The snow is melting and the tree branches are springing back up. Tomorrow we’ll mostly be cleaning up the debris from the broken trees. After that , we can inspect the damaged trees and make the right pruning cuts where branches are broken. I’ll be able to fix a lot of the bent arbs etc by bending them and reducing co-dominants. And I can talk to you about phasing in a new tree to replace that beat-up Bradford pear. More stuff on how to deal with snow damaged trees at Snow Damaged Trees
Renee wanted me to help her get rid of the hornets. So I had to decide how to go about it. The most effective way to control European hornets would be to destroy their nest and colony. But we have no idea where the nest is – probably not even on her property. If we went to spray the hornets we see on the trees with an ordinary contact insecticide we’d just kill those individuals present at the time. So I opted to coat the bark of the trees with a material called dinotefuran. It’s a neonicotinoid, like Merit, with which you may be familiar. But it’s much more soluble, so when applied to the bark of a tree it can be absorbed, and then conducted through the tree’s phloem. And the phloem of the
