2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38
The viburnum leaf beetle begins to attack the viburnum closer to the end of spring, as well as at the very beginning of summer. This gluttonous pest often eats up all the leaves, leaving only bare veins, as a result of which gardeners often have to cut down their favorite fruit trees. To avoid such losses, you need to get to know the viburnum leaf beetle better - as they say, you need to know the enemy by sight. After all, if the number of pests is too high, the shoots will ripen very poorly, which in turn will lead not only to the loss of the long-awaited harvest of berries, but also to a significant decrease in the winter hardiness of the bushes
Meet the pest
Viburnum leaf beetle is a harmful light brown beetle about 5 - 6 mm in size. The larvae of these pests are characterized by a greenish-yellow or dirty gray color and are endowed with tiny black heads. And on their backs you can see small black spots. Each individual has nine pairs of abdominal and three pairs of thoracic legs. And the size of the larvae of older instars often reaches 12 mm.
The overwintering of harmful eggs takes place in special egg-laying. Approximately at the beginning of May, miniature larvae are selected from the eggs, immediately beginning to feed on the leaves and actively skeletonize them. And if there is not enough food for them, then the pests will get over to young shoots.
The larvae that have finished feeding are sent to the soil, where they pupate. And after three or four weeks (usually in July) tiny bugs begin to come out. They feed as actively as the larvae - as a result of their destructive activity, practically nothing remains from the leaves with berries.
After a while, the mating females lay eggs, placing them in small depressions in heaps - on average, twenty-three eggs in each. And the pests gnaw out recesses for the subsequent placement of eggs in the quickly drying green tops of the shoots. From above, they cover their egg-laying with fancy caps. It is in this form that viburnum leaf beetles will winter.
The development of harmful parasites can sometimes be very extended in time, since it completely depends on the established weather conditions. However, in any case, within a year, all individuals develop from the stage of eggs to the stage of adult insects.
How to fight
Dried viburnum shoots with egg-laying pests located on them must be cut off and destroyed both in early spring and with the onset of autumn. And during the emergence of voracious larvae and during the period of mass release of harmful bugs, viburnum bushes begin to be sprayed with drugs "Karbofos" or "Fufanon".
As a rule, treatments against this pest are carried out in two passes: trees are sprayed against bugs in August and in September, and an active fight against larvae is carried out in May and June. In addition to the above drugs, drugs such as "Bitoxibacillin", "Fosbecid" or "Actellik" are often used to combat viburnum leaf beetles.
However, it is possible to fight these scoundrels also by means of knowledge about the peculiarities of their development. Females for placing eggs usually choose the tops of young central shoots - it is there that they gnaw through numerous depressions. Closer to September, the shoots inhabited by them begin to dry out. In the event that the viburnum bushes are not very tall and young enough, it is recommended to break out the dried shoots along with the viburnum leaf beetles nesting in them and burn them promptly. Ideally, such events are carried out not only in the fall, but also with the onset of spring, before the harmful larvae have time to hatch. In principle, this is quite logical - if the eggs of the pests are destroyed in a timely manner, then neither larvae nor adults will appear on the site.
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