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.
Visual traps are active near the apple tree.
Obviously, one must know what the adult apple maggot looks like to use these traps effectively. Monitoring will help in the development of specific pest management programs. In some cases, red sphere traps may be effective in controlling the apple maggot by trapping most of the females before they land on the real fruit and lay eggs. Synthetic apple volatile lures are now available, which greatly increase the efficiency of the traps. The emergence of black cherry fruit fly, cherry fruit fly, and blueberry maggot fly can also be monitored through the use of these traps.