The 2005 growing season left many growers with very different experiences managing insect pests in soybeans. Aphids were feared to return to economic populations, and for nearly 2 million acres in Iowa, they did. However, many growers reported fields with 250 or more aphids per plant next to fields that had few if any aphids. I was a bit skeptical of this last observation, but such a situation occurred next to one of our research plots in Story County. Just as one would expect, the field that we had carefully marked and planted for research had a sub-economic population of soybean aphids
