The Jasmine Moth Loves Olives Too...

After a long evasion from my blogger duties (quite an active summer, I confess...) here I am back to keep you, my dear persisent reader, updated on the last insect whose eating&mating activities exceeded damage tolerance level. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Jasmine Moth (Margaronia Unionalis, or Palpita unionalis, some scientific stuff here (in italian) and a short wiki here).

To our, and to a number of other olive growers disappointment,  the Jasmine Moth does not only like to feast on jasmine plants as its name may justly induce you to believe, but on olives too, and it's a gargantuan eater nonetheless. If left unchecked, it can eat all the young branch springs and damage, if not completely reverse, a year of growth.

How does he achieve such a feat you may ask? Well, this small moth lays eggs on the young, tender new branches like this one:

After a few days, a larvae develops from the deposited eggs and starts feeding on the said tender young leaves, until reaching the lenght of 7-8 mms whereupon it transforms itself into a moth and then it's the same process all over again.

In the meantime, what it does on the young olives looks like this:

or this

As I said, this kind of damage could hurt our olive growing plans for years to come, setting back entrance into production for years. Here is another picure
of a completely dessiccated apex:

Now, you may wonder, how can we avoid such damages? Basically, it's rigorous checking of the growths every 3-4 days from May to October, and when the nuber of larvaes exceed the 4-5 per hectare, it's time for some damage control. So, it's basically taking a two-three hours long walk every few days looking for symptoms like this :

As you can see, the moth larvae glued together the apex leaves in order not to be bothered whils eating. If you unglue the leaves, what you find inside usually looks like this:

Can you see the larvae? If not, sorry, but I forgot the macro lens at home that day :-)

So what do we do then? Researches did a good job by finding out that the larvae has a natural enemy in a bacteria called Bacillus thuringiensis (wiki knowledge again here and here), which gives digestive problems to our friend, but is completely harmless for other insects. So we spray it by hand on the trees  and most of our small green leave eating friends, well, get a big tummyache and leave the olive branches alone. The only downside is that it is active for a day or two, therefore it gives no resting time from my semi weekly strolls....

If the tempo cools down a bit, I promise to come back for some more soon!