You cut a currant branch in spring or autumn and see that its entire core is black. Things are bad, there is a currant glassweed in the area - a secretive and almost invincible pest. It is difficult to fight glassworm on currants because it spends most of its life inside the shoots, where it cannot be reached with any drugs.
What to do now? Should you put up with the pest and not get enough harvest from year to year? You can, of course, resign yourself, or you can try to inflict significant damage on the enemy.
Before going on the attack, it would be nice to know the enemy by sight, right?
Sometimes the glass beetle is called a stem mite, although this insect has nothing to do with mites. The glasswort is a butterfly that looks like a small wasp. She has narrow wings with an orange border along the edges, black veins and a span of about 20-22 centimeters. The glass looks like this:
This butterfly especially often attacks black currants. But sometimes it occurs on both red and gooseberries.
Depending on the weather, this butterfly begins to lay eggs in May or June. She does this in small cracks in the bark or near the buds on young branches. After 10-15 days, offspring appear. The caterpillars climb inside the stem, live and feed there, gradually moving along the stem lower and lower to its very base. The middle of the stem turns black and looks like this when cut:
After the second winter, the caterpillar pupates, becomes a butterfly, lays eggs, and everything repeats again and again.
How to understand that currants are affected by glassware? If suddenly, after flowering, branches that seem healthy at first glance suddenly begin to wither and then dry up. Such branches must be immediately cut down to the soil and burned.
It is better to keep any pest at a distance from your site than to fight it later. Therefore, first of all, let's look at measures to prevent damage to currants by glassware.
Before purchasing seedlings or planting cuttings taken from a neighbor, carefully inspect them. All branches of the seedling should be healthy, and the cuttings should not have the slightest sign of a black core. Healthy planting material is not a panacea, of course. No one guarantees that in three or four years the young bush will not be attacked by glassweed. But we still have these three or four years. We still have time to take some preventative measures.
For example, let's plant several elderberry bushes on the plot or next to it. It does an excellent job of repelling glass beetles (and many other pests). And if there is a bird cherry growing nearby, we, on the contrary, will cut it down. The smell of bird cherry is very attractive for glass.
What else can we do? Plant plants with a pungent odor between currant bushes: tomatoes, calendula, nasturtium, garlic, onions, marigolds. The aromas of such “neighbors” are designed to confuse the butterfly. And if she doesn’t detect a currant bush by smell, then she won’t be able to lay eggs.
Let’s say it’s too late to carry out preventive measures: the glassware on the site lives and thrives. How will we fight it?
It is quite difficult to eradicate glassware forever. The most vulnerable are the newly hatched glassworm caterpillars, which have not yet had time to “go” inside the shoots, but how to catch them at this very moment? Almost impossible.
However, we will not sit idly by. We will do everything in our power to, if not destroy the pest, at least reduce its numbers to a minimum.
Throughout May and June, when the caterpillars enter the pupal stage (and for this, many of them leave their shelters inside the stems), from time to time we loosen the soil under the bushes, adding ash and tobacco dust to it.
Don’t forget to carry out inspections in spring, autumn and even summer if signs of damage suddenly appear on a branch. We cut off the annual branch “to a clean shoot,” that is, we cut off the part where the black center is visible. We cut off older branches to ground level, leaving no stumps. In the spring, it is recommended to prune currants twice: first, do standard sanitary-rejuvenating pruning, and after the buds open, when it is easy to distinguish “bad” stems from “good” ones, remove all branches with small or wilted leaves.
If the glass has occupied the entire bush, you can carry out radical pruning: cut off all the branches of the bush to the very base. Young healthy shoots will begin to grow from the roots, and our task will be reduced to preventing recurrent damage.
Timely pruning significantly reduces the number of butterflies and glass beetle larvae. But in order to reduce their number to an absolute minimum, you will have to resort to spraying. You can spray the bushes with both chemical and biologically active preparations against pests: Fitoverm (2 milliliters per liter of water), Lepidocid (20-30 grams per 10 liters of water), Akarin (2 milliliters per 1 liter of water), Bitoxibacillin (80-100 grams per 10 liters of water). It is advisable to spend a liter or one and a half of the resulting solution on each bush. The biggest challenge in spraying against glass beetle is choosing the right time. As we have already mentioned, the glass must be “caught” during the hatching period of the caterpillars, which are still on the surface of the branches. We begin spraying as soon as the first leaves bloom on the currants and repeat the procedure after 10-14 days.
Along with currants, it is also necessary to spray raspberry bushes; adult butterflies feed on them.
We wish you success and great harvests!
Today, a topic that is not obvious to novice gardeners is glassware on currants (how to get rid of it and how to prevent damage to the bushes). After all, currants and gooseberries are favorite delicacies not only for children and adults; often these berries attract the attention of various pests that can reduce the harvest, or even destroy it completely. And if you are thinking about the question “why do blackcurrant branches dry out,” then it’s time to get acquainted with the lover of berry crops - the glass butterfly, and choose methods to combat this annoying pest.
The insect got its name because of its glassy wings, practically devoid of scales. By the way, due to this feature, which is atypical for lepidopterans, the pest’s resemblance to a butterfly is minimal. They look more like wasps, right?
Body length does not exceed 1 cm, dark blue, shiny color. Three yellow lines are clearly visible on the abdomen (in females the stripes are wider than in males), the end of the abdomen is a tuft of dark blue hairs. The wingspan is approximately 20-23 mm.
Butterflies fly out after currants bloom (after about 2 weeks); they are especially active in warm, mostly sunny weather. The period of emergence from the pupae and the flight of the butterfly lasts for almost eight weeks; the glass cases stop flying just at the moment the berries ripen. One female lays no more than 60 eggs, one at a time. Places for laying are cracks on the branches, places near the buds.
The eggs of the insect are small, slightly oval in shape, and light brown in color. If you look at the egg under a magnifying glass, you can see a net-like texture on the surface. It takes 10 to 20 days for the egg to fully develop.
Closer to the hatching of the caterpillar, the egg changes color and a creamy tint appears. An adult caterpillar is approximately 20–25 mm in size, the body is white, the head is black; two weeks after emergence, the caterpillar begins to bite through the buds and various damage into the branches, leaving behind black passages with excrement. That is why the green berries of black currants dry out and the branches wither - the caterpillars make their moves and poison the plant. The passages can reach 50 cm in length; the caterpillars remain in these same passages for the winter.
With the onset of spring, some of the caterpillars pupate, they become butterflies, the other part continues to feed, gnaws passages to the base of branches and bushes, until autumn, then remains for another winter. It turns out that caterpillars of different ages overwinter in different places, young ones in one-year-old twigs, and adults in woody stems. At the beginning of the third year of insect development, the caterpillars gnaw their way to the exit and pupate, then a butterfly flies out of the pupa.
All varieties of currants are most susceptible to insect attack; gooseberries are less affected. The pest also visits raspberries. Old plantings of berry bushes, if not monitored, can be completely damaged, and the number of pest individuals is greater at the edges, and there are much fewer glass cases in the middle of the area.
In the first year, it is almost impossible to distinguish healthy branches from damaged ones; they differ only in the smaller leaves and berries. Damaged branches begin to wither and dry towards the end of flowering. It is at this time that older caterpillars feed, but damage can only be noticed in the spring of next year - these branches will dry out.
When you remove dry branches, black passages with caterpillar excrement will be visible inside, sometimes you can even find the caterpillar itself in a light pink hue.
If, when cutting the stem, a light passage was found, with brown sawdust and excrement, these are not traces of glassweed, but of the narrow-bodied currant borer.
In the places where the butterflies emerged, the skins of the pupae remain, and over time they are carried away by the wind. It happens that branches with unripe berries and eaten away cores dry out and break off on their own.
Therefore, in the fall, when the currant begins to shed its leaves, you need to inspect the bush, and it is better to cut out those branches that have grown less than 15 cm. Surely a glass larva has settled in them and a black core has already appeared in them.
The pest can affect a significant part of currant plantings, especially under stable warm weather conditions. The currant branches gradually wither and dry out. Damage from caterpillars significantly reduces the berry yield, and every year there are fewer of them.
Getting rid of glassworms on currants is not an easy task; there are many difficulties: the dispersal period is extended, the initial stages of damage to the branches are not particularly noticeable, and individuals of the same generation of different ages have been identified.
Preparations based on nematodes are suitable for combating currant glass. Antonem-F and Nemabact, they should be used to treat plant cuttings right before planting in the ground. The cuttings should be placed in a container with sand and nematodes for three days. The temperature should be +25°, and the sand should be wet. During the period of bud break, it will not be superfluous to spray currant bushes with Anthonem -F at the rate of 200 ml of the drug per bush.
Be careful before using a biological product! Be sure to read the instructions.
Do not plant currants or gooseberries next to bird cherry - they attract insects.
In order not to miss the moment of the beginning of summer of butterflies, in the upper part of the bushes you can place a small container with a mixture of fermented currant jam and plain water (1:1). 1 or 2 containers per bush. You can also use light traps. But such baits are not for everyone - we, for example, don’t want to lure the neighbor’s butterflies as well. But on berry plantations such measures are completely justified.
The process of protection from glassware complicates the development and lifestyle of the insect. However, considerable expenditure of effort and time can be avoided if you do not forget about prevention - correct and timely pruning will rid the currant bushes of many pests, and strong odors will confuse the female insects, and they will not want to leave their offspring in an aggressive environment.
In general, we looked at one of the reasons why blackcurrant branches dry out, and figured out how to get rid of glass from currants in the safest way. But there can be many reasons for drying out of branches, so stay with us and you will find out what diseases can cause drying out of currant shoots.
If in the spring the branches of seemingly healthy currant or gooseberry bushes suddenly begin to wither and dry out, if a black core is visible on the cut of a dead shoot, it means that you have to fight glassworm on currants. Take the threat seriously; this pest is capable of completely destroying berry crops.
Currant glass butterfly
An adult insect is a small dark blue, almost black butterfly with characteristic light stripes on the abdomen and transparent, glass-like wings with a span of 2.2-2.5 cm. Glass butterflies begin to appear in the spring about two weeks after the beginning of currant flowering. The period during which eggs are laid lasts up to 8 weeks. The female leaves 50-60 oblong light brown eggs in places of damage on branches or in soft tissues near the buds.
Glassworm larvae pose an immediate danger to plants. These are white or cream-colored caterpillars with a black head up to 2.5 cm long. They emerge from eggs 10-12 days after laying and begin to penetrate young shoots, feeding on their core. Before the first wintering, the individual manages to make a 15-20 cm long passage inside the new growth. The next year, the length of the damage reaches 50 cm, and the adult branch dries out completely.
In the spring, at the end of the second year of life, the caterpillar comes to the surface near the soil, pupates and gives birth to a new butterfly. Thus, the insect's life cycle is two years. At the same time, the currant bush is occupied by “old” larvae of the pest, living in woody branches, and “young”, inhabiting new growth. Each individual at this stage of development overwinters twice, so their numbers are growing at an alarming rate, requiring immediate control measures.
Glass larva inside a currant shoot
Glass beetle larvae feed on the core of currant, gooseberry or yoshta branches, moving along them from top to bottom. Damage can be suspected by the wilting of the current year's growth, unnaturally small leaves, a small number of flower stalks, and poor berry set. A cut of the shoot reveals a characteristic blackening of the core with a hole in the middle.
In autumn, affected branches can be recognized by small growth, less than 15 cm. Experienced gardeners immediately check such shoots by cutting off the top. If the core has turned black, continue pruning to a healthy area, and treat the cut with garden varnish.
In the second year after the introduction of the larvae, the branches of the crop dry out, since by this moment the pest descends along them to the very ground, completely eating away from the inside.
IMPORTANT! It is necessary to distinguish between the damage left by the currant glass beetle and the narrow-bodied borer. In the second case, a hole with light edges filled with secretions and rot is visible on the cut of the shoot.
Bioactive preparations to combat glassworm are based on the use of toxins from various fungal cultures, which effectively affect the digestive system of insects. At the same time, not only currants, gooseberries, and yoshta require treatment with biological products, but also planting raspberries; During the summer, adults feed on its pollen.
Currant glass has good sensitivity to the following organic-based drugs:
IMPORTANT! Treatment with biological products begins when the first leaves bloom and is stopped at least 30 days before harvest. During use, you must strictly adhere to the instructions and take personal protection measures.
The use of biological products alone against pest caterpillars is not enough, so you should know how to deal with glassware on currants using pesticides. Several industrial chemical compounds have proven themselves to be effective:
| Table for preparing solutions for processing currants | ||||
| A drug | Compound | Quantity of drug | Amount of water in liters | How to process |
| Karbofos | Insectoacaricide based on organophosphorus compounds. Toxic to bees, do not treat during flowering. Only freshly prepared solution is used. | 60 g | 8 | For 1 bush use 1.5 liters of working solution. The maximum number of treatments is 2 with an interval of 2 weeks, the last one 30 days before harvest; |
| Trichlorometaphos-3 | Contact drug based on organophosphorus substances. Poses a danger to bees. | 20 g | 10 | Sprayed, like karbofos, before flowering begins. Irrigation of the soil under berry crops contributes to the death of all larvae and pupae on its surface. |
| Fufanon | Organophosphorus insecticide with a broad spectrum of action. Dangerous for bees. | 10 ml | 10 | Spraying should be carried out no more than 2 times, the last one 20 days before the harvest ripens. Working mixture consumption 1.5 l per plant |
| Kemifos | Analogue of Karbofos. | 10 ml | 10 | Apply at the beginning of the growing season, use only freshly prepared mixture. Consumption 1-1.5 liters per plant. |
| Iskra M | Contact insectoacaricide based on malathion with a wide spectrum and short period of action. Low toxic. | 10 ml | 10 | To spray 1 plant, 1-1.5 liters are required |
| Kinmiks | Insecticide of contact-intestinal action based on betacypermethrin. Environmentally friendly. | 2.5 ml | 10 | Use only fresh solution. The prepared product is sprayed evenly on the plant from all sides. Consumption 1-1.5 liters per culture. |
ATTENTION! Chemicals are dangerous to bees and fish. It is prohibited to use during flowering and to pour solutions into water bodies. Strict adherence to the manufacturer's instructions is necessary, and the use of protective equipment is mandatory.
Over the entire period of cultivating your favorite berry bushes, a lot of popular advice has been accumulated to help get rid of butterflies on currants:
IMPORTANT! Avoid the proximity of bird cherry; its aroma is very attractive to this garden pest.
Due to the difficulty of dealing with glassberry, prevention of infection of plantings of various types of currants and gooseberries is of particular importance:
If you persistently follow preventive measures, regularly treat currants and gooseberries with special preparations, and use traditional methods of combating glass currants, you will be able to, if not defeat, significantly reduce its number in your garden.
Currants have quite a lot of pests. If in the spring you begin to notice that branches on healthy bushes suddenly wither and dry out, and a black core is visible on sections of dead shoots, then you are dealing with glassware on currants. Find out what the pest looks like, as well as what control methods and preventive measures to apply.
The currant glasswing is a butterfly, somewhat similar in appearance to a wasp, with narrow transparent wings with a span of up to 2.3 cm, an orange stripe runs along the lower edge of the upper pair, and a dark gray stripe along the edge of the lower ones. The butterfly has an oblong bluish-black body with 3 (in the male, 4) thin yellow transverse stripes. The adult glasswort feeds on dew and flower nectar.
From the end of spring until the first half of July, 100-1800 pieces of glass are laid. yellowish eggs in cracks in the bark of stems. After 9-15 days, white larvae with a brownish-brown head emerge from them. They feed on the tissues of the stem, gradually penetrating into the core. The larvae, 2 cm in length, descend downwards; the stroke length can be 20 cm or more. They eat away at the core of the stem, causing the plant to wilt.
The life cycle of glass butterflies is 1 year (partly biennial), most of this period (10-11 months) occurs in the larval stage. The larvae overwinter inside the shoots, the next spring they break through the bark and come out, pupate in May-early June, and after 1 month they turn into butterflies. The new generation of insects remains active for 1.5 months.
Since the insect larvae are located inside the stem, in its core, it is difficult to notice them. The presence of a pest can only be determined by external signs on the bush, when the damage has already been done:
If you break the damaged shoot, which, by the way, can be done easily, since the tissues lose their strength, then the black core will be clearly visible. This is a characteristic feature by which currant glass is identified.
The leaves of the bushes on which this pest has settled wither and begin to dry out, nutrition is disrupted, including the ovaries, the fruits develop poorly, become smaller, and taste more sour. Eventually, the plant may die.
To get rid of glassware on currants, they use agrochemicals, folk remedies, or fight it using some agrotechnical methods.
The most advantageous time to deal with glass pupae on currants is the pupation stage, because the pupae move out and become vulnerable. In May and June, the soil is loosened, while adding ash, mustard powder, hot pepper, and dry wormwood grass to the soil.
If a pest is detected, you need to cut off the damaged parts of the shoots to healthy areas; if the bush is severely affected, cut all the shoots to the root. An adult, still fairly young plant will produce new, green shoots that will be free of pests.
To combat glassware on currants, you can use various insecticides:
Agrochemicals are often dangerous for bees, therefore, during the flowering period of currants, you need to refrain from using it and find other control measures, for example, using folk remedies that are completely harmless to these insects, humans, animals, birds, and soil.
To combat glassworm, infusions of tobacco, orange, mint, garlic, pine needles, lemon, tansy, mustard, pepper, elderberry, and wormwood are used. Currants are sprayed during the intense summer of butterflies.
Some recipes:
Calendula, garlic and onions, marigolds, and tomatoes are planted next to the bushes—glassworts do not like the smell of these plants. To destroy butterflies, install pheromone traps or containers with fermented currant jam diluted 1 to 1 with water.
Insects - enemies of glass beetles - riders are attracted to the site, for which dill is sown next to the currants. To enhance the effect, it is necessary to apply a full range of measures simultaneously, and not just any one method of struggle.
In order not to lose the harvest or the plants themselves, you need to take measures that will limit the spread and reproduction of the pest:
These agricultural practices are carried out to prevent the appearance of glass on black currants and its other varieties.
Glassworm on currants: control and prevention You cut a branch on a currant in the spring or autumn and see that its entire core is black. Things are bad, there is a currant glassweed in the area - a secretive and practically invincible pest. It is difficult to fight glassworm on currants because it spends most of its life inside the shoots, where it cannot be reached with any drugs. What to do now? Should you put up with the pest and not get enough harvest from year to year? You can, of course, resign yourself, or you can try to inflict significant damage on the enemy. Before going on the attack, it would be nice to know the enemy by sight, right? What does a glass bug look like on a currant? Sometimes a glass bug is called a stem mite, although this insect has nothing to do with mites. The glasswort is a butterfly that looks like a small wasp. She has narrow wings with an orange border along the edges, black veins and a span of about 20-22 centimeters. This is what the glass looks like: This butterfly especially often attacks black currants. But sometimes it occurs on both red and gooseberries. Depending on the weather, this butterfly begins to lay eggs in May or June. She does this in small cracks in the bark or near the buds on young branches. After 10-15 days, offspring appear. The caterpillars climb inside the stem, live and feed there, gradually moving along the stem lower and lower to its very base. The middle of the stem turns black and looks like this when cut: After the second winter, the caterpillar pupates, becomes a butterfly, lays eggs, and everything repeats again and again. How to understand that currants are affected by glassware? If suddenly, after flowering, branches that seem healthy at first glance suddenly begin to wither and then dry up. Such branches must be immediately cut down to the soil and burned. Prevention of the appearance of currant glass It is better to keep any pest at a distance from your site than to fight it later. Therefore, first of all, let's look at measures to prevent damage to currants by glassware. Before purchasing seedlings or planting cuttings taken from a neighbor, carefully inspect them. All branches of the seedling should be healthy, and the cuttings should not have the slightest sign of a black core. Healthy planting material is not a panacea, of course. No one guarantees that in three or four years the young bush will not be attacked by glassweed. But we still have these three or four years. We still have time to take some preventative measures. For example, let's plant several elderberry bushes on the plot or next to it. It does an excellent job of repelling glass beetles (and many other pests). And if there is a bird cherry growing nearby, we, on the contrary, will cut it down. The smell of bird cherry is very attractive for glass. What else can we do? Plant plants with a pungent odor between currant bushes: tomatoes, calendula, nasturtium, garlic, onions, marigolds. The aromas of such “neighbors” are designed to confuse the butterfly. And if she doesn’t detect a currant bush by smell, then she won’t be able to lay eggs. Fighting glassworm on currants Let's say it's too late to carry out prevention: glassberry lives and thrives on the site. How will we fight it? It is quite difficult to eradicate glassware forever. The most vulnerable are the newly hatched glassworm caterpillars, which have not yet had time to “go” inside the shoots, but how to catch them at this very moment? Almost impossible. However, we will not sit idly by. We will do everything in our power to, if not destroy the pest, at least reduce its numbers to a minimum. Throughout May and June, when the caterpillars enter the pupal stage (and for this, many of them leave their shelters inside the stems), from time to time we loosen the soil under the bushes, adding ash and tobacco dust to it. Don’t forget to prune currants in spring, autumn and even summer if signs of damage suddenly appear on the branch. We cut off the annual branch “to a clean shoot,” that is, we cut off the part where the black center is visible. We cut off older branches to ground level, leaving no stumps. In the spring, it is recommended to prune currants twice: first, do standard sanitary-rejuvenating pruning, and after the buds open, when it is easy to distinguish “bad” stems from “good” ones, remove all branches with small or wilted leaves. If the glass has occupied the entire bush, you can carry out radical pruning: cut off all the branches of the bush to the very base. Young healthy shoots will begin to grow from the roots, and our task will be reduced to preventing recurrent damage. Timely pruning significantly reduces the number of butterflies and glass beetle larvae. But in order to reduce their number to an absolute minimum, you will have to resort to spraying. You can spray the bushes with both chemical and biologically active preparations against pests: Fitoverm (2 milliliters per liter of water), Lepidocid (20-30 grams per 10 liters of water), Akarin (2 milliliters per 1 liter of water), Bitoxibacillin (80-100 grams per 10 liters of water). It is advisable to spend a liter or one and a half of the resulting solution on each bush. The biggest challenge in spraying against glass beetle is choosing the right time. As we have already mentioned, the glass beetle must be “caught” during the hatching period of the caterpillars, which are still on the surface of the branches. We begin spraying as soon as the first leaves bloom on the currants and repeat the procedure after 10-14 days. Along with currants, it is also necessary to spray raspberry bushes; adult butterflies feed on them. We wish you success and great harvests!
