What else is on the insect checklist?

Ever hear about Bermudagrass mites? No? Neither had Rob Uzar for the first decade or so of his golf course maintenance career.

Located throughout the Southern and Southwestern United States, the microscopic arachnids can, as you might have guessed, damage Bermudagrass. But what makes their work sometimes tricky to detect is that they yellow or brown turf, making it look like some poor spray technician misapplied a plant protectant. The biggest tell is the sudden appearance of a witch’s broom tuft.

“I haven’t seen any at my place,” says Uzar, the golf course superintendent at Hammock Creek Golf Club in Palm City, Florida. “I’ve been lucky with that, because they’re a pain in the neck to get rid of. But there are a lot of guys in Florida who have to deal with Bermuda mites.”

Uzar’s introduction to Bermuda mites came when he was working at Hunter’s Run Golf Club in nearby Cape Coral. He spotted the miscolored turf and the witch’s broom on a fairway and wound up looking at a sample under the microscope stocked in the maintenance facility. “We could actually pull a piece off and go in there and look at it,” he says. “It was kind of cool.” He thought he spotted the same signs not long ago at Hammock Creek, but it turned out nematodes were crawling along the course.

Uzar deals with plenty of insects in Florida, especially when the late summer rains start to roll in.

“We usually get cutworms coming in this time of year,” he says. “We sprayed for them last week because I saw some when I was playing golf. … My place was notorious for mole crickets, too, but I really haven’t seen any since I’ve been there. I feel like this year was a worse year for mole crickets, for whatever reason. I did my normal app that I’ve done the three summers that I’ve been here, and this summer I did see a bigger breakthrough. I got more product out of it and went and took care of those spots. I’ve caught up to it, but there were definitely areas that got hammered and I wasn’t expecting it.”

And, like so many superintendents, Uzar deals with grubs. “Lately,” he says, “I’ve had a couple tees that have crazy grub problems that I’ve never had before. Maybe they’ve always been there and some of the insecticides had taken them out and I’d just done it a little different this year. … The armadillos were going wild.”

If only those armadillos enjoyed a good Bermuda mite.