Lawrence Akutagawa wrote:

hmm...let's see. A couple of points here....

The only trees with which I am familiar that has foliage or fruit in winter
are evergreens - and foliage only at that. Best to my experience, coddling
moths are not a problem with conifers. And I do believe that it is winter
that my previous post recommended when dormant spraying be done.

I think you missed the whole point. Dormant oil is effective in
smothering
eggs, not cocoons. The eggs of the Codling Moth are laid a few days
after
petal drop, in the Spring. It's bad enough that you are wasting your
own
time and resources on this approach. Don't mislead others to do the
same.
If you look on the web for control measures of Codling Moths, most of
them
don't even mention dormant oil, and the few that do, say it is only
mildly
effective and should be sprayed on the eggs (not the cocoons). As a
typical
reference, take a look at this article:
http://www.cahe.nmsu.edu/pubs/_h/h-427.html




The pupae on the one hand are living entities that require air. On the
other hand best to my knowledge, they do not have an independent air supply
system such that they can be smothered by various means, including dormant
oil. The trick, of course, is to cover the cocoons sufficiently with oil
that the pupae inside do suffocate. You don't want to or don't need to
cover the pupae itself with the oil...you just want to cut off the air
supply.

In the cocoons, the insects are essentially dormant and probably don't
need
a lot of air.


Sherwin Dubren

"Sherwin Dubren" wrote in message
...
I don't think dormant oil is a good choice to kill codling moths.
Dormant
oil should not be applied when there is folliage or fruit on the trees.
However, that is the time when the codling moth emerges from it's Winter
cocoon (weeks after petal drop) and lays it's eggs. I don't think the
dormant oil would be effective in killing the insect inside it's cocoon,
so that rules out the effectivity of dormant oil as a control of codling
moths.
The only other technique I have tried are hanging traps in the trees.
This is a labor intensive job and the lures to attract the moths are
somewhat expensive. I quickly gave up on various pesticides, except
for 5% Imidan, which seemed to be effective.

Sherwin Dubren

Lawrence Akutagawa wrote:

I have an uncle who swears by nematode worms. There are several places
(two are Home Depot and Gardens Alive
http://www.gardensalive.com/item_dis...uctNumber=5000) here in
the
US that sell them. The procedure is to spray the ground under your
apples
trees - and the main trunk - with them as soon as it gets warm in
spring,
with periodic followups during the season. The idea, according to him,
is
to attack the insect in the pupae stage. I'm going to give this a try
starting a few weeks from now while it is still warm and the insects are
getting settled for the winter.

Another approach is to heavily dormant spray the trees several times
during
the winter to kill as many of the overwintering pupae as possible. An
oil
based spray will work well by suffocating the pupae. Not 100% effective
(you miss some), but it does keep the overall poplulation down.