There are many considerations when using pesticides to manage insects and mites on nursery and landscape plants. Although efficacy is obviously central for any pesticide use, there are often special problems with development of pesticide resistance among certain pests (e.g., twospotted spider mite). Conservation of natural enemies of insect and mite pests is critical to optimizing pest manageme...

Insect pest management relies mainly on neurotoxic insecticides, including neonicotinoids, leaving residues in the environment. There is now evidence that low doses of insecticides can have positive effects on pest insects by enhancing various life traits. Because pest insects often rely on sex pheromones for reproduction, and olfactory synaptic transmission is cholinergic, neonicotinoid residu...

a State Key Laboratory of Integrated Management of Pest Insects and Rodents, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China b State Key Laboratory for Infectious Disease Prevention and Control, National Institute for Communicable Disease Control and Prevention, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Beijing 102206, China Department of Entomology, Cornell Un...

Okro and Peppper were intercropped in a randomised complete block design with three replicates to assess the effect of this on the population of several insect pest of Okro. Five pests of Okro were recorded: Podagrica uniforma; Podagrica sjostedti; Oxycarenus hyalipennis; Cosmophila flava and Dysdercus superstitiosus. However, there were no significant difference in the population of these inse...

Bacteria of the genus Chryseobacterium have previously been identified as mutualists of plants and insects. Chryseobacterium strain CBo1 was cultured from the gut of the agricultural pest Bactrocera oleae and its whole genome sequenced. This genomic resource will aid investigations into the transition of microbes between plant and invertebrate hosts.

Wheat is one of the major cereal crops with annual global production over 600 MT from about 200 M hectares (FAO 2012). The cultivation of wheat started about 10,000 years ago as part of the Neolithic revolution which state a transition from hunting and gathering of food to settle agriculture. Earlier cultivated forms of wheat were diploid (einkorn) and tetraploid (emmer) with known initial orig...

Many insects show a greater attraction to multimodal cues, e.g. odour and colour combined, than to either cue alone. Despite the potential to apply the knowledge to improve control strategies, studies of multiple stimuli have not been undertaken for stored product pest insects. We tested orientation towards a food odour (crushed white maize) in combination with a colour cue (coloured paper with...

Insects are an important and probably the most challenging pest to control in agriculture, in particular when they feed on belowground parts of plants. The application of synthetic pesticides is problematic owing to side effects on the environment, concerns for public health and the rapid development of resistance. Entomopathogenic bacteria, notably Bacillus thuringiensis and Photorhabdus/Xenor...

Over the past decade RNA interference (RNAi) technology has emerged as a successful tool not only for functional genomics, but in planta expression of short interfering RNAs (siRNAs) that could offer great potential for insect pest management. The diet of insects feeding exclusively on phloem sieves contains water and sugars as main components, and the uptake of the liquid food greatly depends ...

Anabrus simplex is an economically significant crop pest in the western United States and is a model organism for studying the influence of sex role reversal on sperm allocation and utilization patterns and population genetics. We isolated seven polymorphic microsatellite loci in Anabrus simplex , and within population allele numbers ranged from 10 to 25. High polymorphism is not unusual for Or...