Nearly all the apples are disfigured and almost all have brown dirt-looking mounds where something entered. I've now seen two of what look to be adult apple maggot flies on the apples. Also, very many apples are on the ground already, far before being ripe.

Could someone please help me identify what is/are the culprit or culprits? If you have suggestions to take care of them as well I'd appreciate it. I'm trying not to use any harmful chemicals if possible as we'd like to eat any good apples we may be able to salvage. If I have to treat it with something nasty and wait until next year, so be it.

Finally, is there something I should do next year to treat it early on so I don't have these issues? I've read dormant oils and pheromone traps may be in order. Is that the case? I know of at least one other tree on my block that looks the same and it won't be treated at all, so I should probably protect mine.

Thank you.

BT would work on the tent; spinosad may work on both.

No point in preventive sprays as this sort of thing happens only occasionally. Damage is minor unless it's a very young tree. In the latter case, the tree would be small enough that you would be able to disrupt the tents or sweep them out.

Consider this year a washout, salvage what fruit you can, and next year be vigilant about the beginnings of tent caterpillars and fruit pests. Tents are often pruned out of trees if that would be a small percentage of the whole plant and discarded or even burned. You have to get rid of those caterpillars before they become egg-laying adult moths. Next year earlier applications of the sprays mentioned above will help.

I'm not an expert about the fruit pest, you have to discourage the adult fly before it penetrates the fruit, then it is too late.

In the humid regions an organic approach requires 3 or 4 applications of Surround just to start things off, but to begin to offer specific advice it is important to know where the trees are as specifically as possible.

The leaf destroying pest is called fall web worm and the advice for that was fine. Coddling moth is what got into the seed cavity and destroyed the usefulness of the apple but the bumps may be from plum curculio. You can look up all these pests to get confirmation.

It is relatively easy to produce fruit without the help of modern synthetic chemistry in regions where there's not much rain during the growing season but it is a lot easier in wetter regions to use these tools.