Success

Well, I think so.

The bugs shown in the first picture are from the tanglefoot stuff I put around borer damage on five fruit trees two weeks ago. About half of them are from stone fruit trees and the rest are from apple trees.

The second picture is some of the damage the borers did to my apple trees. The honey bee is gathering in the tanglefoot stuff to take back to its hive for winter repairs. They normally do this with the sticky sap (which they turn into propolis) that the tree forces out the borer holes but in this case it’s taking the tanglefoot. They don’t seem to take a lot, or to clean it off entirely from one area, so at this point I’m willing to donate it to them. They have enough problems in this world now anyway :-) If you zoom in you can see that the bee has put the stuff in its pollen baskets maybe we should rename them “grocery carts” :-). I am also extremely happy that the bees don’t get stuck in the tanglefoot like the Flies do. If the bees got stuck I think I would have to try to find another way to protect the trees.

I gathered as many stuck things as I could see from the tanglefoot application. What may not be obvious in the picture are the three cat tail seeds, the feather, and 4 smaller nats. Out of 14 bugs 10 were the largish type of fly. As nearly as I can tell these flies are the perfect size to make the damage that the trees had.

Any entomologists out there care to provide any additional information?

The hardest part in all of this was finding something that would disolve the tanglefoot material that they were stuck in. I tried isopropanol, acetone, vegetable oil, and a mixture of them. The oil worked, followed by acetone.

Been googling for the last hour and it seems as though the bugs are cambium flies genus Phytobia. Doesn’t seem to be a huge economic pest and they’re probably beating up my trees a little bit because the trees already had gopher damage on top of the dwarfing root stocks. Now that the trees are safer from gophers (notice I said safer instead of safe) :-) It’s likely that the natural predators will take over. I had a bunch of spiders last year and I hope they will come back.