Fighting Moths With Pheromones Is Now Easier The new low-volume
spray technique developed by ARS entomologist Alan Knight
delivers active materials to a tree canopy in a stream and
reduces water use from 100 gallons per acre (for the old method,
air-blasting) to just 1.25 gallons. Rather than place pheromone-
emitting dispensers in trees by hand to disrupt codling moth
mating, apple and pear growers could soon be spraying the pest’s
chemical sex attractant instead, thanks to ARS research. For
decades, growers have released synthetic forms of the female
moth’s sex attractant, or pheromone, in orchards to confuse the
male moths and keep the insects from mating and spawning new
generations of destructive caterpillar offspring. Then, as
today, growers hang the pheromone dispensers from tree branches,
often as many as 200 to 400 devices per acre. It’s a costly,
labor-intensive affair, notes entomologist Alan L. Knight, with
ARS’s Yakima Agricultural Research Laboratory, at Wapato,
Washington. The relative ease of s