Right now, in October, female spotted lanternflies across Franklin County are laying egg masses on tree trunks, deck rails, grill covers, propane tanks and the wheel wells of parked cars. Most of them will not be found. Each one holds roughly thirty to fifty eggs that will sit through the winter and hatch in spring.

That is the real seasonal story. But almost every article a Columbus homeowner will find about it is now out of date, because Ohio changed the rules in February 2026 and changed the advice along with them.

Two things in particular are worth knowing before you read anything else: Ohio’s quarantine is no longer a county list, and the state is no longer asking you to report sightings.

What actually changed in February 2026

On February 17, 2026, the Ohio Department of Agriculture replaced its county-by-county spotted lanternfly quarantine with a statewide quarantine covering all 88 counties. The order it replaced covered eighteen.

If you find a page that says Ohio has an 18-county quarantine, or a 12-county quarantine, you are reading something written before that date. A great deal of the spotted lanternfly content online still says exactly that.

The part nobody expects: stop reporting it

For years the standard advice was to photograph a spotted lanternfly and report it to the state. That advice is finished in Ohio. ODA is no longer encouraging community members to report sightings, because the insect is now distributed widely enough that individual reports no longer tell the department anything it does not already know.

Cleveland Metroparks puts it the same way: the department no longer collects reports because of the widespread distribution. Columbus and Franklin County Metro Parks said something similar even before the statewide order, advising that residents did not need to report sightings on their own property.

So if you find spotted lanternfly in your yard in Columbus this month, there is nothing to file. That is a strange thing to read when half the internet is still telling you to report it, but it is the current position of the agency that runs the program.

The Ohio Plant Pest Reporter still exists, and ODA’s Plant Pest Control Section can still be reached at 614-728-6400 or plantpest@agri.ohio.gov. Those remain the right channels for other suspected invasive pests. They are simply no longer the thing to do about this one.

What the quarantine actually restricts

Ohio’s rules live in Ohio Administrative Code 901:5-56-03, which defines a regulated article as the insect in any living stage, plus plants and plant parts, and it lists them: live or dead trees, nursery stock, firewood, logs, perennial plants, garden plants, agricultural produce, stumps and branches.

Then there is a third category that most summaries skip. The rule also covers any other product, article or means of conveyance the Director determines poses a reasonable risk of spreading the insect. Means of conveyance means vehicles and trailers. Your truck is, in principle, a regulated article.

Here is the nuance that almost everyone gets backwards. The prohibition in 901:5-56-01 is on moving regulated articles out of a regulated area into or through a non-regulated area in Ohio. Now that all 88 counties are regulated, there is no longer any non-regulated part of Ohio to move into. The in-state restriction has essentially run out of anywhere to apply.

What is left, and what ODA’s own framing emphasizes, is movement out of Ohio. Regulated products may not leave the state without a compliance agreement, permit or inspection certificate.

What this means if you are just a homeowner

Legally, very little. There is no permit you need and no report you must file. ODA asks, rather than requires, that you check outdoor furniture, garden equipment, firewood and vehicles before moving them somewhere new.

One more thing worth knowing: ODA does not remove spotted lanternfly or tree-of-heaven from private property. Nobody from the state is coming to deal with the tree in your yard.

Violations of Ohio’s plant quarantine statutes are, under ORC 927.99, a third-degree misdemeanor on a first offense and a second-degree misdemeanor afterwards. We have found no evidence of a homeowner ever being prosecuted over spotted lanternfly in Ohio, and we are not going to imply that you will be.

What this means if you move wood or plants for a living

This is where the regulation actually has teeth. ODA lists four instruments:

Compliance agreement — a written agreement certifying all shipments from a regulated area are free of spotted lanternfly
Inspection certificate — for a single shipment moving within Ohio
State phytosanitary certificate — for individual loads moving out of state within the continental U.S.
Federal phytosanitary certificate — for regulated articles leaving the country

Under 901:5-56-05, movement also requires a waybill stating point of origin and intended destination, and loading and handling done so as to prevent infestation.

How it got to Franklin County

The timeline matters, because it tells you how long this has been here.

2014 — first United States detection, in Pennsylvania
October 2020 — first Ohio confirmation, at Mingo Junction in Jefferson County
October 28, 2021 — Ohio establishes its quarantine rule; populations found in Cuyahoga County that September
August 4, 2023 — ODA adds Franklin, Hamilton, Lucas, Mahoning and Muskingum counties, tying the new detections explicitly to Columbus and Toledo
May 15, 2025 — six more counties added, bringing the total to eighteen; the same release states ODA would begin treating in Franklin and Hamilton counties that spring
February 17, 2026 — statewide

Read that properly and it tells you something. ODA adds a county to the quarantine when infestations have been confirmed, not merely suspected. And the department does not commit to a treatment program over a handful of stray insects. Franklin County was added on confirmed infestation in 2023 and was being actively treated by spring 2025.

One correction while we are here. OSU’s own fact sheet ANR-83 says spotted lanternfly was first detected in Jefferson County in October 2021. ODA says 2020. The fact sheet was last updated in April 2022 and appears to have folded the detection date into the quarantine date. We use ODA’s.

What is actually known about Columbus specifically

Less than you would hope, and we would rather say so than invent it.

There is no published population estimate for Franklin County. There is no density figure. There is no map of affected Columbus neighborhoods. If you find an article naming specific streets or suburbs, it is making that up.

What we do know: spotted lanternfly was first observed on the Ohio State University’s Columbus campus in 2023, and OSU entomologists have been studying its behavior there since. Columbus and Franklin County Metro Parks reported it in a single park as of June 2025, without naming which one or giving counts.

That is the honest extent of the public record for this city.

What it actually does to your trees

This is the part where most of what you have read is wrong, and it is wrong in the alarming direction.

The study that changed the answer

In August 2023, a Penn State team led by Kelli Hoover published four years of results in Environmental Entomology. They reared spotted lanternfly at varying densities in enclosures, from egg through adult, on three native trees — silver maple, weeping willow and river birch — with tree-of-heaven present in half the enclosures. They measured leaf gas exchange and nutrients for two years and trunk growth for four.

No trees died. Not one, in four years, under sustained feeding pressure.

Heavy feeding did reduce key nutrients and noticeably slowed trunk growth in the first two years. Then the native trees recovered in year three once feeding pressure eased. The tree-of-heaven did not recover; its growth stayed flat.

Hoover’s summary: “our results suggest that we are unlikely to see big impacts on the growth of trees.”

She also supplied the caveat, and we will pass it on rather than hide it: “Our study represents a worst-case scenario in which spotted lanternflies fed on the same trees for four consecutive growing seasons.” In a real landscape the insects move between hosts and populations rise and fall. The study also covered four species, not every tree in your yard.

What it does genuinely kill

Penn State’s management guide states it plainly. Spotted lanternfly is not known to kill plants, with three exceptions:

Cultivated grapevines — the real economic casualty, and the reason the state cares
Tree-of-heaven — the invasive it prefers above everything else
Black walnut saplings — young trees, not established ones

Ohio’s grape and wine industry contributes more than six billion dollars a year in economic activity, which is why ODA runs a quarantine program over an insect that mostly will not kill your maple.

For an established tree: stress, not death

The accurate framing is that spotted lanternfly is an additive stressor. Heavy feeding can weaken a plant, particularly in combination with the things already working against it — drought, compaction, girdling roots, a bad planting site, existing disease. Saplings are more at risk than mature trees.

If your oak is struggling, spotted lanternfly is probably not the reason, but it may be one line on a longer list — and if it is an oak, oak wilt and the pruning calendar are the first things worth ruling out. That distinction matters when someone tries to sell you a spray program. Working out which stressor is actually driving a decline is what tree health care is for.

Honeydew, sooty mold, and the thing it does kill

Spotted lanternfly excretes excess sugar as honeydew, which on a sunny day can fall from an infested tree like a light rain. It attracts ants, wasps and hornets. It then gets colonized by sooty mold.

Sooty mold does not directly harm a plant, but it coats leaves and reduces photosynthesis — and Penn State notes that dense infestations can kill understory plants underneath. That is a genuine mortality pathway, and it is the one most articles leave out while they are busy exaggerating the canopy risk.

The practical nuisance is real too. Honeydew stains on trunks, decks and cars parked underneath can be very hard to remove, and a patio under a heavily fed tree becomes unusable.

About that $324 million figure

You will see it everywhere, usually as “spotted lanternfly costs Pennsylvania $324 million a year.” It does not.

The number comes from a 2019 Penn State study by Harper, Stone, Kelsey and Kime. It is modeled, not measured, it is Pennsylvania-only, and the $324.9 million is the expected annual impact under a hypothetical scenario in which the insect spreads to all 67 Pennsylvania counties. The estimate for the quarantine zone as it stood was $50.1 million.

There is no equivalent published estimate for Ohio at all.

What is happening in your yard this month

Spotted lanternfly has one generation a year and overwinters as eggs. Its life stages overlap, so more than one can be present at once.

Most published timing comes from Pennsylvania observations, and OSU’s fact sheet says so explicitly. For Ohio, ODA’s own figures are these: nymphs usually hatch in April and may persist through August, adults typically appear by late June or July and stay active until winter, and egg-laying runs from around September until cold weather kills the adults. ODA’s web page gives the egg-laying window as October through December. Penn State finds most masses are laid in October.

Put those together and the answer for mid-October in Columbus is unambiguous: egg-laying is underway now and will continue into December. This is the single most useful month of the year to go looking.

What an egg mass looks like

Each mass holds roughly 30 to 50 eggs, averaging about 35, and a female lays at least two.

Fresh — the covering is white and glossy when first laid, drying to gray or brown. Flat, and about the texture of wet gray putty or dried mud
Older — the covering fades, cracks, or disappears entirely, leaving neat rows of eggs exposed
Already hatched — small oval emergence holes along the top

They are laid on almost any hard surface: tree bark, decks, house siding, rocks, stone, metal, outdoor furniture, grill covers, propane tanks, pallets, firewood, machinery and vehicles. ODA specifically names tree-of-heaven, maples and mulberry among trees.

The nymphs you may have seen earlier in the year are worth recognizing too. The first three instars are black with white spots, starting around an eighth of an inch. The fourth instar, which ODA says appears around June, is red with black stripes and white dots at roughly half an inch. All four stages are wingless.

Adults are about an inch long at rest, with gray forewings marked with black spots and black wingtips. One detail gets mangled constantly: the red is on the hind wings. Adults normally rest with their wings closed, so you only see gray. The red shows when the insect flies or is startled. It is not something that appears at a particular time of year.

Scraping egg masses: how, and how much it is worth

This is the job for October through winter, and it is worth doing. It is also worth understanding what it does and does not accomplish.

The method

Penn State recommends scraping from September through May with a plastic card or a putty knife, directly into a bag or container of rubbing alcohol or hand sanitizer, and leaving them in the solution permanently.

ODA’s Ohio guidance is slightly different and equally workable: scrape into soapy water or rubbing alcohol using a knife or the edge of a credit card. ODA also notes that egg masses can be treated with horticultural oil during winter or before spring bud break.

If you would rather smash than scrape, apply even, forceful pressure across the whole mass. A properly destroyed egg bursts open.

The five mistakes

Do not scrape them onto the ground. Penn State is direct about this: egg masses scraped to the ground can still hatch. This is the most common error by a distance
Do not use a ladder or climb the tree. Penn State says so explicitly. It is not worth an injury
Do not bother destroying eggs from a female you have already killed. Eggs that were never laid will not hatch
Do not move an object that might have a mass attached — the eggs simply hatch in the new place
Do not apply a systemic insecticide while trees or shrubs are flowering, or where nearby flowering plants could take it up through the soil

The number that puts it in perspective

On maples of 30 to 40 feet, Penn State found that fewer than 2% of egg masses were within reach from the ground, in the zero-to-ten-foot band.

That single figure reframes the whole exercise honestly. Every mass you destroy prevents roughly 35 insects next spring, which is real. But scraping is not a control strategy for a mature tree, because 98% of the masses are above you. Penn State’s own wording is that scraping and smashing may reduce later nymphs and adults but most likely will not eliminate the population.

Worth doing on the trunk you can reach, on your deck rail, on the grill cover and on the trailer. Not worth paying anyone to do as a treatment program.

What does not work

Sticky bands, and the birds

Penn State does not recommend sticky bands without a wildlife barrier. They catch pollinators, beneficial insects, birds, small mammals and lizards.

If you use them anyway: guard them with mesh screening, not chicken wire, check them daily, and if something is caught, do not try to free it yourself — contact a wildlife rehabilitator. Homemade bands made from duct tape and petroleum jelly are less effective than commercial ones.

Penn State prefers circle traps, the funnel type, placed about four feet up a smooth-barked trunk. But those are deployed from nymph hatch in late April through June and removed at season’s end. In October, trapping season is over. This month’s job is eggs.

Home remedies

Emelie Swackhamer of Penn State is blunt: common household remedies, dish soap included, can harm beneficial insects, other animals and plants, and should not be used. She adds that all insecticides present safety risks.

There is an apparent contradiction here worth resolving, because ODA tells you to scrape eggs into soapy water. These are different things. Soapy water in a jar, as a place to drown scraped egg masses, is fine. Spraying homemade soap or vinegar mixtures onto plants and insects in your yard is what Swackhamer is warning against.

A few other things that are simply not true

They do not bite or sting. Penn State’s Julie Urban notes their mouthparts are not capable of penetrating human or animal skin. There is no evidence of toxicity to pets
They do not damage buildings. Honeydew and sooty mold stain surfaces; the insect does no structural harm
They are not a fly. It is a large sap-feeding planthopper
“They have gone from my area” is usually wrong. Swackhamer calls it wishful thinking — they typically deplete a food source and move, and come back as the trees recover
Weeping sap alone does not mean spotted lanternfly. ODA cautions explicitly that other pests cause the same symptoms

Tree-of-heaven: the host that actually matters

If there is one thing on a Columbus property that genuinely drives spotted lanternfly numbers, it is Ailanthus altissima. It is the preferred host, it is one of the three plants the insect reliably kills, and it is extremely common on fence lines, alleys, vacant lots and railway embankments across this city.

Telling it apart from the things it is confused with

Penn State names the usual confusions as staghorn sumac, black walnut and hickory. OSU’s fact sheet F-65 adds butternut.

There is one decisive test, and Penn State states it in a single line: tree-of-heaven has smooth leaflet edges. The native lookalikes have toothed edges. Run your finger along the margin of a leaflet. If it is serrated, it is not tree-of-heaven.

The supporting characteristics:

Leaves — pinnately compound and very large, one to four feet long, with roughly 11 to 40 leaflets
Glands — one or two glandular bumps at the base of each leaflet. Nothing native does this
Twigs — stout but brittle, no terminal bud, large V-shaped or heart-shaped leaf scars, and a large spongy pith that sources describe as anywhere from pale brown to salmon
Bark — smooth and brownish-green when young, later light brown-gray, often described as resembling cantaloupe skin
Smell — all parts are strongly offensive when crushed. Penn State calls the odor unique to this tree. Once you have smelled it you will not need the other tests
Fruit — twisted single-seeded samaras in clusters, persisting into winter, on female trees only

What Ohio law actually says about it

Tree-of-heaven is the very first entry on Ohio’s invasive plant species list, at OAC 901:5-30-01(A)(1), in a rule effective February 13, 2023 that covers 63 species.

Here is where nearly everyone gets it wrong. Listing means no person may sell, offer for sale, propagate, distribute, import or intentionally cause the dissemination of the plant in Ohio.

It does not make it illegal to have one on your property, and it does not require you to remove it. Paragraph (D) of the same rule expressly permits disposal and control. So “illegal to sell in Ohio” is correct. “Illegal to have in your yard” is not.

Why cutting it down makes it worse

Both OSU and Penn State are emphatic. Cutting or mowing tree-of-heaven triggers prolific stump sprouts and root suckers. The root system is extensive and resprouts readily. OSU says pulling, cutting and mowing rarely work alone, and that girdling or frilling is not recommended either, for the same reason. Penn State does not recommend cut-stump treatment, because it does not prevent root suckering.

Cut one down without treating the roots and you will have a thicket next year.

The timing window — and it is closing

This is the most time-sensitive thing in this article. Penn State’s guidance is to target the roots with herbicide from July until the onset of fall color, when the tree is moving carbohydrates down into its root system and will carry the herbicide with them. Applications outside that window mainly injure the growth above ground, which is precisely what you do not want.

ODNR’s 2026 forecast puts peak color for central Ohio in mid-to-late October. If you are reading this in the second half of October, you are at the tail end of the window. After that, the realistic options are to wait for next July or to take professional advice on a dormant-season approach.

Glyphosate and triclopyr are generally preferred because they have little soil activity. OSU specifically cautions that imazapyr can harm nearby plants through the soil even in small amounts. For stems under about six inches, basal bark treatment with triclopyr ester in oil on the lower 12 to 18 inches of dry trunk is the standard approach, and OSU notes that basal oil is a more environmentally friendly carrier than diesel or kerosene. Hack-and-squirt uses evenly spaced cuts, roughly one per inch of diameter with a minimum of two, leaving living tissue between them.

Trees under eight inches in diameter are much easier to control. Seeds stay viable in the soil for five years or more, so plan on monitoring and re-treating for at least two years.

One point of direct professional relevance: for a hazardous tree-of-heaven, Penn State’s sequence is herbicide first, wait about thirty days for symptoms to show, and only then cut. That ordering matters and it is not intuitive, and it is worth raising before anyone books a tree removal.

The counterintuitive alternative

Penn State’s management guide describes an alternative to total removal: leave some tree-of-heaven standing and treat it with a systemic insecticide, so it draws feeding spotted lanternfly and kills them. Two conditions attach. Tree-of-heaven is dioecious, so keep only male trees to avoid reseeding. And adults return to the same productive trees in following years, which makes those the rational candidates.

We will be straight about the limits of this: Penn State also says more research is needed on how tree-of-heaven removal affects nearby spotted lanternfly populations. Nobody should promise you that clearing it solves the problem.

Treatment, and whether you need any

Penn State’s answer, for most properties, is largely no — and that is worth quoting against anyone selling you a program.

Their guidance: not every tree in an infested area needs treatment. Scout first. Consider treatment only if high populations are present and persist. Assess both the severity of the population and the vulnerability of the plant, including the other stressors it is already under. Low numbers may not require anything. Use the least toxic option that works. Reserve systemic treatment for high-value trees in high-population areas.

And the line that undercuts most spray pitches: using insecticides on nymphs will not prevent later adults arriving, and treating adults will not stop more arriving. The insect moves through the landscape. You cannot fence it out of a property.

If treatment is warranted, the timing is not now

Systemic insecticides only work on actively growing trees, because the insect has to feed to ingest them. Penn State’s instruction is to avoid late fall and winter.

Dinotefuran — soil drench, trunk spray or injection, July through September, after bloom. Applied too early it can lose effectiveness before the autumn egg-laying it is meant to interrupt
Imidacloprid soil drench — after flowering through July; slower uptake
Imidacloprid trunk injection — July through September, faster uptake than soil application

Contact products are a different category, with residual ranging from none to about two weeks. The reduced-toxicity options — horticultural oils, insecticidal soaps, neem, natural pyrethrins — have good activity but poor residual and need thorough coverage.

ODA’s framing is worth keeping: use the least severe control tactic that works, and the label is the law. Some products legally require a certified commercial applicator.

Pollinators

Never spray insecticides on blooming plants. Apply systemics only after bloom has finished. ODA flags one specific scenario: a soil drench under a tree with flowering plants nearby, where those plants take the pesticide up through their roots.

There is an extra wrinkle here. Honeydew attracts bees, which means an infested tree has pollinators foraging in it. That compounds the risk of spraying one.

Firewood, and the thing people actually spread it with

Firewood is explicitly a regulated article under Ohio’s rule, and the advice has not changed: buy it local, burn it local. ANR-83 puts it in four words — do not move firewood.

Worth knowing that Ohio’s firewood restrictions are not only about this insect. Asian longhorned beetle rules prohibit moving firewood out of several areas in Clermont County, and spongy moth rules make it illegal to move firewood out of any infested area, which covers 51 Ohio counties. Ohio state parks ask visitors not to bring their own; most sell it on site. Wayne National Forest allows only commercially packaged, USDA-labeled firewood into campgrounds.

A note on a claim you may encounter: some pages say anyone leaving an infested area must complete an Ohio spotted lanternfly checklist. We could not locate a current ODA-branded checklist, and the document in circulation is the USDA APHIS vehicle checklist. Treat it as a recommended inspection rather than a legal requirement. The things it has you check are sensible either way: vehicle doors and sides, grill, bumpers, wheel wells, roof and cargo, plus propane tanks, outdoor machinery, wooden pallets and shipping containers.

Christmas trees, since it is nearly that season

Penn State’s position is that the risk is minimal. Extension educator Tanner Delvalle: “Christmas trees are not a preferred host for spotted lanternflies.” Finding one, or an egg mass, is unlikely and should not deter anyone from buying a live tree. If you want to check, egg masses scrape easily from bark. And if any did hatch indoors, the nymphs pose no threat and die quickly.

That guidance is from 2019 and from Pennsylvania, but the biology has not changed.

What to ask a tree service

Tree crews move between properties with trucks, chippers, trailers and loads of wood. That is exactly the pathway this insect uses. A company working in Franklin County should be able to answer these:

Do you inspect equipment before leaving a site? Egg masses go on machinery and trailers, not just trees — and autumn is when they are laid
Do you scout before recommending treatment? Penn State is explicit that not every tree needs treating. A blanket spray program for spotted lanternfly is not following the guidance
When would you apply a systemic? The answer should be July through September, after bloom — not October, and not on a flowering tree
How would you handle a hazardous tree-of-heaven? The correct sequence is herbicide first, roughly thirty days, then cut
Where do the chips and logs go? Logs, stumps and branches are all named regulated articles, and out-of-state movement needs paperwork

ODA’s own closing advice on management is “when in doubt, consult a certified arborist or landscape professional.” That is reasonable, provided the professional is giving you Penn State’s answer about scouting rather than a quote for spraying everything.

The short version for a Columbus homeowner in October

Ohio has been under a statewide quarantine since February 17, 2026. The county lists you will find online are obsolete
Do not bother reporting sightings. ODA is no longer asking for them
Spotted lanternfly will not kill your mature maple or oak. Four years of worst-case feeding killed none. It kills grapevines, tree-of-heaven and black walnut saplings
It is a real stressor on a tree that already has other problems, and dense honeydew can kill the plants underneath
Egg-laying is happening right now and runs into December. Scrape what you can reach into alcohol or soapy water. Never onto the ground. Never off a ladder
Accept that under 2% of the masses on a tall maple are reachable. Scraping is worthwhile, not curative
If you have tree-of-heaven, that is the thing that matters — and the herbicide window closes with fall color, so it is now or next July
Do not cut tree-of-heaven without treating the roots, or you will get a thicket
Skip sticky bands unless you are prepared to screen them and check daily. They catch birds
Skip home remedies. Soapy water in a jar is fine; soapy water in a sprayer is not

If you have a tree-of-heaven on the property line, a maple that has been raining honeydew onto the patio all summer, or a tree that was already struggling before any of this started, that last one is the conversation worth having — usually starting with a tree risk assessment. Spotted lanternfly is rarely the whole story on a declining tree, but it is sometimes the line that pushes an already-stressed one over.

BuckeyeTree Pro — Columbus and Franklin County. Call (614) 259-1714 for an assessment.