This issue of Tree Crop is the last one before flowers appear on your tree crop, Ion Staunton* writes.
 
Insects will be showing up for a feed at about the same time. The usual suspects: aphids, thrips, mites, etc. By the time the trees think it is warm enough to swell buds and produce petals, the pests are deciding to emerge from wherever they were overwintering and attack the new growth. 
 
Then there are the bees, ready to assist by providing pollination services. There’s a lot going on. 
 
Your mission is to conduct the orchestra, bringing in the players at precisely the right time. 
 
It’s not all that easy.  
 
The flowers open before the leaves on most crops and then the bees turn up. Within a week the mites have arrived and then the aphids, clustering on the soft growing tips, stems, and new leaves. Your job is to kill the pests without getting the beekeepers offside. 
 
It’s just as well bees work office hours; well, starting a bit before nine and gone before dark. This leaves your trees free of bees between sunset and sunrise whether you live in the southern or northern parts of Oz. 
 
The insects and mites are workaholics. The aphids stick their snouts in through the soft tissue and they hardly need to suck as the tree you’ve nurtured and watered has so much sap, it almost pressure-fills the aphids. 
 
Just as well aphids have a couple of exhaust-pipes at the rear, or they could burst. Juice goes in one end and out the other; the aphid gets its nutrition and, the honey dew that ants don’t collect during the night (ants usually work daylight hours as well) is spilled all over your tree and, being loaded with sugar, it ferments and turns into black or sooty mould.  
 
Mites have little legs and no wings so they can only spread slowly over the new growth. Day and night; night and day, they are the ones that stay the distance… until you intervene. 
 
The thrips, whitefly, various bugs, jassids and caterpillars are usually a couple of weeks away from arrival. They like more greenery, but right now, with petals open, your crop needs pollination, and it doesn’t need the aphids, mites and any other opportunist pests. 

 Control

Let’s start where I usually finish these articles: chemical control. 
 
You wait only until pest numbers are up a little bit and throughout most of your crop. By applying an instant kill contact insecticide (such as Py-Bo Natural Pyrethrum of course) after sundown when the bees are partying in their hive… every insect or mite you contact will die. 
 
Next morning, there will be residues of pyrethrum until about mid-morning because it rapidly degrades in ultra-violet light. But here’s the clever bit; the residues are highly repellent to bees. 
 
Pyrethrum was used in Aerogard and other fly, mozzie and midge repellents when they were first released in aerosol form in the 1960’s. Pyrethrum was replaced because new repellents were developed that repelled for longer than an hour or so. Which all confirms that the bees won’t have more than a couple of hours of frustration the morning after… and they won’t be affected at all.  
 
You can see this for yourself. In the first hour or so after sunrise, you’ll see bees come to the crop and hover above and around the blossoms, seldom getting within a hand-span of them. The bee work-ethic is being tested; they’d love to collect pollen, but they don’t like the natural pyrethrum. 
 
You may think about a sleep-in after your late evening on the tractor but if you can take a cup of tea or coffee into your crop at this time for a look around, you’ll see this is exactly what happens. Somewhere before lunch (depending on UV levels) the bees are back at work and unaffected. 
 
While you’re there, you can look a bit closer and see the dead insects and thrips. If you see dead pests, it’s because the droplets hit them. If you see live ones… they were missed. This tells you the application did not get full coverage and you need to change something physical for your next spray; droplet size, pressure, angle of nozzles or speed of travel. 
 
Of course, if you have 100% dead pests, just maybe you could cut back a bit on the next application. You can’t kill pests any deader than dead so, save the costs associated with over-application by adjusting and measuring the result next time you spray. 
 
Systemic pesticides get into, and are conducted around, the sapstream. Any pest that sucks sap or eats a leaf will die. And the bees don’t even know about it. A problem here is that particularly for stone and pome fruit trees, there aren’t enough leaves to absorb systemics at the time the flowers and new fruit buds first come under attack. 
 
There are many systemics and you’ll need to check the label to see how long they are effective and whether it is registered for your crop… and how often it can be used a season. The withholding period is not the same as the effective period; the withholding period expires when it is safe to eat the fruit and, as we all know, there is always a built-in safety margin. 
 
Beneficials have a definite advantage if these predatory and parasitic insects are released early. Firstly, you have to wait until there are sufficient pest numbers to provide them with food. As soon as your beneficials provider says “Release!” it will be because numbers of pests are high enough to keep them in food for the rest of the fruit growing and ripening period.  
 
If a swarm of thrips, Rutherglen bugs or other fly-in pests arrive in plague proportions, the beneficials will be unable to prevent money-losing damage, so, out with the Py-Bo again. 
 
Bringing in the appropriate music at the appropriate time is all part of conducting the production. “One more time”.