As the holidays creep up, so do cankerworms. This is the week to stop them.

This might seem gross as you prepare for that Thanksgiving Day feast, but now is the best time to treat your trees against cankerworms.

This week and next are ideal to wrap your trees with those sticky bands that stop the wingless mamma moths from walking up trunks and across branches to lay their eggs, city officials said Monday.

The moths begin their march up the city’s tree canopy when they awaken during Charlotte’s first cold snap, expected soon.

“We’re trying to capture her on this sticky Tanglefoot material,” assistant city arborist Laurie Reid Dukes says in a YouTube video explaining how to band your trees. “Because they can’t fly away from it, they’ll just walk up this band and then she’ll get stuck in this little river of sticky material. What she wanted to do was climb up the tree, go out to the very ends of the branches to lay her eggs.”

For best results, band your trees after most leaves have fallen, usually no earlier than the third week of November and no later than the first week in December.

Charlotte’s cankerworm population has grown for 30 years, partly because of the city’s large concentration of old willow oaks, city officials said. Entomologists are unable to explain it, but natural controls have failed to cut cankerworm numbers to where they don’t harm trees, officials said. Also susceptible are other oaks, cherry trees, dogwoods, maples and crape myrtles.

Cankerworms eat leaves, and trees expend a lot of energy producing more leaves. That weakens the trees and makes them susceptible to other threats, including drought and insects, city officials said.

This story was originally published November 20, 2017 at 9:12 PM with the headline "As the holidays creep up, so do cankerworms. This is the week to stop them.."