How to Use frass in a Sentence

frass

noun
  • Look for large, black ants as well as the tell-tell sawdust-like debris, called frass.
    — Caroline Picard, Good Housekeeping, 9 May 2018
  • Seeing frass usually means the colony has been there for at least two years.
    — Sacbee.com, 10 Mar. 2026
  • Borer holes may be surrounded by piles of orange or green frass, as shown in the photo above.
    — Lauren Landers, Better Homes & Gardens, 5 Sep. 2024
  • Sawdust-like material called frass found on the ground around the tree or on the branches.
    — Haadiza Ogwude, The Enquirer, 11 Aug. 2023
  • Damage includes round or ragged feeding holes and deposits of wet, green or brownish frass.
    — Dawn Pettinelli, Hartford Courant, 27 July 2024
  • This frass is comparable to the size of the caterpillar.
    — Barbara Gillette, The Spruce, 9 Mar. 2026
  • One byproduct of the process is frass — the scientific term for bug excrement.
    — Christopher Ingraham, Washington Post, 3 July 2019
  • At ground level, beetles have moved in, eating away at the trunks and leaving behind sawdust-like piles of frass.
    — Ellyn Lapointe, Smithsonian Magazine, 2 Aug. 2024
  • Another telltale sign of thrips presence is the gift of frass specks glued to the leaf; frass is the term for insect excrement.
    — Miri Talabac, Baltimore Sun, 1 Feb. 2024
  • Insect holes may also have some boring dust (frass) in or on the ground under them, whereas sapsucker holes will not.
    — oregonlive, 15 May 2021
  • Glossy black dots of frass tend to be found in association with stippling damage on plants infested with thrips.
    — Miri Talabac, Baltimore Sun, 1 Feb. 2024
  • The researchers on this new paper found that younger forests had less frass, indicating fewer insects, than the older forests.
    — Ethan Freedman, Popular Science, 29 Jan. 2025
  • Piles of sawdust or frass beneath the holes indicate active tunneling.
    — Nafeesah Allen, Better Homes & Gardens, 25 June 2024
  • Often frass is the only way you are alerted to them, because the caterpillars are a bright leafy green color and feed on leaves high overhead.
    — Ellen Nibali, baltimoresun.com, 8 Oct. 2020
  • The frass contains a particular type of microbe that enables the larvae to digest the cow dung into which they was born.
    — Liz Langley, National Geographic, 4 Feb. 2017
  • Larger trees may simply have more insects to drop frass, which could impact the results if tree sizes weren’t standardized between forest types.
    — Ethan Freedman, Popular Science, 29 Jan. 2025
  • Beetles in this genus often resemble caterpillar frass, a technical term for insect poop.
    — Troy Farah, Discover Magazine, 22 Nov. 2019
  • However, some people do develop an allergy to their frass, or poop, says Diepenbrock.
    — Arricca Elin Sansone, Country Living, 31 July 2023
  • Borers are easy to distinguish from disease because the sap is mixed with frass (the debris and fecal matter left behind by boring insects).
    — oregonlive, 20 Dec. 2019
  • As the insects grow, the Beta Hatch team removes the frass the mealworms produce, and replenishes their food.
    — Kara Carlson, The Seattle Times, 22 June 2017
  • Finding frass on tomato leaves or the soil below your plants is sometimes easier than finding the green hornworm perfectly camouflaged among the green vines.
    — Barbara Gillette, The Spruce, 9 Mar. 2026
  • One example is the skipper caterpillar, which can shoot solid pellets of its waste, known as frass, over a distance up to 38 times its body length to keep predators off its tail.
    — Jack Tamisiea, Scientific American, 28 Feb. 2023
  • The region was in the midst of a gnarly spongy-moth infestation; caterpillars were gobbling up oak leaves at a horrifying rate, showering the landscape with frass.
    — Amanda Petrusich, The New Yorker, 11 July 2024
  • After hatching, the caterpillars bore into the apples and tunnel to the core before heading out the other side, leaving a trail filled with reddish frass (a polite word for bug poop).
    — Ciscoe Morris, The Seattle Times, 10 May 2017
  • How to find tomato hornworms Actively feeding tomato hornworms leave behind a trail of biological waste called frass.
    — Barbara Gillette, The Spruce, 9 Mar. 2026
  • Beta Hatch now has a grant in partnership with those scientists to find out if the bugs can still be consumed by livestock, and if the frass will still be safe for plants if they are fed an all-plastic diet.
    — Kara Carlson, The Seattle Times, 22 June 2017
  • In a pilot experiment, those combinations ranged from zero frass and all regolith to all frass and no regolith, covering percentages in between.
    — Sarah Scoles, New York Times, 27 Nov. 2023
  • After passing through their hind gut, their excrement exits their body past their rectal pads—which compress the frass, AKA poop, into hexagonal prisms!
    — Popular Science Team, Popular Science, 3 July 2024
  • Besides holes, these pests can also leave behind shed pupae skins, webbing, and frass, insect excrement that looks like large grains of sand, according to pest management brand Woodstream.
    — Caroline Picard, Good Housekeeping, 13 Mar. 2019
  • Separately, producers mix the larvae’s frass, or debris from its digestion, with a microbial inoculant extracted from the black soldier flies.
    — Catherine Wang, Forbes, 27 Nov. 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'frass.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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