The first adult males of the season should begin to appear soon in pheromone traps, so it shouldn't be long before we start seeing some adult females in pear foliage, followed by their invasive crawler offspring. We realize that the Bartlett fruit set is down considerably this season, but for those who do have a crop and don't want it threatened by mealybug infestations, the crawlers are the most susceptible stage for chemical control, which we expect sometime during the next couple of weeks, especially in the Hudson Valley. Adult females are present for a total of 4-6 weeks, and oviposit for about one week after mating. Males survive for only a few days after emerging. The elongate, orange-yellow eggs are laid in jumbled masses along with waxy filamentous secretions in protected places such as under bark crevices, near pruning cuts, and occasionally in the calyx of fruit.
Later instars are similar in appearance, but become progressively browner and redder.
This hatch is completed by the petal fall stage of pears. Nymphs that hatch from these overwintered eggs are active from roughly early May to early July. As the nymphs approach the adult stage, they tend to congregate on older branches at a pruning scar, a node, or at a branch base, as well as inside the calyx of pears. Second, pears to be made into puree typically are not peeled or cored by New York processors, so infestations can potentially result in unacceptable contamination of the product. Another problem, of concern to apple growers in the 1930s and 1940s, and again in the Hudson and Champlain Valleys in the early 1980s, is that the honeydew secreted by the crawlers is a substrate for sooty molds growing on the fruit surface.