WORCESTER, Mass. - If you’ve gone for a walk in Worcester's Lake Park. you may have noticed a few black, carboard-like structures hanging from trees. They’re traps for the Asian Longhorned Beetle.

“We are focusing on areas of high risk," said Felicia Hubacz, a Forest Health Specialist for the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation. "So we have risk modeling, using GIS, telling us where the highest spots of possible risk are.”

What You Need To Know

  • Massachusetts DCR has set up 300 traps throughout Worcester County to catch the Asian Longhorned Beetle

  • No insects have been found in traps since 2015, but there were two infected trees in the region last year

  • Forest Health Specialist Felicia Hubacz says the beetle usually targets maple trees, which makes up a large population of trees in the state

  • The season for the beetles starts around the first week of July, and typically runs until the first frost

Hubacz and her team members at DCR spent Tuesday preparing the traps for beetle season. The season usually starts around the first week of July, but Hubacz says warm weather can make them come out a bit earlier.

Tuesday, they lowered each trap, added a lure for the beetle, and put it back up in the tree in hopes of catching the destructive little creature should they be nearby. But they have to think carefully about where they place them.

“Asian Longhorned beetle is super lazy, and they don’t want anything to do with flying," Hubacz said. "If they can crawl into the trap, that’s what they’re going to try and do first.”

Traps are set throughout Worcester County and the lures are changed every two weeks.

The beetle is known to feed on and live in the trees, which can create significant problems for the areas impacted.

“These insects primarily feed on maple," Hubacz said. "And if anybody knows the region here, you grew up around here, we have a ton of maple trees. Maples make up a large part of our parks, our forests.”

It's been a while since one was found in the trap. Hubacz says they last caught one with this method in 2015.

Only two infected trees have been found the last two years in Central Massachusetts. Although the population is down to almost nothing, the traps are a necessary precaution.

“It weakens that trees integrity to stand up," said Hubacz. "So, we do want to make sure that we take care of these because , imagine a future without maple syrup.”

DCR says team members will be checking the traps and replacing the lures every other week for the next couple of months. They say the first frost is usually when the beetle starts to die off.