Two-Spotted Spider Mite
Two-Spotted Spider Mite. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report.
It appears that a tiny pest has been in training. Betsy Beers, WSU research entomologist says the two-spotted spider mite seems to be building a resistance to nearly all chemicals currently labeled for control.
BEERS: It's a very ubiquitous pest. It attacks a lot of crop plants, tree fruits are just one of them but there's just a huge number of hosts for this particular pest and it is not necessarily a problem until it builds up to pretty high numbers and usually that has to do with pesticide perturbation.
Anjou pears, right now, seem to be the area of concern for the two-spotted spider mite.
BEERS: The truth is we're running out of effective insecticides to use on this pest but the other strategy is biological control and biological control works very well. We know because we've used it on various crops, apple in particular for many, many years. These are insects that cannot compete well in the absence of pesticides. They're natural predators will just take them down.
The mites are not particular about their host plants and attack the leaves of pears, apples, hops and many others which then indirectly causes damage to the fruit. Beers is continuing her work.
BEERS: We're going to try to see if we can develop a program soft enough to allow biological control of mites.
That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network of the West.
