ALBANY, N.Y. – The pine shoot beetle, a pesky insect that can weaken or kill Christmas trees and other valuable pine nursery and forest products, is gaining ground in New York and elsewhere in the East and Midwest.

New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation has expanded the state’s quarantine against the export of uninspected pines and wood products to 49 counties, including virtually all of upstate New York. The quarantine area now reaches as far east as the Massachusetts-New York line and as far north as the U.S.-Canadian border.

The pine shoot beetle, which is about the size of the head on a match, made its first appearance in the United States on a tree plantation outside Cleveland in 1992. Scientists think the European import might have gotten into the country in dunnage, the wood packing used to stabilize cargo in big ocean- and Great Lakes-going ships.

From the six states where the beetle was detected by the mid-1990s – Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania – the insect has since been confirmed in Oxford and Franklin counties in Maine as well as in Maryland, New Hampshire, Virginia, Vermont, West Virginia and Wisconsin, according to the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

States have imposed quarantines on the export of uninspected trees and other wood products from more than 200 counties in those states.

Stephen Teale, a professor at the State University of New York School of Environmental Sciences and Forestry, said the latest expansion of New York’s quarantine area shows that the pine shoot beetle continues to be on the move.