A while back, I decided to try bagging one of the three Asian Pears my tree successfully produced this year. I wanted to see if it made any difference in pest damage prevention.

Here are the results:

This is the unbagged pear:

There’s no internal damage, no worms burrowing, but I see some superficial damage, probably from an insect with sucking mouthparts, like a stink bug.

By comparison, the bagged Fruit, pictured on the left, doesn’t have this damage.

Conclusion: I think this is a good technique, one that should be used on more vulnerable fruit, but is of negligible value for these Asian pears until the bugs well and truly find them. Since the pressure on them at this time seems relatively low, I probably won’t make the effort to bag them in the future until I see the insects start to be a problem.

I will definitely try this on any apples I get next year.

What do you think?