2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38
The hogweed harvester is particularly damaging to parsnips and celery root. The leaves of these crops attacked by insolent pests turn brown and dry out almost instantly, and root crops are characterized by extremely unimportant development. The larvae of harmful parasites feed mainly inside leaf tissues. In addition to parsnips and celery, hogweed sometimes also affects parsley with lovage. To avoid losing the long-awaited harvest, these villains have to fight
Meet the pest
The hogweed hogweed is a small fly, characterized by a rather variegated color, which can be either yellow-red or black or brownish. And the ventral side of her body is usually painted in lighter colors. The size of impudent flies reaches about 12 mm. All of them are endowed with shiny transparent wings, equipped with oblique stripes of a rusty-brown color, as well as tiny yellow legs. The shiny breasts and abdomens of harmful parasites are usually brownish, and on closer examination, you can see little black lines on their dark green eyes. Males differ from females in that their abdomens have five segments visible from the outside, while females have usually six such segments.
Eggs laid by harmful females are characterized by an oval shape and have small elongations on one side in the form of miniature stalks. Shiny little white hogweed larvae grow up to 8 mm in length. They can be both light green and white, with intestines clearly visible through their own integuments. And the rear ends of their bodies are straight cut and equipped with a pair of spiracular openings. As for the puparia of pests, their size is usually about 4.5 mm, and they are all painted in yellowish-greenish tones.
False cocoons overwinter in the soil at a depth of about ten centimeters. Around the beginning of May, the first flies begin to appear. Initially, they are characterized by inactivity, and after some time, the females begin to lay eggs inside the leaves. After about a week, tiny larvae will emerge from these eggs, actively mining the leaves. In this case, they gnaw through the passages in the leaf pulp in such a way that the shells of the leaf blades remain intact. By the way, harmful larvae can easily move to neighboring plants. After a month, the adult larvae migrate into the soil and pupate there almost immediately (at a depth of about five centimeters). And in September, on the plots, you can notice the appearance of individuals of the second generation. The adults of the pests try to stay in the tree foliage all the time, feeding on nectar, honeydew and water. They also mate there.
The hogweed borer most often damages crops adjacent to individual trees, located close to the forest or growing along the edges of fields. And you can meet this impudent wrecker not only in the European part of Russia, but also in Kazakhstan or the Caucasus, as well as in Afghanistan, in Asia Minor and in Western Europe.
How to fight
The most important preventive measures against hogweed hogweed are the timely control of weeds and the prompt elimination of all plant residues from the beds immediately after the entire crop has been harvested. It is equally important to strictly follow the rules of crop rotation, and in the fall, the soil in the beds is necessarily dug up.
All parsnip and celery leaves damaged by harmful flies are recommended to be removed - this measure helps to contain the spread of gluttonous parasites. And so that adult hogweed hogweed could not lay eggs on the leaves of growing crops, they should try to be covered with a fine-mesh net or garden fleece.
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