Bread flea - a small pest of large bread

A bread flea is a very common beetle in nature. It is able to feed on various cereals, tolerates harsh winters and is able to adapt well to environmental changes.

A small bug, which you can carefully examine only using magnifying devices, is outwardly even beautiful in some ways, appreciate the bread flea in the photo below.

Biological portrait

Classification

According to the place in the classification of animals, bread fleas belong to the order of the Coleoptera, or Beetles, the family of leaf beetles, the genus Chaetocnema.

A close relative of the bread flea is another pest of cereal crops - stem flea. She is the cousin of our heroine, and belongs to the genus Phyllotreta. As the name implies, the stem flea mainly damages the stems of plants, while the bread flea specializes in leaves.

Description

A bread flea is small in size, up to two millimeters long and eight tenths of a millimeter wide, a bug of black color with two longitudinal yellow stripes. For this quality, the insect is often called a striped bread flea.

Sexual dimorphism in these insects is expressed implicitly, but nevertheless, certain differences in representatives of different sexes can be noticed. This mainly concerns the structure of the genital organs.

Our help! Sexual dimorphism refers to the apparent external differences between males and females.

Spread

The distribution range of the striped bread flea is quite extensive. It covers almost the whole of Europe, North Africa, Central and East Asia. In the Russian Federation, a bug can be found throughout the territory where grain crops are cultivated: from Kaliningrad to Nakhodka.

In nature, bugs settle in meadows, fields, and other places rich in grain and wild-growing cereal plants.

Forage crops

Cereals, mainly spring crops, damage cereal crops. Most often, they damage spring wheat and barley, but beetles do not really like oats.

In addition to these crops, striped bread fleas feed on such plants:

• corn;
• rye;
• millet;
• Chumiza
• ryegrasses;
• wild cereal plants: wheat grass, fescue, bluegrass.

In some years, minor damage to the striped bread flea of ​​cruciferous crops, sugar beets and anise is noted.

It is interesting! Unlike most pests, in a striped striped flea, the larvae do the most damage to plants, but adults.

Beetles eat around the upper part of the leaf blade, thus depriving the plant of a large proportion of chlorophyll.

Lifestyle

Adult beetles in autumn fall over winter in roadside ditches, in forest belts, ravines and beams not far from sowing fields. There, under a layer of foliage, they survive the coldest time of the year.

When the spring sun warms the air to 7-11 degrees Celsius, striped bread fleas fly over to meadows with wild cereal plants and fields sown with winter crops, then, after spring shoots, to spring crops, where the freshest and most tender leaves appear.

At a temperature of 17-20 degrees, the beetles begin to mate.After that, the females lay in the ground to a depth of 1-3 centimeters small, half a millimeter long, pale yellow testicles.

Soon, depending on weather conditions, larvae emerge from the eggs, which practically do no harm to quarantine plants. They feed on small roots of cereals and weeds. Here, in the upper layer of soil, larvae pupate. In appearance, the larvae resemble a small, 3.5 millimeter long, yellowish caterpillar with three pairs of legs and the last segment of the body bent up.

In the second half of summer, adult striped bread fleas appear from the pupae, which subsequently go away in the winter, after having previously visited the seedlings of winter crops.

In just one season, the striped bread flea gives one generation of its complete breeding cycle.

Malware

The harmfulness of the striped bread flea is the damage of leaf parenchyma by adult insects. Bugs begin to eat from the upper end of the leaf, gradually moving down the leaf plate.

Our help! Biologists call parenchyma soft, plant-rich tissue cells. This creates a supply of moisture and nutrients.

Thus, the violation of the integrity of parechima leads to a decrease in the properties of the leaf plate by the use of photosynthesis processes, in turn, this leads to a general weakening of the plant. Sick cereals do not give that return, which was originally laid down in the yield of the variety, which will affect the financial component of the agricultural process.

In particular, agricultural producers need to monitor the spread of striped bread fleas in warm, dry spring. This climate is most favorable for the development of beetles.

The difficulty with fighting bugs is also that they are wonderful flyers, and they can easily fly from one field to another if food in one place seems to them more tender and sweeter than in another.

Pest Control

Regarding the fight against the striped bread flea, two types of work are distinguished:

• agrotechnical;
• chemical.

The first, agrotechnical measures, are aimed at reducing the attractiveness and preventing the spread of pests. They include such events:

1. Holding the spring sowing period as early as possible. The time run will allow the seedlings to become a little coarser, which will reduce their attractiveness as a food item for a bread flea.
2. Weed control around crop squares. This is especially important when destroying wild-growing cereal plants.
3. The application of mineral fertilizers will destroy fleas along with soil organisms and larvae.
4. Even sowing to the optimum depth will allow plants to grow faster, ahead of the time for insect generation.
5. The cultivation of such varieties of cereals, in particular wheat, which have long vaginal leaves.

Chemical methods of control include the treatment of cultivated areas with insecticides of various directions:

• organophosphorus compounds;
• pyrethroids;
• neonicotinoids.

Such work is recommended to be carried out in the presence of 30-50 bugs per square meter of field during visual inspection.

Unfortunately, we could not find the video about the bread flea. Instead, we offer you material about another cereal pest - the beetle Kuzka, whose mother Nikita Khrushchev promised to show the Americans in his famous speech.