A fruit mite: small red bugs on leaves (9 photos)

Have you seen red caviar on your trees? It's time to sound the alarm! It's not a salmon flying over your garden: it's a red fruit mite! If nothing is done, the microscopic pests will ruin the trees and destroy most of the harvest.





If you don't know whose caviar it is, it even looks appetizing...

The red fruit mite, or European red mite, is a spider mite. All members of this inglorious family are similar to each other: small - only 0.4 millimeters in length - red and hairy. And each of them is ready to shed liters of blood! The blood of your plants.



Count-Tick-Scull.

Fruit tick is a vegan version of a vampire. Instead of veins and capillaries, they are attracted by green veins filled with juices. Arthropods easily pierce the thin skin of plants with chelicerae and suck nutrients directly from the cells. And the ticks feast for the whole world - several hundred or even thousands of individuals gather on one leaf!





Small, fluffy, but not cute at all!

But it is difficult to notice a crowd of vegan vampires - a society of green bloodsuckers gathers secretly, on the back of the leaf. You will learn about their presence after the fact: from such guests the leaf quickly becomes covered with gray-brown spots, the processes of photosynthesis are disrupted in it. It withers and dies, and the ticks in a friendly company move to a new victim.



These tiny red dots are fruit mites! There are at least a couple dozen of them here. But it is almost impossible to notice them by accident!

The mite is not interested in fruits and berries. So why is it a fruit mite? The fact is that it is the harvest that suffers most from it. The main processes of the plant's life occur in the crown. The fewer healthy leaves, the weaker the tree itself becomes. All the resources that should go to the formation of the fruit, it spends on fighting parasites. As a result: during a mass attack of mites, the yield of apple trees, for example, drops to 65%!



Apple and pear trees are blooming... Oh, wait, they're not blooming at all, they're infested with fruit mites!

And the worst thing is that mites feel especially good on human property. That's because there's no healthy ecosystem here. What does that mean? Well, look, fruit mites have lived in the vast expanses of our vast country for centuries. But you won't find mass infestations in the forest - there are plenty of insects in the wild that are not averse to feasting on slow-moving and helpless arthropods. In the garden and vegetable garden, the system is completely different.



Overseas caviar, tick caviar.

We create an artificial little world where we ourselves maintain the balance. We add fertilizers, plant certain types of plants, treat the soil with various chemicals and burn all the bugs we don't like with napalm! So it turns out that a parasite gets into the garden - and begins to multiply exponentially, because there is no one to eat it.



The only thing the tick can scare its enemy with is a disheveled hairdo. In all other respects, it is absolutely helpless!

Under favorable conditions of a warm spring and a humid summer, the red fruit mite produces up to 10 generations per season! At the same time, one female can lay up to 90 eggs. Those same eggs from the beginning of the article. This is the only stage at which the parasites are safe for the garden. From the first seconds of life, the larvae begin to damage local plantings.



Most often, parasites leave eggs on the bark of trees. Clutches appear on the trunk especially often before the winter period. So you can prevent an attack of ticks in advance.

You can understand them: they have little time for everything - the life of a fruit tick lasts 20 days. During this period, parasites must have time to molt twice, find a mate, mate and reproduce. Only by the end of summer does the strategy change: the last living females lay "wintering" eggs, the processes of embryonic development in which are slowed down. Such eggs can easily survive frosts down to -40 ° C and continue to attack your green spaces in the spring.



I'll find a female. Any. Quickly. 6 hours, 54 minutes, 31 seconds left to live.

Of course, you can use chemicals to combat red fruit mites. Or you can... buy other mites! Some companies have started breeding and selling predatory mites on a regular basis. They don't touch plants, but hunt their fellow pests. And this option sounds much better, because in this case you restore the natural balance.