The Dreaded Palm Weevil Strikes Again

After seeing others hundreds of examples and palm trees locally suffer, it was only a matter of time before I became infected, yep, I've caught the dreaded palm weevil.

Ten years ago there was none or very little palm weevil along the Iberian Peninsula, now due to trees being imported from the tropics in their thousands, it was inevitable that some of those trees were already infected and so the palm weevil was  introduced and within a matter of weeks can turn a once healthy palm from the one on the left to the one on thew right.

One of the palm leaves on my tree was hanging off and looking distinctly brown. so I removed it. I thought that it was due to the wind which has been so strong and had broken it off.
However, the gardener, saw the leaf and said that it had been chewed by the weevil and asked which tree it had come from. Once we arrived at the tree, he took a look, put his head next to the pineapple trunk and said, "sim, it is full of them"(he is Portuguese but speaks English). By putting your head next to the trunk and listening carefully, you can actually hear them munching away inside the palm trunk.

With that he set about removing more leaves to get into the infected area, seems the weevils borough down to get to the softer part of the tree and set up home all the while munching away at the palm and eventually destroying it.

 This is one of the little bugger's that we removed from the palm tree, along with another 15 of his brothers.



The grubs seem to cocoon themselves insides pieces of the palm tree while they hatch. The pieces of palm tree in the picture on the right each contain a grub which were dug out of the palm tree. We had great delight by standing on them and squishing them, they burst like the mother of all blackheads.

The next picture is of the actual grubs which  are enormous, they are the sort of size that Bear Grylls would have a 3 course meal from and we removed over 20 grubs from the tree.






I have now sprayed the infected tree and all my other palm trees with an insecticide, I can only keep an eye on things and see what happens.
That was last week, since spraying the tree, it seems to have flushed out another few grubs which have come to the surface of their own accord and I have had pleasure squishing them but could still hear them inside the tree.
Another week later and so far the trunk seems to be quiet, watch this space.

 

Thank you to my grandson Morgan for the video of one of the grubs removed from the tree, he has promised not to sue me for copyright violation for using his material.