Spotted Wing Drosophila – Facts for Fancy Fruit

Spotted Wing Drosophila

For those of you who follow me or Peter on Twitter, you know that last week I found SWD larvae in raspberries at the Meigs Farm near Lafayette. Small fruit growers should be into their rigorous spray schedules now. If fruit are ripe or ripening, growers should be spraying approximately every 5 days. The available insecticides depend on the crop so check the Midwest Fruit Pest Management Guide for your options. It is important to rotate between different classes of insecticides to avoid the development of resistance. For conventional growers that might mean a pyrethroid, Delegate, and malathion, for example. For organic growers, the only two choices are pyrethrin and Entrust. When spraying pyrethrin, use the lower end of the rate range and spray more frequently because pyrethrin has little or no residual activity. Whatever products you spray with, be sure to notice the pre-harvest intervals, which can be problematic in some crops.

 

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