For instance, if I choose earlier fruiting raspberries (Prelude) and concentrate my efforts on the Spring crop would they be less effected by SWD than the fall crop might? I understand the cold drastically knocks down the population so there aren't many in the early Spring. Similarly I was thinking of Sunshine Blue for blueberries, but now I'm wondering if an early fruiting variety would be best. And for Strawberries, would June bearing make more sense than feeding the SWD population all summer long with everbearing? Of course I might get lucky and not have them find me, but I understand they are getting worse so it might make sense to take them into account when selecting plants.

I know I can reduce the plague by picking any ripe fruit and getting rid of anything that drops, but if I understand it correctly the little buggers don't even wait for the fruit to be ripe.

Thoughts?

I'll probably put in a couple of Anne and Polka Raspberry plants and hope they don't find me right away, but I'll put most of my effort into the Prelude and Polana. I'm hoping the Sunshine Blue may still be okay if they're mostly done by early July, but I'll definitely give up on the everbearing strawberries and just go with the Junes.

It does sort of make me wonder about adding Romeo Cherries to the Carmine Jewels I just planted. I wonder if they would be too late?

It is sort of sad, but probably better than being disappointed later if all my effort just becomes fly food.

And here in Virginia and some other places, they are now also finding African Fig Fly, which is another type of drosophila. That wasn't what I saw on the Celeste fig, but they appear to be another potential menace in the making.

They've hit me in early August for the last two years, so the 2nd half of Triple Crown is badly affected, along with all the primocane raspberries. None of the floricane raspberries have seen any damage. Even the late season Royalty (floricane purple raspberry) was unscathed.

So, this winter, I'm removing a lot of my remaining primocanes and replacing them with floricane raspberries. I'll be removing all the Caroline and Autumn Britten raspberries and most of the Prime Jan raspberries. I'm keeping most of the Prelude, even though it has a sizable fall crop which gets infested. I'm also keeping Anne (yellow), my best tasting variety, which seems less hard hit than the others.

In their place, I'm planning to plant Lauren (early season) and Taylor (late season). From Nourse's website, it looks like Taylor will have about the same season as Royalty. Hopefully it will have more flavor.

SWD are so small and numerous, I think it would be tough to keep them out with netting unless you had a greenhouse. After watching them this year, I wonder if someone were to develop sticky fly paper treated with an attractant, that you might be able to reduce them considerably with something like that if placed in reasonable numbers around your plantings.

But the bad news is that I read about SWD too, and the berries were infested from the first we picked in late Aug until mid Oct. Probably I wouldn't have noticed the little worms, or I would have thought they were just an overripe berry or two and discarded the ones with obvious worms. But when you soak the berries and look closely a lot of worms come out. We still ate them but I didn't want to give any away to friends.

I've been thinking about the bug zapper idea as a way to deal with other pests. For instance, if we can figure out what PC is attracted to and put a few around the orchard in May, then maybe we could eliminate/reduce the need to spray...

If you put ripe (or overripe) berries in during august to catch SWD, you may zap some yellow jackets as a side benefit.