Staff released 50 of the small black beetles — a natural predator of the adelgid — as part of the Hemlock Restoration Initiative, a cooperative effort launched by the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services in March 2014 to restore North Carolina’s hemlock trees to long-term health.

A native of Asia, the hemlock wooly adelgid has decimated hemlocks in Western North Carolina over the past decade and is a problem throughout much of the hemlock’s range. Predator beetles have been a leading strategy to stave off the adelgid’s total annihilation of hemlocks, but they have primarily been used on national park and national forest lands until now.

“We are hopeful that the Lari predator beetles will take hold and provide long-term control of the adelgids and help save the remaining hemlock stands on our game lands,” said Joe Tomcho, a conservation technician with the Wildlife Commission who helped with the initial treatments.

Tomcho’s optimism is based, in large part, on research conducted by Dr. Richard McDonald of Sugar Grove, which shows that the predator beetles eat more than 90 percent of the adelgids where they’re released.