Project Overview
Commodities
- Fruits: apples, general tree fruits
Practices
- Education and Training: farmer to farmer, on-farm/ranch research, participatory research
- Pest Management: traps
Proposal summary:
In apples, the need to control apple maggot fly is one major reason for using insecticides after June in this area. Trapping out apple maggot by surrounding the orchard with baited traps has already been shown to successfully control apple maggots with no insecticides, but the commercially available "sticky sphere traps" are difficult to clean as well as increasingly expensive. We propose to use real apples as an inexpensive and disposable subsitute for the commercial traps. This approach apparently was tried many years ago when the traps were first being developed, but we feel that apple storage technology has improved significantly since that time and the results may now be better. If successful, this technique will allow growers to monitor and/or control apple maggot with reduced pesticide, at a much lower cost than is currently possible. It will help us in the interim while a pesticide-treated sphere is being developed by Umass and may even continue to provide a low-cost alternative to the pesticide-treated traps once they are developed.