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Heartwood, which is actually dead tissue and not a living part of the tree, contains certain chemical substances that protect it from insect and fungus attack. So, it is the durable heartwood that causes the mature black locust to be prized as fence post material.
Leaf Miners
These are a few of the reasons why a Vblack locust blight" would be tragic. Fortunately, the recent diseased appearance of the trees has not been caused by any sort of blight, but by a relatively innocuous insect, appropriately known as the ‘‘locust leafminer.”
Leaf-mining damage is caused by insects in the larval or "grub" stage. Many thousands of miners feed inside the leaflets of locust trees in summer.
This defoliating - activity will often cause the trees to put out a second growth of leaves in late summer. Several complete defoliations will occasionally kill a tree. In rare cases, intensive leafmining activity will kill virtually all locusts in a stand.
Even if this should happen locally (which is very unlikely), the locust is a vigorous sprouter and will regenerate new stands.
Black locusts and locust leafmining insects have coexisted for thousands and thousands of years. Any irruption in the insect population, or subsequent decline in numbers of black locusts, will certainly be temporary. Insect populations will never completely destroy the food supply of their species.
Adult leafminers, incidentally. are beautiful tiny beetles, having a subdued orange-and-black iridescence. They feed on foliage of oaks and other trees as well as black locusts.
Cicadas
Emergence of broods of seventeen-year cicadas occurred this year in many parts of Virginia. This emergence did not, of course, indicate any unusual abundance of cicadas, but was merely a normal periodical occurrence.
Nonetheless, the sight of myriads of ghostly cicada nymphs, resurrected after years of underground subsistence, may seem portentous. No wonder that the appearance of hordes of cicadas was once supposed to foretell war. (The basis for this belief—hopefully a myth—was the red color of
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