• Blueberry plants are plagued by a number of insects.blueberry image by Lucy Cherniak from Fotolia.com
  
  Humans are not the only animals that find blueberries delicious. A number of insects also appreciate the blueberry plant. While some of these insects enjoy the fruit, as do humans, others prefer the leaves, flower buds, flowers, or sap of the blueberry plant. They can destroy the plant if not controlled.
  
  

Leafrollers

• Foliage feeders are insects that feed on the plant's foliage including the leaves, flowers, and flower buds. Leafrollers are common foliage feeders, feeding on the bands of the plant. Oblique banded leafrolers are among the worst. They begin eating foliage and buds before the blueberry blooms and continue with a second generation in the summer. The second generation eats the green fruits of the blueberry.
  
  Look for leaves covered with webs, which shelters the leafrollers. You can also look for small 1/2- to 3/4-inch worms, or adult brown or yellow moths. Pick leafrollers off the plant by hand or spray your bushes with an insecticide.
  
  

Beetles

• There are a number of small beetles, such as chafers, weevils and Japanese beetles, which feed on blueberry roots through the winter and buds early in the season. These pests can be controlled with pesticides such as malathion. Removing nearby wild blueberries, trashand fallen debris from the ground will help control weevils as well.
  
  

Sap Suckers

• Leafhoppers and aphids are small, related species that feed by sucking sap from the leaf's underside. Leafhoppers do not do much damage to blueberries by feeding, but can spread blueberry stunt mycoplasma. Aphids reproduce rapidly and can damage young plants by their large numbers.
  
  Catch both species with goldenrod yellow sticky traps, which will attract them because of the color, or spray the underside of the leaves with water to dislodge them. You can also spray the undersides of leaves with pesticides, but those pesticides will injure ladybird beetles, which control aphids and should only be used as a last resort.
  
  

Blueberry Maggot

• Michigan State University Extension calls blueberry maggot, "the chief pest of blueberries." These fruit feeders are flies 3/16 inch in length and lay eggs in fruit, which hatch into larva that consume blueberries from the inside, causing the fruits to fall to the ground where the maggot can crawl into the soil and overwinter. If you find fruit infested with small maggots, treat the plant with a pesticide such as malathion next year.