- Author: Mark Bolda
Nice gallery of lygus (plant bug) management in cotton in the American Southeast.
Run through it if you have a few minutes, again this is in cotton, but the points about lygus management are not unrelated to our situation in the berry business.
Key points:
1. Lygus (plant bugs as they call them over there) move from their preferred hosts (see below) to cotton when it gets dry.
2. No need to over-react and spray all of your crop when you see the problem in one area. Use a sweep net and understand the lygus population over the entire field, field edges might have more.
3. Recommended to open lygus control campaign with highest rate of a neonicotinoid insecticide; not sure personally about that one, don't forget that neonicotinoids are just as heavy, if not heavier, on many of our beneficial insects (Geocoris, Orius and Nabis) since they are in the same insect family as lygus.
3. Destruction of cotton terminals takes place in a short period of time (20 minutes); would this point to even less time to negatively affect the achenes of strawberry and developing drupelets of blackberry?
4. High numbers of lygus are reported in corn and wheat surrounding cotton, but yet the authors do not claim to know why the lygus is coming into cotton. Interesting that high numbers in a surrounding crop do not necessarily mean lygus migrates to another crop. We do not know from where our lygus is coming.
5. Monitor the situation after the spray. Did you achieve good knockdown?
Nice little article.
/span>