The eagerly awaited fruiting season of your cherry tree is just around the corner and then that: covered spots, rotting, half-ripe cherries and maggots in the flesh! This unsightly annoyance is usually caused by the cherry fruit fly or the cherry vinegar fly introduced from Asia.
Maggots in cherries usually come from fruit flies that specialize in cherries
Flies specialized in cherries
Cherries are not only popular with us humans. The red, sweet fruits are also valued in the animal world, for example in birds, raccoons and also the larvae of certain flies. Species that have more or less specialized on cherries when laying their eggs are:
- the cherry fruit fly and
- the cherry vinegar fly
cherry fruit fly
The cherry fruit fly allows its brood to grow up exclusively in cherries, such as sour cherries, honeysuckle or bird cherry. She lays her eggs on the cherries just before the fruit ripens, where the small, whitish larvae hatch after 5-12 days and eat themselves thick and round within about a month. The fruit begins to rot from being eaten and falls off. The maggots pupate in the soil and hatch as a finished fly next May.
cherry vinegar fly
This fly, which is particularly problematic for fruit growers, originally comes from Asia and has only been present in Germany since around 2011. It affects not only cherries, but also other soft fruit varieties. During the warm season, spotted drosophila can produce several generations. Unlike cherry fruit flies, cherry vinegar flies overwinter as adults.
countermeasures
In order to control cherry fruit flies and cherry vinegar flies, a number of preventive measures are recommended. It is best to combine individual methods, because of course none of them has a 100% success rate.
Hang up yellow tablets
Yellow tablets coated with glue and sometimes with attractants attract the flies and allow them to cling to them. However, hanging up such plaques in the tree serves at best to make the extent of any infestation visible.
cultural protection networks
Covering cherry trees with crop protection nets is also a proven and very reliable way of preventing flies from laying eggs in agriculture. The fine meshes of these nets cannot penetrate the fertilized females and consequently cannot lay eggs on the fruit.
floor fleece
From May until the end of the harvest season, you should cover the ground under the tree with a protective fleece. This effectively prevents the cherry fruit flies from hatching and laying new eggs.
Completely harvest and pick up
By harvesting all the fruit and also picking up all the fallen cherries from the ground, you can significantly curb the proliferation. Important: Do not compost spoiled fruit, but dig it deep into the ground or dispose of it in the organic waste, otherwise nothing will be done to prevent propagation!
Especially for cherry vinegar flies: vinegar traps
The best way to decimate the cherry vinegar flies, which are difficult to combat, is to use homemade vinegar traps: Simply fill the top of a perforated can or plastic bottle with one part water, one part vinegar and a dash of dish soap and hang it in the tree.