Minnesota officials are entering their fourth year of battling Emerald Ash Borer in a desperate attempt to save the state's nearly 1 billion ash trees. The Pioneer Press reports on some not-so-traditional methods employed by the department of agriculture to stop the exotic beetle. One interesting method involves gluing several dead Emerald Ash Borers to a leaf and leaving them by the Mississipi River in hopes that a male will come by to mate and get stuck.

The Minnesota Department of Agriculture is hoping trained detection dogs will help locate ash trees infested with the invasive beetles. The organization Working Dogs for Conservation claims to have found encouraging results in training dogs to find emerald ash borers.

MPR reports the Department of Agriculture will start hanging about 6,500 purple traps next week throughout the state. The beetle has already killed and infested millions of ash trees across the country, including several hundred in the Twin Cities metro.

The city is warning residents to be on alert for companies going door-to-door that claim they have products that will stop or prevent emerald ash borer infestations.

Minnesota made it through most of the summer without a new infestation of the emerald ash borer. But that's ended now that the pest has turned up in trees at the Fort Snelling Golf Club. The Agriculture Department will check nearby Dakota County to see if it should be added to the list of four counties where firewood is quarantined because of the bug.

Agriculture officials hope the insects -- a natural enemy of the ash borer -- will help combat a newly discovered infestation of the pest near the city's historic Summit Avenue.

The Minnesota Department of Agriculture on Monday ordered an emerald ash borer quarantine for Hennepin, Ramsey, Winona and Houston counties. That means any material that could contain the pest, such as firewood, is considered a "regulated article" and cannot be moved outside the quarantined area.

The Minnesota Department of Agriculture says they found fewer infested trees than expected in Minnesota's initial infestation area. Scientists conducting the branch sampling study also noticed fewer green beetles in the affected trees.