The use of pesticides to produce fruit crops is essential to the economic success of farmers. Consumers have a high standard for acceptable fruit, and pesticides are key to the farmer's ability to produce marketable fruit. In the past 50 years, there has been a shift towards using safer active ingredients to protect both humans and the environment. The government continues to ban unsafe, broad-use pesticides, and label new chemistries with more specific active ingredient targets. If this trend towards more responsible pesticide usage continues, there will be a need for more direct targeting of the pesticides on the crops. The most common method of pesticide application is airblast spraying. This method has huge drawbacks. It has been shown that with airblast application, less than 0.1% of pesticides applied to crops reaches its target pest. Most of the pesticide is lost to drift, leaching, and degradation by the sun, and risks exposure to non-target populations. Trunk injection should be considered as an alternative delivery method for pesticides. It delivers the pesticide directly into the tree's system without losing pesticide to drift and is contained within the tree. Trunk injection has been effectively used to control foliar pests in apple trees and wood boring pests such as the emerald ash borer. One injection can provide multiple seasons of control. In the current two studies, we use trunk injection to apply insecticides and evaluate their efficacy at controlling two very different orchard pests, the pear psylla in pear and the black stem borer in apple. The objective of the first study is to compare the efficacy of abamectin and azadirachtin in the control of pear psylla in pear using two different application methods, airblast and trunk injection. Trunk injections of abamectin and azadirachtin were compared to airblast applications of equal labeled rates on 33-year-old Bartlett Pear trees (Pyrus communis L., var "Bartlett"). The abamectin and azadirachtin trunk injected treatments controlled pear psylla as well or better than the airblast applied treatments. Trunk injecting from the first season provided a moderate level of control into the second season, one year after the injections. The objective of the second study is to evaluate the efficacy of two insecticides, emamectin benzoate and azadirachtin, and injection timing fall and spring, on their ability to control BSB in apple trees with simulated topworking and ethanol injection as an attractant.
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