Fruit Pest Is An Unusual Pest

2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38

Fruit shellfish, which lives almost everywhere, attacks literally all fruit crops. However, you can also see it on the oak tree. It harms most of all in early spring, and in most cases, young buds suffer from the invasions of the fruit sheath. In addition to the buds, unusual pests can also damage leaflets with flowers. In order not to lose the long-awaited harvest, it is imperative to fight these gluttonous parasites

Meet the pest

Fruit pouch is a rather unusual butterfly, the wingspan of which is from 12 to 14 mm. The front wings of the pests are distinguished by a silvery color with dark, vague spots, and the hind wings are equipped with a rather long fringe and are painted in dark brown tones.

The size of the lemon-yellow eggs of fruit case-bearers reaches 0.35 mm. And dark brownish caterpillars grow up to 10 - 12 mm in length. Caterpillars of the first year of life are endowed with black-brown slightly arched caps 8-10 mm long, and caterpillars of the second instar, growing up to 13 mm, are cigar-shaped and equipped with spirally curved tips.

Younger caterpillars overwinter on shoots in bizarre arcuate caps, fixing themselves in branch branches or near buds. With the onset of spring, without leaving the covers, they gnaw holes in the swelling buds and begin to eat away their contents. And as soon as the first leaves appear on the trees, harmful caterpillars immediately mine them. Approximately in June-July, caterpillars move from leaves to twigs, attach to them and, having fallen into a state of diapause, remain in it throughout the second half of summer, as well as throughout autumn and winter.

At the end of the second wintering, voracious caterpillars resume their feeding and slightly rearrange the caps, gradually giving them a cigar-like shape. They will pupate in these caps in June, and the first butterflies will appear in July. Female pests lay eggs on leaves, and their total fertility reaches forty to fifty eggs. After nine or eleven days, caterpillars are reborn, penetrating the sheet tissue and forming mines in them. In these mines, gluttonous creatures are from twenty to twenty-five days. And after this time, they gnaw through the skin of the leaves along the edges of the mines and build arched covers, fastening the skin with a cobweb.

Tracked mines are usually double-sided, light brown and almost always round. They have small holes in the center, free of excrement. With the onset of autumn, all caterpillars, together with their covers, go for the winter. By the way, a two-year development cycle is characteristic of fruit case-bearers.

You can meet these unpleasant pests in the southern and central regions of Russia and the former USSR, in Kazakhstan, in Central Asia and in Western Europe.

How to fight

In order to protect against fruit cases at the stage of bud swelling, insecticide treatments are carried out. Usually they are carried out simultaneously with spraying against gray buds. Nevertheless, it is advisable to resort to such treatments only if on each tree from 3 to 5% of the buds are damaged, or there is one mine for each leaf. Organophosphate preparations are especially good in the fight against these pests. After the buds have bloomed, it is allowed to re-process. Most often "Metaphos" or "Metation" is used for its implementation.

With the onset of summer, a fairly solid part of the gluttonous parasites die during insecticide treatments from codling moths and some other pests.

In young gardens, caterpillars are often destroyed by hand, and harmful butterflies are caught using light traps.