It is the most important indirect pest of peach and nectarine in the mid-Atlantic region, where injury associated with Cytospora canker, pruning wounds, winter injury, and mechanical damage results in significant loss of production in older orchards. It may be common in black knot galls on plum.
Females are somewhat larger than males.
Eggs are oval, cinnamon colored and less than one mm in size. Initially yellowish-brown in color, cocoons become rust brown as they age. LPTB overwinters in galleries under the tree bark as a larva in various stages of development ranging from young to nearly full-grown. In the spring, larvae resume feeding and complete their development beneath a thin layer of the bark surface from pink to shuck-fall. Following construction of a cocoon the larva changes to the pupal stage.