Bait is most effective in early October, when slugs come to the soil surface to feed, mate and begin laying eggs. Summer is not the time to treat slugs on unirrigated cropland, as they are hiding most of the time. Winter and spring are too wet as slugs recover from bait under saturated soil conditions. If you can kill the slugs before they lay eggs, you have won half the battle. We think that natural beneficial predators such as the predacious ground beetle, spiders and harvestmen were controlled or pushed from the plots during burning.
Field burning often occurs in the summer, when the slugs are quite deep and insulated in the soil.
Only this spring did they begin to reappear. Most of these slugs are small and resulted from eggs that survived flooding. Eggs are the stage least affected by cold temperature and standing water.