Bruce Nearon is a citrus grower who has been following the HLB “greening” situation, studying new methods for greening control on his own. He occassionally does his own electronic newsletter about meetings he has attended and things he has tried in his own grove operations. Here is a short report from Bruce’s latest communique, fitting for the “Grower Trials” section of this website. Nearon writes:
Our grove is Coyote Grove in Lake Wales and is certified organic. We started our scouting program in October using a commercial scouting service and had planned to scout every two months though May. The December scouting identified two HLB positive trees which were confirmed by PCR tests in the U.S. Sugar Lab. Shortly after identification, we drenched both of the trees in Pyganic EC 5.0, neem, spinosad, and 435 oil. Then we cut them down and burned them. After finding the first two HLB positive trees we increased our scouting frequency to monthly. We found a third HLB confirmed positive tree in January. We drenched that tree in the same spray mix as the first two and cut it down and burned it. After the first two HLB positive trees were found we increased the frequency of spraying the resets to every two weeks. We had been on a monthly spray program for about a year. Recently, I noticed some defoliation on the resets and twigginess. Is it HLB, is it the frequency of the spray, or something else?
With few options to control the psyllids in Coyote we do not want it to be a pool of inoculants to infect our neighbors’ groves. With that in mind we obtained a half million Hippodamia convergens ladybeetles from Rincon-Vitova insectary, the granddaddy of biological control in Ventura, California and released them in the first week in April. Research shows that Harmonia axyridis or Olla v-nigrum (Mulsant) ladybeetles are effective in controlling nymphs. However, we could not locate a commercial supply of this variety of the species, so the H. convergens will have to do for now. We were told by Rincon and others that if we sprayed neem or oil it would kill the ladybeetles; however, we found research that showed that neem and oil had a low-moderate effect on their mortality; therefore, we plan to spray these materials in a couple of weeks. Though they wish us success, IFAS and DPI researchers with whom I have communicated our efforts to control psyllids with predatory insects are less than optimistic about the outcome. # # #
Contact Bruce Nearon at: bnearon2@verizon.net