Pine Scale and White Pine Weevil
Problems:
This time of year is the perfect time to address and take care of these two issues specifically. Pine scale are a hard bodied scale that attach themselves late summer to the needles on your evergreen trees. After they attach they create a hard exoskeleton and begin to suck the sap out of the tree. They become an issue when the population rises to a harmful level and the tree begins to loose needles.
Another insect that is a big issue in your spruce trees specifically is White Pine Weevil. What they do is overwinter in the top of the tree where the bud is forming. Once spring arrives they become active and begin chewing around the new shoot and the problem becomes apparent when the main leader of the spruce tree starts to curl then dies. What this does is disrupts the natural form of the tree by taking the main leader out. The tree then wont continue to grow upwards until it has selected a new main leader, which usually takes several years.
Solution:
We use a program that is typically four different applications timed throughout the season to take care of them, they are listed below:
The best and first approach is to combat both these insects and other hard bodied scale that attack other trees is to get after them early in the spring with a dormant oil application. What the dormant oil does is it actually covers them with a suffocating coating of dormant oil and it smothers them.
The second application will be timed after they have hatched and are in the “crawler” stage. This will be an insecticide application that does a phenomenal job at controlling scale before they have a chance to attach.
The third application will be very similar to the second and will catch any late hatching insects in the “crawler” stage.
This final application of the season will be a dormant oil and insecticide application that does the same thing as the spring application. The reason for using it again is to get any of the remaining scale that may have made it through the other applications throughout the season.
Now we do recommend doing these four applications every season because the control we get is about 75%-90% so if we don’t continue them they will come back within a single season.
