2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38
The green apple aphid is found almost everywhere and mainly affects the apple tree. However, the range of her taste preferences is not always limited to the apple tree - sometimes she can attack pear, irga, cotoneaster, mountain ash, hawthorn and quince. This pest is very dangerous, since in just one growing season it can give a huge number of generations: in the southern zone - from fourteen to seventeen, in the northern - from six to eight, and in the forest-steppe - from nine to thirteen. The green apple aphid is especially harmful in young gardens and nurseries
Meet the pest
The size of greenish wingless parthenogenetic females reaches about 2 mm. They are endowed with yellowish six-segmented antennae and brownish-yellow heads, and their tails and sap tubes are usually black.
Winged females grow up to 1, 8 - 2 mm in length. Sap tubes, legs, breasts and heads are dark, and their six-segmented antennae are yellowish with slightly darkened tops. On the green belly of the pests, you can see small, but numerous black spots, and their transparent wings are painted in a barely noticeable brownish-bluish tones.
Amphigonous males and females are characterized by the absence of wings, brown-yellow or yellow-green color and thickened tibia of the hind legs. Their tails and tubes are also black, and the antennae are six-segmented. The length of amphigonous females is on average 1.6 mm, and males are usually slightly smaller.
The eggs of the green apple aphid are oval in shape and range in size from 0.4 to 0.5 mm. As a rule, they are black and shiny. And funny red-eyed larvae are painted in green tones with a slight reddish tint. As for the antennae and legs, they are black.
Fertilized eggs overwinter near the bases of the buds on young shoots. At the stage of swelling and subsequent budding, voracious larvae are reborn, immediately starting to feed. After ten to fifteen days, after four molts, they are transformed into parthenogenetic females. Such females usually appear before the start of flowering of the apple tree, managing to revive from eighty to one hundred larvae in twenty to thirty days of their short life.
The green apple aphid is a non-migratory species. During the summer, winged individuals develop synchronously with wingless females (from the third generation onwards), instantly flying around and populating forage crops. Approximately in September and October, females appear, reviving the larvae, which subsequently turn into amphigonic individuals. Then the fertilized females lay two to five overwintering eggs.
The larvae, together with the imago, suck out almost all the juices from the tiny buds, and also populate the undersides of the leaves and green shoots. Slightly less often, they can settle on the ovaries. The leaves attacked by gluttonous pests curl up and slowly die off, and the shoots are bent and stunted. If fruit trees are severely damaged, then the skin often cracks on them, and the fruits become noticeably smaller.
The most optimal conditions for the development of green apple aphids are high humidity combined with moderately warm weather. In the case of attenuation of growth processes in forage plants, the number of harmful parasites is significantly reduced. The same happens when low humidity is combined with a sufficiently high temperature. A huge number of gluttonous scoundrels are periodically washed away by heavy downpours.
How to fight
Fat shoots and root shoots on fruit trees must be cut out, since it is their harmful green apple aphid that populates them with particular intensity.
If for every ten centimeters of shoots there are ten to twenty eggs or more, then in early spring, even before the buds bloom, spraying and washing of fruit trees is carried out in the pest breeding centers. In this case, the air temperature should be at least four degrees. And if for every hundred leaves there are five or more aphid colonies, then insecticide treatments are started. For this purpose, Fosfamid, Karbofos, and Korsar are well suited.
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