National Pollinator Week

National Pollinator Week is June 21-27th.  This is an opportunity to learn more about the insects (and some vertebrates) that make our fruits and vegetables possible.  Pollinator Week events in NC include the Johnston County Pollinator Festival at the Howell Woods Environmental Learning Center on June 26, 2010 from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm. Events include pollinator garden tours, crafts, making bee nesting bundles, visiting with vendors and beekeepers, “What’s The Buzz on Native Pollinators?” classes and beekeeping presentations. Join them for one program, or come out for the whole day. Bring a picnic lunch, see the live animal exhibits, explore the nature trails and experience the beauty of Howell Woods. There is no charge for this event. Howell Woods Environmental Learning Center is located at 6601 Devil’s Racetrack Road, Four Oaks, NC 27524. For more information contact Katrina McDougald at mcdougaldk@howellwoods.org or (919) 938-0115 ext. 115. Find out more about Howell Woods at www.howellwoods.org. 


Our lab has developed a strong interest in pollinator diversity and efficiency in the last 2 years.  Shelley Rogers, a MS student co-advised by David Tarpy and I, is studying the pollination ecology of the southeastern blueberry agroecosystem.  Shelley and I will be sharing the preliminary results of this work at the the North American Blueberry Research & Extension Workers Conference in July.  We are hoping to expand our pollinator work to include other production systems, including caneberries, who's pollination needs and pollinators we know little about.

First lightning bugs of the year!

On my drive home last night, I saw my first lightning bug (or firefly) of the year.  Tonight as I walked back from dinner, there were even more active. Fire"fly" or lightning "bug" are both misnomers, as the insects in question are actually beetles in the family Lampryidae.

Fireflies are one of the (many) reasons I am glad to be back east of the Mississippi.  They do not occur in California, where I did graduate work, and summer just isn't summer without them!

Fireflies can also be important predators, as they feed on soft bodied larvae and adults of other insects.  In fact, I have seen fireflies rooting around in blackberry blossoms, presumably in search of larval thrips to eat.  I suspect the plant actually receives some pollination benefit along the way.

Small Fruits Field Day - June 22

The NC State Small Fruits Field Day is scheduled for June 22nd at the Sandhills Research Station in Jackson Springs, NC.  This will be a twilight meeting, beginning with dinner at 5:00pm.  The schedule is being confirmed, but will include presentations on muscadine grapes, blueberries, blackberries, and strawberries from entomology (me and others), plant pathology (Bill Cline), and horticulture (lots of folks).

A busy few weeks

The blog posts have few and far between the last two weeks.  That will be changing soon, but it has been a very busy few weeks in the lab.  Tobacco season has kicked into high gear, strawberries are wrapping up, and blueberries are picking.  In the next few days, I will have posts on blueberry maggot trapping, tobacco foliar insecticides, spotted wing drosophila monitoring, and several upcoming extension events.

What does the short strawberry season mean for pest management?

There has been a lot of news lately about the fast, furious, and fantastic North Carolina strawberry crop this spring.  I have posted about the almost overwhelming harvest at the Central Crops Research Station, which looks to be slowing a bit in the next few weeks.  In fact, most of the heavy strawberry picking in NC should be tailing off by the end of May.  This is good for my research program, since we're moving on to blueberries, blackberries, and tobacco this time of year, but is not necessarily music to the ears of growers or consumers.  We are not seeing lower yields in 2010, just a more concentrated crop.

This short season has some direct pest management implications that growers should be aware of.  First for our key arthropod pest of strawberries, twospotted spider mites.  I have only gotten phone calls from one grower with spider mite issues this spring!  Either you are all comfortable with your management programs, or this was a mild mite year.  My money is on the later, as we did not have a single spider mite in our research plots at Central Crops until mid April, and even then, we had to manually infest to generate the number that were needed for our threshold and efficacy trials.  The low spider mite numbers are due to several factors:  Cold winter weather decreased mite populations and produced very hardy, healthy plants.  Healthy plants do not harbor as high mite populations as stressed plants, and they can better tolerate the populations they do have.  The fast fruiting season also reduced the importance of TSSM.  Fruiting strawberry plants can tolerate higher numbers of mites than young plants.  Finally, the rapid harvest season has likely rendered the use of miticides unnecessary.  Even the most effective conventional miticides take 2-3 week for full efficacy because they act on all mite life stages.   When it appears our season will be winding down in that same amount of time, a miticide treatment is probably not advised.  Of course, there are always exceptions to this rule, and I encourage growers and agents to contact me with questions.

Next, thrips: 2010 has been, as expected, a late thrips year with relatively low populations.  Thrips treatments are likely not justified.  I address other thrips related issues in posts here and here.

Lygus bugs are of the same ilk as thrips this season.  We will be out of strawberry harvest before they are likely to be an issue.

Finally, sap beetles.  These late season pests may rear their ugly heads in 2010 not because we have a long field season which will stretch into to heat of summer but instead because the sheer volume of fruit in a short period of time may result in less thorough picking by both employees and customers.  Sanitation is crucial for sap beetle control and is often sufficient by itself.  Chemical controls should be our last option, but they are available.

Just some of the news stories from throughout the state:
WBTV Charlotte at Hall Berry Farm
WRAL's Go Ask Mom blog on organic strawberries near the triangle 
WRAL and Dr. Barclay Poling at our research plots at the Central Crops Research Station, Clayton, NC
WECT's Strawberry Festival Coverage
WWAY on Columbus County strawberries
Sampson Independent on the large crop
In the Field on strawberries in NCDA's Food to School Program

Don't worry about "strawberry insects"

Rockingham County horticulture agent Kathryn Holmes first brought this video to my attention last month in an email where she asked "do we need to worry about these"?  





I fired off a quick reply that these were larval thrips (probably eastern flower thrips), which we most certainly have in NC but are nothing to worry about and certainly do not warrant washing your strawberries in soap.  We do not typically see fruit injury from thrips in NC strawberries, so I do not generally recommend pesticide treatment for these insects.  See this post from earlier in the spring on thrips.  I was not aware, however, that this video had been picked up by other sources until I was searching for local media stories on the strawberry crop and found WRAL news blogger Monica Laliberte's post on the same topic.  Since this information is being passed around more widely, I decided to write up a short post to clarify the video for those that may be interested.


The video was produced by Star-K Kosher Certification, a company that assists businesses in receiving kosher certification for food products.  Most Insects are not kosher, which explains why they are interested in removing insects.  What does this mean for the rest of us who do not keep a kosher diet?  Nothing new!  We do not have any new non native thrips species recorded recently from NC strawberries, which means that the insects that may be present on our fruit are the same as have always been there.  Many thrips are generalist omnivores--they feed on pollen, plants, and even the eggs of other pest insects.  The larvae are present on strawberries because the eggs they hatched from were laid there.  They will feed for 1-2 weeks (depending on the weather) and then molt to adults themselves and move on to the next host.  Thrips are present in numerous other places in the environment--in flowers, in your lawn, on your peaches, and on your house plants--like many other arthropods.


Strawberries are not washed before packing (to do so would dramatically shorten shelf life), and a good water rinse will remove field dirt and insects.  Those that are not removed are ultimately harmless.  I know I would much rather eat a strawberry rinsed in water with a few remaining thrips (or mites) than one covered in soap residue or one treated with unnecessary pesticides used to assuage the fears of consumers coming across a video like the one above!

Final tobacco trial transplanted!

Our trial site in Stokes County, NC with newly planted NC 196 flue cured tobacco plants. Photo: HJB

On Wednesday, May 5th, Anna and I traveled to Stokes County, NC to transplant our last on farm tobacco trial for 2010!  It's been a busy transplant season, and we have a lot of tobacco in the ground.

Here's a run down of our 2010 trials (in order of transplant):

1. Soil insecticide efficacy (wireworms, flea beetles, and aphids) - Border Belt Tobacco Research Station
2. Tobacco splitworm larval performance trials - Cunningham Research Station & Oxford Tobacco Research Station
3. Insecticide movement & longevity (2 trials) - Cunningham Research Station & Upper Coastal Plain Research Station
4. Aphid threshold revision trials - Cunningham Research Station, Upper Coastal Plain Research Station & Oxford Tobacco Research Station
5. Tobacco budworm management in seed production - Cunningham Research Station & On farm in Forsyth County
6. TSWV & Thrips flight timing trial - On farm at one location each in Craven & Duplin Counties
7. Tobacco streak virus management trial - On farm in Lee County
8. Lepidopteran (tobacco budworm and hornworm) management - On farm in Stokes County

In all, we have 19 tobacco trials this summer (6 at Upper Coastal Plain, 4 at Cunningham, 1 at Border Belt, 3 at Oxford, and 5 On farm).  


As you can see, we have a diversity of projects underway.  Some of the key questions we will be addressing in 2010 are the efficacy and longevity of transplant water applications of Coragen, testing additional novel applications of Coragen and Belt, and testing new, unregistered pesticides.  Master's student Monique Rivera will be continuing her work on the behavioral ecology of the tobacco splitworm (Phthorimaea operculella).  Doctoral student Richard Reeves will be heading up our pesticide movement and longevity trials as well as beginning his work on economic threshold revisions with aphids.

Newly transplanted tobacco plants in Stokes County treated with a simulated transplant water treatment of Coragen at 7 fl oz/acre.  Because tobacco setters can be difficult to calibrate for small plot work, we apply transplant water treatments in 2 oz of water immediately following transplant.

I'll be posting updates on these projects throughout the summer!