2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38
The willow scabbard develops not only on the beautiful willow - it often attacks currants with gooseberries, and blueberries with cotoneaster, as well as a huge number of hardwoods. Most often, you can meet this villain in the European part of Russia, in Western Europe and in the Caucasus. And willow scale insects are populated mainly by shoots with twigs and trunks of trees of different ages in the area of smooth bark. In order not to have to say goodbye to the long-awaited harvest of currants or gooseberries, they must be fought with
Meet the pest
The willow scale insect is an incredibly small pest, endowed with a wide and short light gray pear-shaped shield, rounded and slightly widening in the back. As a rule, the length of females' scutes is from 1, 8 to 2, 6 mm. As for the males of this pest, which sharply differ from the females in their morphological characteristics, they are all colored in orange-red tones and in most cases have a pair of wings. True, sometimes you can meet wingless individuals. These disgusting parasites live in huge colonies.
Eggs of willow scale insects are always very small, have a rounded oval shape and are colored in juicy crimson-red or violet-reddish tones. They always overwinter under the shields of dead females. Approximately in May or June, tiny crimson-red vagrant larvae begin to appear, actively spreading over various fodder plants. They stick to the bark of tree trunks, branches and shoots, actively feeding on their juices, and after two molts are transformed into adult females, laying eggs under the scutes. As for the males, they pass under the scutes two whole stages of development - the molar and the so-called "pupal". As for the duration of feeding of the malignant vagrant larvae, it is about two months.
The larvae of harmful parasites are endowed with white elongated scutes, the lateral edges of which are almost parallel to each other. Above the scutes, on closer inspection, you can see a pair of tiny longitudinal grooves. The size of the scutes of the larvae usually does not exceed 11 mm.
The willow shield is dangerous because in the event of annual damage, the growth and development of trees and shrubs slows down very much, and sometimes they even completely dry out. Young and weakened trees are especially badly affected. By the way, scale insects reproduce at a truly lightning speed, often covering the shoots with twigs with a continuous unpleasant layer.
How to fight
To overcome these disgusting pests, before tiny buds begin to bloom, trees are sprayed with a mineral oil emulsion of various petroleum oils (6 - 8%), sulfur-lime decoction or carbolineum emulsion (6 - 8%). And when vagrant larvae begin to appear, they proceed to treatments with DDT (mineral oil emulsion). It is quite permissible to process growing trees with "Karbofos" or its analogues.
As for valuable plants densely populated with willow scales, if there are not many of them on the site, in early spring you can mechanically remove the bark from them. And from less valuable trees, shoots inhabited by pests are recommended to be completely cut off and promptly burned.
The willow scale insects also have natural enemies - their reproduction is perfectly constrained by parasitic insects belonging to the superfamily chalcid, which actively eat female pests. Some other predatory insects, including ladybugs, are no less active in destroying scale insects. And beetles (especially the larvae of the merciless chylocorus) are not averse to eating these pests.
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