If you are dealing with vine mealybug in your vineyard, you are not alone. Kent Daane, Cooperative Extension Specialist at the University of California Berkley studies different types of mealybug populations across the globe.

Kent covers organic and conventional strategies, ways to increase the presence of generalist and specialist natural predators, and the importance of establishing refugia for beneficials.

His latest work focuses on area-wide management tactics. Looking to the European Grapevine Moth eradication program as an example, Kent sees an opportunity to decrease vine mealybug populations through neighborhood driven monitoring, trapping, coordinated sprays, and mating disruption.

Resources:        

• 119: Vine Mealybug 101: Species Identification, Lifecycle, and Scouting to Create an IPM Program
• 130: The Biological Control of Vine Mealybug Using Mealybug Destroyers and Anagyrus Wasps
• Biology and management of mealybugs in vineyards
• Ecology and management of grapevine leafroll disease
• Impacts of Argentine ants on mealybugs and their natural enemies in California’s coastal vineyards
• Insecticides for a mealybug and a carpenter moth on vine trunks, 2023
• In-season drip and foliar insecticides for a mealybug in grapes, 2023
• In-Season Drip and Foliar Insecticides for a Mealybug in Grapes, 2021
• Kent Daane
• Mealybug transmission of grapevine leafroll viruses: an analysis of virus–vector specificity
• Sustainable Control tools for Vine Mealybug
• UCCE Napa Viticulture Extension Leaf Hopper site
• Vineyard managers and researchers seek sustainable solutions for mealybugs, a changing pest complex

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Transcript

[00:00:00 ] Craig Macmillan: Welcome to Sustainable Wine Growing with Vineyard Team. Our guest today is Kent Daane. He is a Cooperative Extension Specialist with the University of California, Berkeley, and he works primarily out of the Kearney Agricultural Research and Extension Center. And today we're going to talk about a number of topics.

Thanks for being on the podcast, Kent.

[00:00:17 ] Kent Daane: Craig, thanks. I'm happy to be here.

[00:00:20 ] Craig Macmillan: Let's dive in on one pest that everybody's interested in, continuing to be interested in, and you may have some new insights or newer insights on this. Let's start with mealybug management. Kind of what's the state of the art in that topic right now?

[00:00:33 ] Kent Daane: Yeah, that's been the number one question I've been getting for many, many years now. It is an invasive pest. We know it came in, probably being brought in by a grower down in Coachella Valley. It has since spread into the San Joaquin Valley, Central Coast area where you are, Napa Sonoma, and it's been found now in Oregon.

Just like Napa, Oregon has attempted an eradication program. And probably just like Napa, most likely it's not going to work. It's a very, very difficult insect to kill 100%. I mean, I can come up with all kinds of different programs, soft programs, hard programs, expensive programs, inexpensive programs, where I can suppress that insect pest. It's very difficult to remove it from a vineyard. And that becomes important when you think about the kinds of damage we're worried about in Central Coast wine grapes.

Pretty much anywhere where they're looking at grape quality. But especially in the cooler regions. So, this insect, this mealybug, is one of many mealybug species. that is a vector of grape leaf roll associated viruses. And this is the primary reason it grows to such high pest status. So for the most part, the growers can knock its levels down far enough that it's not in the grape clusters or it's rarely found in the grape clusters. That's more of an issue for table grape growers. It's a cosmetic pest. When you look at some of the Regions in the San Joaquin Valley where they're growing a lot of table grapes Kern, Tulare, Kings, Fresno, counties, there's enough heat accumulation and these grapes are harvested early enough in the season that they can still build up their Brix. They can still get a very good grape to market. Even when there's some vinely bug on the vine, they just don't tend to be as impacted by this leaf roll pathogen as our wine grapes.

When you get into regions like San Luis Obispo, Napa, Monterey, Oregon, where they really are trying to hold those grapes on the vine for a longer period of time, trying to build up the bricks levels. That's where this. pathogen causes so much damage.

[00:03:06 ] Craig Macmillan: most of our growers are already going to be familiar with this, but what kind of damage does the vine mealybug cause? It's so, so terrible.

[00:03:12 ] Kent Daane: So the vine mealybug, besides being a vector of this pathogen, is also a direct pest of the grapevine. It can feed on the roots, on the trunk, on the leaves, and in the fruit. When this first hit California, we were working on it primarily as a San Joaquin Valley pest. growers that were putting on, you know, the products of the day dimethylate, lanate. If they were missing , the, target window where that pest was exposed, we would see thousands and thousands of mealybugs, not just per vine, but sometimes a thousand millibugs per leaf. It was causing defoliation. It was causing the berries to raisin on the vine. In South Africa, populations were getting so heavy. It was killing the vines themselves.

How many people out there 20,