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FREMONT, Ind. - State workers spent the weekend removing ash trees from a campground where a tree-killing beetle was found last month.
The Indiana Department of Natural Resources is removing 423 ash trees to help halt the spread of the emerald ash borer, an exotic Asian beetle that already has killed more than 6 million trees in Michigan.
The borer destroys live ash trees by eating the layers under the bark of the tree that supplies nutrients. After those layers are destroyed, the tree starves to death within a short time.
The agency continued the tree-cutting in Fremont, about 40 miles north of Fort Wayne, through the weekend and plans to finish by Tuesday, May 25, it said in a news release.
The trees will be chipped to pieces of about five-eighths of an inch, loaded on a covered truck and transported to an incinerator in Flint, Mich.
The slender adult emerald ash borer has a bright metallic coppery green color and measures about one-third of an inch long.
After the campground's ash trees are cut down, the agency will monitor nearby trees to stop the borers from spreading, it has said.