Time: 11: 30 AM
The day was warm and sunny today. We performed our final pest surveillance today, the sky was partly cloudy with the temperature reaching 27° Celsius and relative humidity recorded at 48 %. The cauliflower plants have grown a lot, but the growths were not uniform. The weather over the week has been partly cloudy, marked by two light showers of rain and a steady increase in day temperature. As stated in the previous blog many fields below our sample field were cleared for new vegetable cultivation.
Our group decided to conduct a Blitz survey and record all the pests and insect predators encountered in the field. The major insect found were aphids and cabbage white butterfly larvae, about 56 aphid colonies were encountered and 88 ladybugs were spotted. Many aphids with wings were also observed. There were around 15 groups of cabbage white butterfly larvae. We noticed symptoms of red ant infestations as some plants were rapidly dying. About half a dozen grasshoppers were observed hopping from plant to plant. We saw few spiders too (Spiders were never observed in previous field visits). Harlequin bugs were found in few plants but not in high numbers. We also saw some diamond back-moths, like other bugs they were less in numbers. Although there were many pests, their combined damage can safely be summed up to be of a negligible amount. This can be attributed to the researcher’s hard work in keeping his field clean.
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