Winter Moth


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Related to Winter Moth: gypsy moth
The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Winter Moth

 

(Operophthera bmmata), a moth of the family Geometridae. The female’s body is 8-10 mm long and brownish gray, with underdeveloped wings having two dark transverse stripes. The male’s wings are developed (wing-span, 20-25 mm) and are yellowish gray or brownish gray with dark wavy transverse lines. Winter moths are found in Europe, Asia (the Asian part of the USSR, Japan), and North America (Canada); in the USSR they are distributed predominantly in the forest and forest-steppe zones.

The winter moth damages leafy varieties of plants. The moths deposit eggs in the autumn on the upper part of the crown. In the spring the caterpillars gnaw the buds, leaves, flower buds, and flowers and form hollows in the gynoecia. They pupate in the soil at the beginning of summer. Methods of protection include treating trees with insecticides in the fall and putting rings of glue on the trunk to prevent the females from crawling up to the crown to deposit their eggs.

REFERENCE

Vasil’ev, V. P., and I. Z. Livshits. Vrediteliplodovykh kul’tur. Moscow, 1958.
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
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