Abstract Grain insect pests impact adversely on the agrarian industry. Insects make a significant portion of crops to become unusable. During storage, lacking proper monitoring and control, different tend grow in grains. In laboratory conditions, grain cereal heaps are most often infested by weevils flour beetles. Since growing very rapidly, it is necessary immediately apply pest control action...

Aphids are a major concern in agricultural crops worldwide, and control by natural enemies is an essential component of the ecological intensification of agriculture. Although the complexity of agricultural landscapes is known to influence natural enemies of pests, few studies have measured the degree of pest control by different enemy guilds across gradients in landscape complexity. Here, we u...

One of the fundamental concepts of integrated pest management is that each pest species has a definable relationship in terms of damage to the plant or animal host that it attacks. This relationship is often referred to as the damage curve (Fig. 1), which is often determined relative to yield loss. This damage curve can take several forms, but was summarized by Higley and Peterson as having a t...

The hibiscus mealybug, Maconellicoccus hirsutus Green, was first reported in the Caribbean in 1994 in Grenada. This was the first record of the insect as a major pest in the New World. By the beginning of 2001, the pest had spread to over 25 territories from Guyana and Venezuela in the South to Bahamas in the North. The pest has also extended its distribution to Central America (Belize) and Nor...

We use discrete time models to represent the dynamics of two interacting populations, a “valuable” population and a “pest” population. We investigate optimal control in the form of decreasing the growth rate of the “pest” population with the goal of maximizing the “valuable” population while minimizing the cost of the control. We compare different types of growth functions for the “valuable” po...

Many existing pest control models, which control pests by releasing natural enemies, neglect the effect that natural enemies may get killed. From this point of view, we formulate a pest control model with stage structure for the pest with constant maturation time delay through-stage time delay and periodic releasing natural enemies and natural enemies killed at different fixed time and perform ...