How to recognize a pest?
The horsefly bug has a round or oblong body. Horseflies belong to the hemiptera family of the suborder of bugs. Its dimensions are in the range of 2-10 mm. The covers are soft compared to other types of bedbugs. Most horsefly species produce only one generation per year. The female lays her eggs inside plant tissues. From the eggs, adult larvae emerge, from which adult insects with wings grow.
During the development process, the imago goes through 5 stages of development per month, molting after each of them.
Young adult plants settle into areas where a suitable crop grows and begin to feed. By piercing the leaves of the plant, they introduce toxic substances inside. Their influence can affect the appearance and condition of the plant. The affected areas die, the process of photosynthesis is disrupted.
After 7 days they begin to mate. By piercing the stems and petioles, females lay up to 10 eggs in each clutch. Eggs survive the winter better than the insects themselves. There they winter, although there are species that give up to 4 generations per season. The longer the warm period, the more generations of the horse fly bug will have time to be born.
Efficiency
So, you picked wormwood or tansy in the yard and are eager to fight the blood-sucking parasites. However, do such products really help remove bedbugs?
Unfortunately, the answer is no. Herbal repellents do help repel parasites, but they cannot cause serious harm to them. Bedbugs quickly adapt to unfavorable conditions and irritants, so after 3-4 days they will get hungry and stop reacting to the unpleasant odor. To remove bedbugs, you need to kill all the adults and their eggs - herbal remedies cannot cope with this task.
Despite their ineffectiveness for complete pest control, they can be used to temporarily repel parasites, as well as to prevent infection. If your neighbors' apartment is infested with bedbugs, you can place bunches of tansy or wormwood near ventilation shafts and outlets to prevent the insects from migrating into your home.
If you want to get rid of parasites forever, then it is better to use high-quality insecticides - modern products have low toxicity for people and animals and are practically odorless. Using good insecticides, you can remove parasites in 2-3 applications.
What harm does it cause to plants?
Horsefly bugs cause a lot of harm to various agricultural and ornamental plants. Weeds also cause damage, although few people worry about them. Their harm lies in the fact that they pierce the leaves and begin to feed on the sap of the plant. They often damage the growing point. As a result, the plant dies or its leaves take on an ugly shape. All this reduces the yield of damaged crops.
Plants suffer even more from adult larvae than from adult individuals - they live inside a leaf or stem, deforming it.
Therefore, the affected leaves usually have an unusual, ugly shape. It can be difficult to notice the bugs themselves on the plant. They have discreet colors and small sizes. You can understand that they feed on plant sap by finding small spots on the leaves - bite marks. After some time, the size of the spots increases and holes appear. Leaves in these places curl and dry out or rot.
Among horseflies, most species live on plants, but there are zoophytophages (they can feed on animal food). The majority of herbivores live and feed on angiosperms, but there are those that feed on mushrooms and ferns. Most horse flies, although they are named after their favorite plant, willingly feed on the sap of others growing nearby. Another name is the field bug.
What the pest threatens:
- Among the flowers, daisies, roses, chrysanthemums, azaleas, and fuchsias suffer the most from the horse bug.
- They affect almost all agricultural crops grown in the garden. The exception is grain crops, which are damaged by the pest bug.
- Shrubs (currants, gooseberries, raspberries, chokeberries) can also be attacked by pests. Currant horsefly bugs feed on them. Two generations of horseflies grow up during the season, the first feeds from mid-May to July, the second until September. The bug is light green in color, the back of the front back is covered with transverse wrinkles. It is approximately twice as wide as the insect's head. There are long antennae that are attached to the head near the eye. The body length of the currant bug is about 6 mm.
- Horsefly bugs cause great harm to strawberry plantings. They lay eggs in the buds or flowers of the plant. This often leads to deformation of the fruit, its top becomes hard and changes color to brown or dark green. Such fruits become unsuitable for consumption.
- The cucumber bug is very small, its body length is only 3 mm. Therefore, it is difficult to notice on cucumber leaves. In addition, he quickly jumps, moving from the bottom of one sheet to another.
Habitat
It will be quite difficult to calculate its location. And it doesn’t get any easier from the fact that their habitat ranges from ordinary grass to ornamental plants. Basically, their location is: grass, flowers and agricultural plants.
They are frequent guests in the CIS countries. And you probably remember more than once a situation when, under the hot sun, having picked and tasted some berry, you wrinkled your face and threw it away, feeling the taste of a beetle. It was a bug.
Beet bug
The beet bug is found in all regions, but does more harm in the forest-steppe zone. In addition to beets, it damages potatoes, sunflowers, flax, legumes, and pumpkins. The imago baby has a narrow body 3.4-4.5 mm long. Outwardly, they are similar to green aphids, but are slightly larger and much more active. They winter mainly in forest belts, which complicates the implementation of agrotechnical measures to combat them. Adult insects have yellow-brown elytra, with a noticeable black spot in the center.
Horsefly bug larvae move slowly across the field because they do not have wings. Therefore, the bulk of insects will be on plants that are located along the edge of the field. They feed on the juice of young beet leaves, including the succulent veins. After a bite, light spots of irregular shape appear on the leaves. The leaves turn yellow, dry out during drought, and rot during rains. If there are a lot of bugs, the leaves disappear completely.
Typically, beet crops are not completely destroyed by horse flies. It appears on the field at a time when the seedlings have already grown. And the number of insects is not so large as to completely destroy the crops. But product quality and yield can decrease significantly. The root crops of such plants are less sweet, have smaller size and weight. Horsefly bugs cause particular harm to areas where beet seeds are grown.
When horse bugs move to the seed plants, they infect the stem, the flower stalks become bent and die.
The main stem, on which the bulk of productive seeds is formed, dies or becomes distorted. As a result, side shoots appear and grow strongly. Flowering is delayed by approximately two weeks, so all the seeds will ripen later. Bedbugs continue to feed on the juice of the seeds until the shell becomes hard. They then move higher up the stem, trying to find new succulent areas of the plant.
If you look at damaged seeds in cross-section, you will notice that they have a brown color, which is not characteristic of healthy seeds. The resulting seeds have a lower percentage of germination; they can be affected by mosaic viruses and other diseases.
Products and chemicals
One of the options is chemistry. But it’s not so simple here, because you need to select the drug carefully, since it can harm not only the bug, but also your plant.
ATTENTION! Repeated use of one drug may simply not produce results. After repeated use of the drug, bedbugs develop immunity.
You need to diversify your choice of drugs, and not get hung up on one. Have at least three types of pest control chemicals in your arsenal. When choosing a chemical, pay attention to the active ingredient.
Pirimiphos-methyl is well suited for treating inedible plants. Its peculiarity is that it lasts about a week on your plants, this is quite enough to drive away pests that have decided to conquer your green territory. But most importantly, do not forget that using it on edible plants is dangerous for your health!
If the bug has attacked the edible part of your vegetation, dimethoate will come to the rescue. It doesn't last long, but it knows its job. Will drive away all those who are hostile to your plant. And most importantly, it will preserve the opportunity to consume its fruits later.
If we talk about the folk method of dealing with them, then everything is not so specific. Because all the usual methods are good, but still inferior in effectiveness to their work colleagues listed above.
Fighting horsefly bugs
The fight against horse flies should begin immediately after the first signs of damage are discovered. Various methods of struggle are used:
- Treatment with chemicals. Treatment with chemicals is carried out by spraying plants. Particular attention should be paid to treating the underside of the leaf and plant, getting on the petioles and stem. Preparations of the organophosphorus group and pyrethoid drugs are used. Experts advise using Aktara, which has a greater effect on pests without killing beneficial insects.
- Agrotechnical. Agrotechnical control methods include removing dry and fallen leaves and plant debris from the site in the fall. Together with them, adult pests that have hidden for the winter and the eggs they lay are removed. In the summer you need to weed out weeds, which often harbor horsefly bugs. Plowing and loosening the rows will help significantly reduce the number of pests on the site. A cohosh plant planted on the site will protect useful agricultural crops. Horsefly bugs cannot stand its smell, so they will go looking for food in neighboring beds.
More information can be found in the video:
Preventive resettlement measures
People have resorted to different methods by which they can reduce the number of insects on cruciferous plants. This allows you to create obstacles for the spread of bedbugs on the site.
Prevention measures that are effective:
- in the fall after harvesting and in the spring immediately after the first wave of warming, soil is excavated;
- seedlings are protected in different ways: with agrofibre, plastic bottles (they are pre-cut into 2 parts and used wide);
- before the onset of winter, remove organic waste from the site;
- Special traps are placed on the site, the principle of their operation is: the devices are connected to a voltage source, emit light, and when the pests crawl, they die from a discharge of current.
Lack of boron is the first cause of deformation of strawberries
The first reason for the deformation of garden strawberries may be a lack of boron. In dry years, boron deficiency is most noticeable. Also, with uncontrolled application of nitrogen fertilizers or lime, the boron content in the soil is sharply reduced.
Symptoms of boron deficiency can be observed both on the leaves, roots, and fruits of strawberries. Boron deficiency determined by the leaves: strong curvature of young leaves, the leaves begin to curl upward, old leaves have a yellow border along the edge, and the roots become stumpy. Young strawberry fruits do not develop and die. There are a lot of barren flowers: with a severe lack of boron, the ovaries simply die. Boron deficiency on adult fruits - longitudinal stripes appear on the berries of garden strawberries, which gradually become rough, the soft tissues of the berry do not develop in these places, the whole berry looks ugly. Developing and mature strawberries may taper at the end and curl up.
To eliminate boron starvation, boron is added to the soil in the form of boric acid or borax when planting strawberries. This can be done in the spring by mixing microfertilizers with crushed soil when loosening or fine sand.
add boron in June, when berries begin to form. Add boric acid or borax to the water for watering or spraying garden strawberries. Microelements are added at the rate of 5 g per 10 liters of water. Boric acid is first dissolved in one liter of hot water and poured into the main solution.
Description of some popular individuals
Basically, garden bugs live in areas planted with cultivated plants and can act both as dangerous pests, frankly causing harm to plants and even directly to people, and as useful assistants to gardeners in terms of exterminating other harmful insects.
We present to you the first representative of the garden bug - the stink bug, which, on the contrary, does not have a green color - this is the well-known berry stink bug. Yes, the same one that, after contact, leaves a sickly sweet and at the same time disgusting smell. Moreover, this type of bedbug has a beautiful and bright color, which attracts attention. The berry bug lives on all berries growing in garden plots, such as raspberries, currants, chokeberries (chokeberry) and others.
However, not all relatives of garden bugs are safe for plants; some cause significant damage to cabbage and radish leaves, greenhouse cucumbers and pear trees. Insects feed on the juice of the above plants, for which they pierce the skin of leaves and young shoots, and then suck out the juice. After which, brown spots form on the damaged areas of the plants, and the leaves die accordingly.
Thus, we figured out that some garden bugs are terrible enemies that need to be gotten rid of and know effective ways, and some, on the contrary, are comrades for gardeners. Beneficial garden bugs are predators, so they actively fight caterpillars of harmful butterflies, various aphids, thrips, and even larvae and adults of Colorado potato beetles. Therefore, gardeners need to learn to distinguish between beneficial and harmful bugs and get rid of the latter without harming their helpers.
Interesting and educational video about the life of garden bugs:
