 Hey everybody this is Scott Graham and Ron Smith with Auburn Extension. Today we're going to be talking a little bit about managing and scouting for escape bull arms and cotton. So to start you know our primary management for cotton we're using BT technologies. A lot of the cotton in the state this year in 2020 is two gene cotton so it's primarily things like Bulgar too and we're starting to see in recent years some slippage with and protection with those technologies where worms are coming through and we're having to make some sprays. We want to talk a little bit about that and maybe kind of why we're seeing and what to do about it. So a lot of the when I lot all the bull worms that we're seeing in our cotton are coming out of BT corn so that's our problem the generation is being selected through the corn when the corn dries down and is no longer attractive for the moths they move into our cotton crop and begin to lay eggs and that's when we start seeing issues. So it's very important that we start scouting when when our corn's dried down and the moths moving in. Generally in South Alabama we're looking around the 10th of July is when we expect to start seeing moths immigrating into a field. We move up to Central Alabama we expect to start seeing them around July 20th and then in the northern part of the state generally around the first week of August is when we need to start really scouting for bullworm moths and eggs and start start looking at our crop. So to scout our cotton for bullworms we like to start in the terminal look for eggs look for a small larvae and maybe some feeding in the terminals then we'll move down the plant to squares and flowers and bulls and we're looking for obvious signs of feeding holes in squares or bulls a lot of frass that they produce as they feed and that's what that's what we're looking for when we're looking for these worms. For control of bullworms so we've got a couple of different options for us in Alabama right now your pyrethroids are still providing pretty good suppression. A lot of times around that these flights tend to coincide with the second or third week of bloom we're spraying for stink bugs so we get good suppression with the pyrethroid insecticides at that time. In the north Alabama where we seem to have a little bit more issues with the scape bullworms you know we may want to go with our newer chemistries the diamonds they do cost a little bit more than the pyrethroids do but they provide excellent control and a good residual depending on the rate that you use of these products you can see anywhere from 14 to 20 days control with these products like I said they're very good but they can be they do cost more than pyrethroids do. Let me see you didn't leave a lot to fill in there Scott so I can't add very much more except that we like to think of the entire complex that may be occurring in cotton when these windows of bullworms move into cotton so quite often it's either plant bugs or stink bugs and a lot of times that may affect our choice of chemistry because really you know when all said and done our bugs are probably doing us more damage to cotton than our escape worms are up until this point. We had a pretty bad year of escape worms 2017 2018-19 years we didn't have very much and I think most of that was located in the Tennessee Valley so that gives us some clue of historically where should we really look most closely for escape worms and I think we'll find it occurs in the same areas I don't know about the same fields but same areas year after year. So another thing to mention scouting for bullworms is thresholds so we've kind of got two different thresholds in Alabama which is going to vary almost on a field by field basis in some sense so what we've got is in fields where we haven't sprayed a hard chemistry in a couple of weeks where we have abundant beneficials things like fire ants such as that our threshold is going to be 10% so if you find 10 bullworms on 100 plants that will be your threshold and in fields where we have sprayed we spray plant bugs we made a stink bug application we don't have as many beneficial insects in the field we're going to reduce that threshold to five bullworms per 100 plants and it's very important that we're scouting our fields at least weekly really there in the peak flight we probably need to try to at least pick a couple of fields to look at twice a week to really make sure we're on top of this because with most of our chemistries that we're using for bullworms the most effective when those larvae are within two to three days old so it's very important that we're in the field when those bullworms are that age so we can properly time an application for our best control.