The cherry fruit maggot is probably responsible for most of the "wormy"
cherries in New York but the plum curculio is also a cause of "wormy"
fruits and in some seasons is a most formidable pest. This curculio[69]
(_Conotrachelus nenuphar_ Herbst) is a rough, grayish snout-beetle
somewhat less than a quarter of an inch in length, so familiar an insect
as scarcely to need further description. The female beetle pierces the
skin of the young cherries and places an egg in the puncture. About this
cavity she gouges out a crescent-shaped trench, this cut or sting being
a most discouraging sign to the cherry-grower, for he well knows that
from the eggs come, within a week or two, white and footless grubs which
burrow to the stone and make "wormy fruit." Some of the infested
cherries drop but many remain eventually to distract the housewife and
those who eat cherries out of hand. Jarring the beetles from the trees,
a method employed by plum-growers, is quite too expensive and
ineffective for the cherry-grower and poisoning with an arsenate is the
only practical means of combating the pest. Rubbish and vegetation offer
hiding places for the insects and, therefore, cultivated orchards are
freer from curculio than those laid down to grass. There are no
curculio-proof cherries but, as with plums, the thin-skinned varieties
are damaged most by the insect.
The grub of the plum curculio is easily distinguished from the cherry
fruit maggot. This "worm" is the larva of a beetle, a true grub,
footless and with a brownish, horny head while the cherry fruit maggot,
the larva of a two-winged insect, is a true maggot like that which comes
from the common house-fly and hardly to be distinguished from the apple
maggot. It is important to be able to distinguish in wormy cherries the
grub of the curculio from the cherry fruit maggot in order to know and
understand the nature of the two enemies in combating them.
Another pest of this fruit is the cherry leaf-beetle (_Galerucella
cavicollis_ Le Conte) the larvae of which sometimes do much damage to
cherry foliage. The adult insect is an oval, reddish beetle about
one-fourth of an inch long with black legs and antennae. Both the adult
and the larvae feed on the leaves and do much damage if abundant.
Usually there are two broods, the insect pupating in the ground.
Fortunately the pest is easily controlled with the arsenical sprays.
The cherry scale (_Aspidiotus forbesi_ Johnson) is commonly found on
this fruit and occasionally on others as well. To the unaided eye it is
very similar to the well-known San José scale, differing chiefly in
being lighter in color. The remedy is the same as for the San José
scale, which we next discuss.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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