A tiny pine beetle that has wiped out tens of millions of acres of forest in the western United States and Canada could be close to invading Minnesota’s majestic pines. Although the mountain pine beetle is about the size of a grain of sand, they have devoured 45 million acres of pine trees in western North America over the past couple decades — the world’s largest forest insect outbreak in recorded history.
The state Department of Agriculture is proposing a quarantine in hopes of keeping the beetles at bay and protecting the state’s nearly 200 million pine trees large enough for them to attack — at least for the time being.
That likely will be difficult. Mountain pine beetles have marched east to the Black Hills of South Dakota. On at least two occasions, they have been transported all the way to Minnesota — once in a load of firewood, and once in timber for log cabins and furniture.
But Minnesota was lucky because the bugs already were dead, said Mark Abrahamson, an entomologist for the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. “In both cases it seemed like we were fortunate in that the material just happened to be aged long enough that nothing was alive in it,” Abrahamson said. “But it’s demonstrated to us that there is a real pathway across the plains and we need to take that seriously.”
The proposed quarantine would ban freshly cut logs from states infested with the mountain pine beetle that have the bark still on them. Abrahamson said that should be effective.