Bark Beetle: Benefit Or Harm?

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Video: Bark Beetle: Benefit Or Harm?

Video: Bark Beetle: Benefit Or Harm?
Video: This Tiny Beetle Is Devastating Forests in the Worst Outbreak Ever | Short Film Showcase 2024, April
Bark Beetle: Benefit Or Harm?
Bark Beetle: Benefit Or Harm?
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Bark beetle: benefit or harm?
Bark beetle: benefit or harm?

In any garden or vegetable garden, a wide variety of insects are constantly scurrying - both useful and harmful. Summer cottages and bark beetles do not bypass their attention. And, unfortunately, these seemingly harmless creatures refer specifically to pests - if you do not start a timely fight with them, they can cause quite serious damage! What should be done in order to get rid of these uninvited guests?

What harm do bark beetles do?

These small bugs are endowed with the ability to actively chew through numerous passages in the wood. However, bark beetles can parasitize not only on trees, but also on a number of cultivated plants, and sometimes even in furniture made of wood or building materials! However, most often bark beetles, of course, harm the fruit trees!

Bark beetles inhabiting the very depths of tree trunks completely and completely ruthlessly destroy their internal parts, often leaving the bark completely without any damage. And the damage they cause to various wooden structures, and even more so to log houses, is generally akin to a fire - if you do not start an operational fight against these scoundrels, such structures will no longer be subject to restoration!

Types of bark beetles

In modern realities, home, furniture and powder bark beetles are most often found. At the same time, domestic bark beetles are considered to be the largest - they can grow up to one and a half centimeters in length. Gnawing enough large and ornate passages in fruit trees, over time they completely destroy the trees from the inside. At the same time, the duration of their full life cycle reaches ten years, and such beetles are dangerous because it can be extremely problematic to detect them from the very beginning of "guesting".

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The length of furniture bark beetles almost never exceeds three millimeters, and their life cycle is on average three years. These malicious individuals take root well at home, gnawing furniture and other objects made of wood with great pleasure.

And the powder bark beetle got its unusual name for its ability to process wood into a real powder. As a rule, this very specific pest prefers fresh wood, so it is most often found in wood processing and logging points.

What all these species of bark beetles have in common is that they all feed on wood. And all of them are dangerous in that at first the damage to the wood occurs absolutely imperceptibly, since the larvae emerging from the eggs laid by the females develop in the depths of the wood for the first few years, without looking at the surface and not revealing themselves in any other way.

There are certain benefits from bark beetles, but only in natural conditions - there they are considered to be orderlies of the forest, since these tiny creatures are endowed with the ability to dispose of damaged trees and significantly accelerate the processes of nitrogen metabolism.

How to understand that bark beetles have appeared on the site?

The presence of bark beetles on the site is evidenced by the sudden appearance of a large number of woodpeckers, the formation of many small holes in the tree bark, as well as the fall of foliage and the deterioration of both the general condition of the plants and their appearance. An obvious sign of a severe infection is the detection of dust spilling out, and if the bark begins to peel off the tree, this indicates that the tree is already beginning to die.

How to fight?

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The most effective means for fighting bark beetles are considered to be such drugs as "Senezh Insa", "Clipper", "Calypso", "Antizhuk" and some others. These products contain substances that have a detrimental effect on both adults and larvae. And "Antizhuk" can also boast of additional protection against no less dangerous fungus! As a rule, all these drugs are injected into the holes found in the bark with a syringe. After repeating these manipulations several times, all the bark beetle moves are carefully sealed with a previously prepared garden pitch. Certain personal protective measures will not be superfluous - it is recommended to carry out treatments in a special protective suit, not forgetting about a respirator with gloves.

Prophylaxis

Prevention will not be superfluous: all damaged or dry branches found in the garden must be cut off in time, and the lower parts of the tree bark must be regularly treated with lime. And in order for all preparations intended for treating trees to be much better retained on the bark, it is recommended to combine them with a small amount of laundry soap. Additional processing of especially large branches and trunks with well-proven folk remedies will not interfere - clay or manure with lime combined with humus is especially well suited for these purposes. But laying out traps from bark beetles is, alas, not an effective measure, since different types of these scoundrels prefer wood of different ages and different varieties.

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