Some important tree-fruit pests can be monitored by the home gardener.
Monitoring is a way of assessing the presence of pests and the size of their population.
Figure 1 shows a calendar of events for apples in the Lake Plains area of New York. This information, along with monitoring your specific situation for pests, will help you determine when activity begins, and in some cases, what the population levels are. From this information you can make decisions about what pests you need to manage in your fruit planting. Visual traps, one monitoring tool, are available for some of these important tree-fruit pests. For example, both red sphere traps and yellow sticky-board traps are used to find out when adult flies are available to monitor the apple maggot fly.