Fall. What a wonderful time of year! High school football on Friday, LSU football on Saturday, deer, duck, dove, rabbit and squirrel seasons begin, and fresh, local citrus will start ripening. Satsumas’ rinds will begin to turn pale green and then yellow in the next few weeks. This is a sure sign of maturity and the ensuing harvest.
As satsumas begin to mature, homeowners and commercial producers need to begin scouting satsuma trees for a late-season insect that has the potential to ruin fruit. The leaf-footed bug or pue-nez, pierces the rind of the satsuma fruit and injects yeast into single or multiple slices of the fruit. The yeast will cause the slice(s) of fruit to dry up, and the fruit becomes unpalatable. Excessive piercing from the leaf-footed bug can also cause fruit to drop from the tree.
Complete control of the leaf-footed bug can prove to be nearly impossible, but suppression can be achieved with a couple of different insecticides. First things first, you need to confirm that you have the leaf-footed bugs in your tree(s); do not just spray and pray that the insecticide you have chosen will prevent the insect. Once you have confirmed the pest problem, noncommercial citrus producers can purchase one of the following insecticides to suppress the insect: Bayer Advance PowerForce® Multi-Insect Killer Concentrate or Malathion 57EC. Bayer Advance products can be purchased at Lowes, Wal-mart, etc. The active ingredient in Bayer Advance PowerForce® Multi-Insect Killer Concentrate is cyfuthrin; this is the same active ingredient in Baythoid, which is used by commercial producers to control many insects. This product also is labeled to be used in vegetable gardens as well as on lawns to control soil insects.