 Hello, my name is Jan Konodal. I'm the Extension Entomologist from NDSU. Today we're going to learn how to scout for banded sunflower moth eggs and sunflower. This helps to determine whether the field will need to be treated with insecticide if it's above the economic injury level. Banded sunflower moth is a major insect pest in sunflower in North Dakota. It feeds on the seeds, reducing the total weight of the seed, consuming the entire kernel. This will reduce the yield of the sunflower field, so it's economically important. There's two crop stages you need to know about to get out and scout for banded sunflower moth eggs. That's the R2 stage, which is a bud, and then the nearest leaf behind that bud is less than three-quarters of an inch to that bud. For the crop staging, when you see the leaves coming right off the head, you use the leaf that is on the stem for determining what crop stage. The R3 stage, that leaf is three-quarters of an inch or more from the bud, and the buds can range in size, small, medium, or large. So you have to use that leaf as an indicator of the crop stage. So this is when you'd want to get out and scout for banded sunflower moth eggs. To look for banded sunflower moth eggs, we need to look on the outer bracks of the bud. The eggs are very small. They're laid sinkily or in clusters. The eggs will hatch in five to eight days into the larvae that causes the injury by feeding on the florets and the seeds internally. So it's easiest if you use a head-mounted magnifier to see the eggs. This magnifies the image three to four times. So place the magnifier on your head and then you can easily see the eggs with these. And I see about five eggs just on this one brack. Now the scouting protocol is to divide your field into two sections on each side. Go to the middle of that section, go 20 feet into the field at least, and then sample five buds in a row. And on each bud, count the number of eggs on six bracks randomly. Here's a R2 bud with the nearest leaf being less than three quarters of an inch from the bud. So we'll sample this one for banded sunflower moth eggs, counting the eggs on six of the outer bracks. As we're counting, we'll need to record the number of eggs on each brack. So there's a spreadsheet you can download from the Extension Entomology website. And it has a little section where you can record the number of eggs on each brack. So write down the number of eggs you find on each brack for each of the five heads, and then calculate an average for that sampling site. And you do that for each of the eight sites. So you have two sampling sites on each side of this field. And then determine what your overall average is for the whole field. And then we have a formula that we use for calculating the economic injury level, which takes into account the value of the crop, the market value, price per pound, and also the plant population, number of plants per acre, and also the insecticide cost. The economic injury level formula is the treatment cost divided by the market value per pound times the plant population per acre times a factor .00078. And that gives you the economic injury level. You compare your average to that calculated formula value. If your average is above the calculated formula, you need to treat. For an oil, sunflower field, and we calculated the economic threshold to be about 3.2 eggs per six bracks. And we used a insecticide cost of $8 an acre and a market value of 16 cents per pound and a plant population of 20,000 plants per acre. So let's assume that our scouting, when we're out scouting for the eggs, we are above the calculated threshold of three eggs per six brack. So then this allows us a window of opportunity to get that insecticide spray on. The optimal timing for a banded sunflower moth is not right after you find those eggs. It's after the eggs hatch and the larvae are very young and they're feeding on the florets of the head. And this typically is when the flower has just opened up and you can see the yellow rim of florets around the face of the sunflower. This is the R5.1 stage and this is the optimal insecticide timing application for control of banded sunflower moth and some of the other insects we see common in sunflower like the red sunflower seed weevil. Thanks for joining me today and learning how to scout for banded sunflower moth eggs. Monitoring for insects pests and learning how to calculate the economic injury levels are an important part of integrated pest management programs. For more information on banded sunflower moth and insecticides registered in sunflower in North Dakota, check out the following websites on your screen. For the head mountain magnifiers, you can also go to the following websites on your screen. Thank you and have a good day.