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The brown spruce longhorn beetle attacks all species of spruce that we know of, that we’ve tested. In Canada it’s attacking red spruce primarily but also white spruce and black spruce and even Norway spruce which is not a native tree but there are some planted in North America. And it damages the trees, kills them eventually by, it feeds on what’s called phloem which is a tissue underneath the bark between the bark and the wood that transports the food from the leaves down to the rest of the tree. So it’s full of sugars and goodies. The larvae feed on that phloem that goes around the tree, and when there’s enough larvae feeding on that phloem they essentially girdle the tree. So this might take 2,3,4 years before the phloem is cut off. But as the phloem gets gradually cut off, the flow of food to the roots is cut off, so the roots begin to die off, the tree gets weaker, it gets progressively weaker, it gets re-infested year after year. Depending on the health of the tree when the beetle attacks it, it may take a year to kill it or it might take 5 years.
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