Plum Curculio

Another 5 curculio off the one apple tree. Going to prune this back hard and get it smaller//graft more honeycrisp onto it…i think its been a curculio breeding ground in the past. Easy to catch them…just let them fall into water.

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But you are missing that satisfying crunch when you crush them with your fingers :grin:

I found probably my last one I will find this year today, she was biting the necks of my French Prune. Every year I get the curculio finishing up on the Euro plum necks as their last gasp.

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I found a PC on one of my Superior plum. I crushed it. Interesting thing is that I just sprayed the tree with Triazicide (did I spell correct?)yesterday. I start to wonder how this pesticide works on insects

I have some of that. I stopped using it because i thought it wasn’t working//this was years ago. This year they seem thicker then normal. I’m seeing voles running around squeaking. I’ve got 10 million baby rabbits hopping around. Tree frogs are interrupting my beauty sleep :prince:

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Well. You have nice Eco-balanced backyard. I have baby rabbits running around and munching on my lettuce but I don’t have tree frogs.
Triazicide works somewhat against PC. 90% of plums on the tree do not have PC bite but that 10% puzzles me. Maybe, these are the drug resistant batch of PC that can take higher dose of pesticide

I think this was the thread about that once and done stuff…there could have been others

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Hoodlum PC’s

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Triazicide has a short shelf life. There are some threads in the forum that discuss this. You also don’t know how long the bottle sat in storage before you bought it since there no best used by date or bottling date on the container. Your probably best off buying a new bottle each year. For me that presents a problem since my orchard is small and the smallest bottle I can buy is a several year supply. So what I did is I sprayed at 10-14 day interval last year and this year I sprayed weekly to compensate for the reduced effectiveness. I don’t think Triazicide has high knockdown so it’s possible that plum curculio arrived recently to your tree and was dying. It just doesn’t die immediately. You might capture some PC and put them in a jar and see if they die in a day or so as a test.

And the bottle I buy at HD or Loews is getting bigger too! In general a old size bottle lasts me two to three years.

Every bottle has product date code printed on, as least the bottles of Triazicide I bought in the past. But you have to look very careful to find it. It is black ink against black plastic bottle, a strong demonstrations the brain power of the packaging engineers.

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I’ve so far only had a few plums drop from PC damage. Today I picked up about a dozen drops from my peach tree. Most were less than a quarter. I split them all open and all had dead seeds. One though had this little nasty in it. It also had a bite that was hard to see because of the fuzziness of the peach. The victim was only the size of a nickel.

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Cots dropping now, some with curc bites visible

:cry:. That is so too bad!

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A question about PC. I read every where that pick up the dropped fruits(PC infested) is important measure to control PCs. But as far as I read the life cycle of PC. It takes about a week for egg to develop into q lava. And the lava takes about3~4 weeks in the fruits. The fruits June dropped do have PC lava inside. But after the fruits dropped on the ground, the fruits start to rot, or the tree no longer supply nutrition to the fruits. How does a PC inside a dropped fruits survives for some numbers of weeks before it exits the fruit? I observed that some fruits with PC lava inside didn’t drop in June but continue to develop into certain size and turned reddish then drop. I think we should pick up these fruits to control PC population. Those June fruits that are with or without PC lava real don’t need to worry about because the OC lava don’t have enough nutrition in a small fruit to develop into a adult PC. I could be wrong but I would like to hear experts to clarify my understanding.

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My thinking is the dropped apples now are fine. Its the apples that don’t drop that they develop inside of. They’ll feed and get big and fat and bore a hole and fall out onto the ground and wait until next year and lay eggs in all your fruit. I’ve actually seen these apples hang in the tree all fall/winter…they turn brown/black and crusty. Having said that a lot of PC do not develop in apples even if its been hit multiple times. The apple is growing so quickly and is dense so it crushes those eggs. Pears are even better…i never spray them and never have pc issues in them. Also at least in my yard, the peaches seem to get left alone the most of the stonefruit…they don’t like the fuzz.

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Yes, this is what I mean. I don’t have apple, what I observed is plums I think we only need to pick up the dropped fruits after they grow into larger size than June drop fruits size

Probably depends on the size of the plum and when it was hit. Bigger fruit probably more suspect. You might just want to collect a few off the ground and see what is going on inside.

I did. I saw the damage to the center but didn’t see any large enough worms that are easily to be seen. Also the fruits I thinned turned brown after a week off the tree, especially under humid environment

I noticed this too. My plums got murdered by them before I started spraying even though peaches were of similar size or larger and showed very little damage. My Asian pears had plenty of bites but nothing inside when I split open the fruit.

If you can’t see them then i doubt there is enough there to grow big enough to survive? I wonder if there is a minimum size they have to be to make it outside of a fruit. I have no idea on that. I’ve found them big enough to feed to my fish.

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@IL847 I 've wondered the same thing for years: when thinning out hundreds of pea to dime size apples, should I collect them in a bucket for the trash or can I let them drop under the tree? Can PC larvae mature under the tree in a dropped dime size apple?

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