2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38
The umbrella moth, which lives almost everywhere, loves to feast on caraway seeds. Harmful caterpillars of the umbrella moth eat flowers, as well as rays of umbrellas and seeds. The inflorescences attacked by them almost always dry out and darken, and the tops of growing crops look as if they were scorched by fire. In addition to cumin, the umbrella moth can infect the testes of carrots and other umbrella crops. If you do not start fighting it in a timely manner, you can forget about a good harvest of seeds
Meet the pest
The umbrella moth is a pretty funny butterfly measuring 10 to 11 mm in size. The front wings of the pests are painted in black-brown tones and are equipped with many oblong strokes, and their hind wings are usually grayish. In principle, the color of the wings of the umbrella moth sometimes varies markedly.
Butterflies hibernate, concentrating under tree bark, in brushwood heaps or in straw stacks. Often, their wintering takes place under the roofs of all kinds of buildings, as well as in fences and other places. In early spring, you can already observe the years of pests. On caraway crops, they appear during the period of budding, approximately at the end of April and at the beginning of May.
As soon as the air warms up to ten degrees, the females begin to lay eggs. Their total fertility often reaches two hundred eggs. In this case, the main location of eggs is the undersides of the leaf petioles. The embryonic development of the umbrella moth usually takes from fifteen to twenty days.
The revival of voracious caterpillars occurs at the beginning of the flowering of cumin. At the same time, each individual develops at five ages. Young caterpillars eat small depressions in stems and in leaf petioles, while older individuals migrate upward along the stems, actively populating umbrellas and braiding them with thin cobwebs.
In the midst of the flowering of caraway, harmful caterpillars pupate. This process takes place mainly inside the stalks, into which the parasites enter through the holes they have made. In the case of mass colonization of caraway, one stalk (depending on its thickness) can coexist from seven to eleven pupae. Typically, they are placed about fifteen centimeters above the soil surface. In the pupal stage, harmful parasites stay from twenty-five to thirty-five days.
Around the end of June or the beginning of July, one can observe the years of a new generation of butterflies. Before the collection of seeds begins, they leave the caraway plantings and go in search of wintering places. The umbrella moth gives only one generation per year.
How to fight
Not the least role in the difficult matter of getting rid of the umbrella moth is played by various agrotechnical measures - the elimination of weeds near the seed plots, as well as the timely harvesting of the seed plants with their subsequent threshing.
If there is at least one caterpillar for each plant, the caraway plantings begin to be treated with high-quality microbiological preparations. Also, the destruction of caterpillars is largely facilitated by the pollination of the testes with insecticides. For the best effect, it is recommended to carry out such pollination at the stage of budding and extending the umbrellas. And the inflorescences heavily damaged by the umbrella moth must be cut and destroyed.
A number of natural factors also help regulate the number of umbrella moths. If the air humidity drops to 35 - 40%, and its temperature drops to eight to twelve degrees, the harmful caterpillars die en masse. And the survival rate of pupae is in direct proportion to the quality and quantity of feed consumed by caterpillars. The most viable are pupae weighing from twenty-five to thirty-five milligrams.
The eggs laid by the umbrella moth are often destroyed by predatory bugs and thrips, and are also populated by trichograms. In this case, the level of the caraway pest population is reduced by about 25 - 35%. So during the period of mass oviposition of gluttonous parasites, the release of trichograms will also be an excellent measure of influence on their number.
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