Concerns about the health emergency linked to Covid-19 are accompanied by fruit growers with apprehensions about the growth of the Asian bedbug population which according to the forecasts of the Edmund Mach Foundation will take place in the coming months with an expansion in Trentino, also in Valsugana and in the lower Val di Non.
In the meantime, the phytosanitary campaign has started to preserve the orchards from this and other adversities, while the State-Regions Conference has recently given a positive opinion to the decrees on the use of the natural antagonist of the bedbug: the samurai wasp.
The Edmund Mach Foundation plans to release it in June, but in the meantime in the laboratories of San Michele, thanks also to the financial support provided by the Autonomous Province of Trento, the breeding of bedbugs - 12 thousand specimens collected - continues to continue to obtain sufficient eggs on the which to multiply the parasitoid.
The launches will begin during the summer, but the path for containment will be long and it will take, at least, three years to start restoring the ecological balance in the orchards. In close connection with the PAT, in implementation of the Plan to combat bedbugs developed by the Province itself with the help of all the components, everything is ready to start this important ecological rebalancing operation, the first in Europe after years in which legislative inertia prevented its implementation.