SWD Winter Kill Pt 2

With today's Fruit Grower Report, I'm Bob Larson. Spotted Wing Drosophila is probably the most dangerous pest for Northwest cherry growers, but this winter could really be helping keep them at bay.

WSU Entomologist Elizabeth Beers says we know this thanks to the growing season of 2011, preceded by a very hard frost on Thanksgiving of 2010 ...

ELIZABETH BEERS ... "And that really really knocked back the Spotted Wing population tremendously. It was only our second field season that we'd had it here so we really didn't have it calibrated. We didn't even know what to expect at that time. So, for all we knew it was never going to be a problem again, but it just turned out that was actually a very very harsh winter, and exceptionally harsh one and that if a mild winter came along they would come back again. The thing is though, we never knocked them completely out. Some of them always survived to re-infest our orchards and eventually build up, but they may not build up to a high enough level to be damaging until after our cherries are harvested."

Beers says it won't be long before they know how effective the winter was ...

ELIZABETH BEERS ... "We will put our traps out some time in April and when we see how many we catch we will have, or how soon we catch them, we will have an idea of how hard they were knocked back by the winter. And it will simply be in relation to other years where we had the traps out."

Beers says we are cautiously optimistic that pressure from SWD will not be very high this year.