2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38
Bukarka is a pest that can be found literally everywhere. Most often, it attacks pears with apple trees, and a little less often it can damage thorns, cherry trees, quince, as well as bird cherry, mountain ash and hawthorn. Both beetles and beetle larvae are harmful. From the kidneys damaged by them, rather ugly leaves are formed. If one bud has become an object of food for several bugs at once, then it quickly turns brown and dries up. And in the buds, gluttonous bugs gnaw out pedicels and stamens with pistils. As for the larvae, it is mainly the leaves that suffer from their invasion. Sometimes the larvae move to leaf blades and feed on parenchyma there, forming so-called "mines" on it
Meet the pest
Bukarka is a harmful bug that grows in length up to 2.5 - 3 mm. The color of these pests is usually blue with a steel metallic sheen. The width of their elytra, covered with speckled longitudinal grooves and small hairs, exceeds the width of the pronotum, and their antennae are endowed with eleven segments each. The rostrum and legs of the beetles are black.
The size of the eggs of these harmful parasites is 0.3 mm. They are usually milky white and oval in shape. Slightly curved legless beetle larvae are characterized by a pale yellow color and are endowed with dark brown heads. And the yellowish-whitish pupae of the pests reach 2, 5 - 3 mm in size.
Immature beetles overwinter in the upper soil layer. On the surface, they begin to get out immediately, as soon as the buds on the trees begin to swell. First, they additionally feed on the buds, and a little later they begin to feast on leaves and buds. The massive appearance of these parasites is noted at the stage of bud extension.
At night and when the weather is cool, harmful bukarka hide in the cracks of the tree bark. Their average life span is two to three months. Closer to the end of the flowering of apple trees, the pests mate, after which the females lay one egg at a time in the central leaf veins or in the petioles. A little less often, they can lay two eggs at once - in this case, the females place them in pre-gnawed chambers. After all the eggs have been laid, the pests cover them with cores of central veins or leaf petioles. The damaged areas usually turn brown, the leaf petioles are bent, and the leaf blades hang at a slight angle to their petioles. The total fertility of each female is about a hundred eggs.
After six to eight days, harmful larvae revive from the laid eggs, which for twenty five to thirty days feed on either the tissues of the central veins or the tissues located inside the petioles. And the parasites that are gnawed out are filled with brownish excrement. The leaves damaged by beetles begin to fall off - this process usually starts in the third decade of May, and it reaches its maximum closer to the first half of June. The larvae that have completed their feeding in fallen leaves move into the soil and pupate there at a depth of eight to twelve centimeters in oval cradles. Pupation starts around the end of June and lasts until mid-August. It takes ten to thirteen days for each pupa to develop. The overwhelming majority of beetles remain to winter in the soil in their cradles, and only a small part of them gets out on warm September days to the surface and feeds on the kidneys there. Some of the larvae that have fallen into diapause pupate before the end of the next summer.
If the trees were damaged by beetles badly enough, then their winter hardiness is noticeably reduced, and the volume of the harvest is significantly reduced.
How to fight
Fallen leaves should be collected and burned. And you need to have time to do this before the larvae begin to emerge from it. Autumn soil cultivation, which violates the optimal conditions for wintering beetles, also helps to achieve a good effect.
Insecticide treatments begin to be carried out if there are more than forty beetles per tree.
High temperature and low air humidity help to limit the number of bugs, leading to rapid drying of leaves and death of larvae. And the natural enemies of beetles are entomophages.
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