Buckeye Yard and Garden onLine

Lace bugs use their piercing/sucking mouth parts to suck juices from their host plants. Their feeding produces tiny yellow or whitish leaf spots (stippling) that may coalesce to produce large, yellow-to-copper colored areas on leaves, and early leaf drop. The bugs also deposit unsightly hard, black, varnish-like tar spots of excrement onto the leaf surface as they feed. Most lace bugs have multiple generations per season, and their damage builds with each succeeding crop of new bugs.

Hawthorn lace bugs have a cosmopolitan palate and will feast on a variety of plants in the Rosaceae family, as well as a few plants outside of this family. They are commonly observed on Cotoneaster sp. and Amelanchier sp., as well as their namesake host. Hawthorn lace bugs are found on the lower leaf surface.

Basswood lace bugs should more accurately be called "Tilia lace bugs" since they may be found on several species in the Tilia genus. PDA participants found the lace bugs in their typical lower leaf surface location on littleleaf linden (T. cordata) and silver linden (T. tomentosa). The stippling symptom on the upper leaf surface of silver linden was very unusual in that the spots were confined to distinct 1/4" diameter spots. It was speculated that the unusual pattern was produced by nymphs feeding around egg clusters.