I noticed my unripe plums have these holes with dried clear/yellow tinted sap oozing out of them. I opened one up and found these worms. I inspected the entire tree and EVERY SINGLE FRUIT has them! Help! What is boring and laying eggs in my unripened plums????
Oh gosh, what a shame that they are all infected.
search for info on "plum curculio" moth
every year I swear I"m going to get ahead of these pests... LMK if you figure out how to do it!
I asked my neighbor about his cherry trees with the same looking worm and he said it was a weevil of some kind. If they were my tree, I would looking into spraying it.
Here is some info:
https://insects.tamu.edu/extension/publications/epubs/eee_00014.cfm
the problem with spraying at this point is that the larvae are already inside the fruit... I think they get inside very soon after petal fall, when the fruits are first forming. by the time you really notice them, it's too late to do anything but blister their little ears with foul language when you pick a beautiful looking fruit and find that it's been wrecked inside.
I was hoping they knew that and could use the info for next Spring.
Yea I knew that about spraying at this point. I'm going to clip every fruit off the tree and destroy them. That way they don't burrow into the ground to pupate. The tree doesn't look healthy...this is a new property we just bought and moved into in January, so the tree was already here. It's trunk is in poor shape. Not sure if it's worth saving...there aren't THAT many fruits on it. I have no experience with fruit trees, so I don't even know if I could make it healthy again. I also don't know the age of the tree...the house was built in 1996, so it could have been planted then, who knows.
I removed all the plums yesterday. I climbed the tree to get to the top ones. Put them in a pot and boiled them...to kill the worms. I did manage to get pics of two bugs I found laying more eggs as I was plucking the fruit off the tree.
Wow, they really did a number on your fruits. It's sickening to pick off fruit with damage like that, because you can't help thinking, wow, I could really have been eating a lot of plums this summer!
A friend says her dad traps the moths in spring, preventing them from laying eggs... something involving bananas (only he is smart and eats the bananas, using just the peels)... I will have to find out more before 2014!
