If they are discovered, they should be easily controlled with any of the pyrethroids once they come out of the bloom and are exposed to the insecticide B unless they are too big when they come out. The budworm moth flight should begin to taper off by the end of this week. We need a little break in the action to allow some of these non-BT fields a chance to clean up some on their own. It has become very apparent that fields that are away from boll weevil sites and are not being treated by the boll weevil folks on a regular basis are beginning to pick up some plant bugs. We discussed spider mites last week, but I wanted to mention them again.
Most fields do have a few spider mites around.
Some fields have quite a few and are beginning to have some red spotting on the leaves B usually, about the 3 rd and 4 th leaf from the top. The beet traps continue to show a slight increase in moth catches. One of our traditional hot spots for the traps near Montrose had the most again this week with an average daily catch of 57 moths. The next highest was 15. These numbers are low, but they are high enough to begin seeing an occasional egg mass here and there.