little messy, but it will save your tree,” All said.
The bugs often travel via cars, trucks and trains. So squishing them can also help prevent their spread, said Brian Walsh, a Penn State Extension horticulture educator who studies lanternflies.
“They don’t belong in our environment,” Walsh said. “And while you may not be having a huge impact overall on the population by killing individuals, each one that you see and encounter and kill, that is one less that you’re going to accidentally move to a new area.”
Cleveland Metroparks has experienced a significant increase in lanternflies in recent years, said Adam Regula, the parks’ climate resilient forest manager. In addition to stressing trees, the sweet liquid excreted by the bugs can also attract yellow jackets and wasps.
The organization responded by removing all trees of heaven, the bugs’ favorite host plan, from its parks.
In 2025, the organization started dispatching volunteers with dogs trained to sniff out lanternfly egg masses and then signal their location. Their handlers then scrape and destroy the eggs, Regula said. Staff has started to install lanternfly traps on tree trunks too.
“Our efforts are really focused on mitigating the nuisance and the impact it has on public spaces,” Regular said. “We have not yet seen a huge impact in our forested ecosystems, so we are encouraged by that.”
In Virginia, vineyard owners are struggling because the adult lanternflies start to enter their growing area in late summer, which is also when grapes start to ripen, said Drew Harner, an assistant professor of viticulture at Virginia Tech.
“They are really hard to manage,” Harner said. “Many times, a grower will have to use an insecticide, but they can’t use specific products as we get closer to harvest, or there are just a limited number of products they can use.”
Even if they manage to reduce the population, the number of lanternflies around the vineyard is so high, that they just re-enter the vegetation, so “you’re stuck with this rollercoaster population dynamic”, Harner said.
He and other scientists are trying to find ways to protect vineyards. They are researching potential strategies like releasing parasitoids from east Asia that are effective at killing lanternfly nymphs and eggs, as well as spraying spores that create a fungus that would infect and kill the bugs.
Vineyard owners have also started removing trees of heaven, Harner said.
Despite the increasing US lanternfly population, Derstine, of the University of Richmond, does not expect the bugs to wreak as much havoc as, for example, the emerald ash borer, an invasive Asian beetle that has killed hundreds of millions of ash trees.
“This is a recent invasion,” Derstine said. “It’s been about 12 years. That is not very long in the grand scheme of things, and so there has probably not been much adaptation or chance for any response by the natural enemies or parasitoids or things that are present here.”
But Virginia vineyard owners are not just waiting for nature to run its course. For the last three years, they have hosted an event, Scrape for the Grape, where volunteers remove lanternfly egg masses from vines and posts, which will hopefully reduce the number of adult bugs next year.
This year, Zephaniah Farm hosted about 60 volunteers over two days.
“When there is a new pest and we are not sure how to manage it, it’s very uncomfortable and scary,” Hatch said. “To have community members come out and help us, that means a lot.”