Tips for CBB
Integrated Pest Management for Your Farm
by Suzanne Shriner - updated 04/08/2011
(in pdf format and printable here)

Coffee Berry Borer (La Broca) damage can be very serious, or it can be reduced to 2-5% of your crop.  With a multi-pronged approach to control, you can greatly minimize loss. It is important to “be your own scientist” when it comes to your farm.  Inspect your coffee often.  As young cherry matures, the CBB will often wait at the end of the bean.  When the bean begins to harden, the beetle will begin to drill.  Even if your cherry is green, inspect it regularly.  If you see CBB (see KCFA website pictures) on the cherry, consider spraying the fungus.  Don’t wait for damage to occur.  This is a short list of recommended practices.  The best practice? Harvest your coffee; 75% of CBB will be removed.

Field Sanitation
Simple sanitation is vital, and can be cost-effective with a few preventative measures.  Many CBB experts consider it the most effective form of control. The beetle can live in raisin for up to 5 months without feeding. 

• Do a “final round” gleaning of the field to break the life cycle. In a well-picked field, it should take approximately 16-24 man-hours to glean old crop from 5 acres of trees.
• Remove all raisins before pruning each tree.  One bean can host multiple generations. 
• All CBB-infested beans or floaters should be placed in black garbage bags and left in the sun for several days.  The heat will kill the beetle. Freezing overnight will also work.

Spray the bassiana Fungus (commercial Botanigard/Mycotrol)
After 20 years of research around the globe, the fungus is the only recommended pesticide for CBB. It is not a silver bullet, but it will significantly reduce populations. Direct spray-contact with the beetle is required. The recommended fungus spray dates after flowering are estimates.  We hope to have more accurate data in the near future. 

• Record date when first major flowering appears on the trees.  Spray raisin/soil immediately at end of harvest. Spray both soil and foliar 30, 100, and 150 days after first flowering. These are estimated dates, do what is best for your farm based on beetle movement
• Shake the bottle very well.  It may require a stirring stick to get spores settled on the bottom.
• The current recommendation is 1 quart of fungus plus 3oz Silwet or Widespread surfactant per acre to cover both trees and soil.  The surfactant is vital to push the fungus into the boreholes. Depending on your tree density and soil, it may take 30-50 gallons of water for coverage.
• Using a 4-gallon backpack, mix approximately 4 oz fungus plus 1 tablespoon surfactant with water (for 30 gal/acre coverage).  Spray the soil and any downed beans on the ground.  Foliar-spray cherries on the tree and the underside of the leaves to the point of runoff.  Also spray mulched trees or pulp piles.
• Fungus can be mixed with soap/oil, Neem, EM, some foliar fertilizers, Bt, as well as some herbicides (for soil application only).  Roundup/glyphosate may limit fungal growth. Check the compatibility chart on the KCFA website.  Avoid foliar treatment using spraypacks that have contained herbicides.
• Rock-covered farms should focus spray on any visible soil or between cracks where beans may lodge. There is no benefit to spraying rocks.
• Mauka farms with longer seasons may need to add an additional spray at 210 days or when CBB are present.    
• Fungus has added benefit of effectiveness on Twig Borer, aphids and fire ants.
• To protect bees, avoid spraying when flowers are present on the tree. 
• Afternoons are best as UV rays impact the spores.  The fungus will live on the tree about 2 days in direct sun and up to 15 days in full shade. 
• Remember, spores are live, so use water mixture promptly and store bottle in cool location. 
• Compared to a backpack sprayer, using a mist blower or motorized ultra-low-volume sprayer may increase kill rate by spreading the fungus deeper into the tree.
• Monitor your cherry regularly and repeat as needed. There is no harm to multiple treatments and fungus will not affect taste of coffee nor harm workers.

Worker Education

• Train your workers to spot La Broca (Spanish for CBB) so that they may report trouble areas.
• Train your workers not to discard green beans or raisin out of the picking bucket. 

Maintain Traps
Traps may not greatly reduce pest populations, but will help identify trouble spots on your farm.

• Use along border locations with wild or untended coffee
• Use around mills or processing areas where CBB may be migrating out of fruit.
• Traps are most effective when CBB is on the move.  In other regions, this is immediately after the growing season, as well as about 150 days after flowering.  We are still learning what is best for Hawaii.  Traps work best when placed 3-5 feet off the ground and at least 12-20 traps per acre. 

Small Processors
About 50% of the beetle will survive through processing and travel on to the parchment stage.  That means care must be taken through all stages to prevent reinfestation.

• Use traps near mill and drying areas
• In India, they recommend that the trees closest to the mill be picked last.  That ensures escaping beetles do not migrate too far into the fields looking for ripe coffee. 
• Floaters should be bagged and left in the sun or frozen to kill the beetles. Or, dipped in boiling water for two minutes to kill all stages of the beetle.
• If bringing coffee from other farms, return bags directly to farmer to prevent cross-contamination.  Or, bags can be boiled or soaked overnight in soapy water to drown broca.
• Cover your pulp piles immediately after use.  Consider regularly spraying them with Pyrethrin.
• Consider additional fungus treatments on soil and trees near to the mill. 
• Be sure to dry all coffee to below 12% moisture as the beetle cannot penetrate the bean at that hardness.
• Use Grainpro bags during storage to prevent moisture absorption and pest recontamination.
• If you buy coffee, talk to your farmers about IPM and be sure they understand all the options.

Copyright under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
You may freely share and transmit this KCFA document in its entirety.
Document updated 4/8/11

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B. bassiana fungus update 12/18/2010
Melanie Bondera

Thank you for all your feedback and input! We’ve sent the fungus off to several labs for identification. Farmers should go out and collect any b. bassiana fungus from their own farms before the harvest season ends and there are no more coffee cherries. Here’s my suggested collection procedure.

1. Find coffee cherries with CBB, which is mainly identified by a small hole at the blossom end of the coffee cherry (green or red).
2. Look for a bit of white fungus coming out the hole (works best in high humidity, where you have soil, shade, or moisture on your farm). I also find multiple on one lateral. (I needed my reading glasses to see this)
3. Collect in a clean ziplock or tupperware. Take inside and work on a clean cutting surface. Cut the cherry in half across the beans (the difficult direction); I use my clippers. You’ll see the remains of the CBB life cycle inside.
4. Find a dead CBB stuck in the exit hole with white stuff coming out of its body.  This is your most likely source of B. bassiana. Use a clean tweezers (I sterilized with flame) to remove it from the cherry. Place in a sterilized canning jar or similar container (running thru a dishwasher counts as sterilizing) with a cotton ball or wad of clean paper towel.
5. I was getting about 5 dead beetles with white fungus in the entry hole out of every 30 cherries I picked with white coming out the exit hole. So, be patient. Take the leftover cherries, beans, live beetles and other mess and keep it in a ziplock for 3 weeks or bury it one foot down or boil it.
6. Let jar with beetles sit open in a clean, dry, protected area for 3-4 days to dry. In my coffee shack, I put a bit of mesh screen over it. Then put the lid on and store, until we have a protocol to spread on your farm.

We’re working on a farm-scale protocol for farmers to expand it on their own farms, but it’s trickier than we originally thought, so stay tuned.

Get on Google and start educating yourself about B. bassiana and CBB. There is a lot of information out there from the 70 coffee growing countries that have this beetle. B. bassiana is a naturally occurring soil fungus that is drawn into the coffee trees’ tissue by the presence of the CBB. The fungus is not a silver bullet, but an important part of the ongoing control practices including sanitation and trapping. This pest is very resistant to chemical pesticides, so most growing areas have abandoned them. We’ll never be rid of CBB, but we can get it down to a manageable threshold of 5-10%.

Remember as you start your pruning, do a clean-up round of picking the cherry, so none of them can be hosts to the next round of beetles. Bury them one foot under or store in plastic bags for 3 weeks in the sun to kill the CBB, then compost.

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Initial CBB Observation by KCFA Farmer
Melanie Bondera- November 2010

Beauvaria bassiana fungus and Coffee Borer Beetle

I went to the CBB Farmer meeting at Yano Hall on Tuesday, 11/8/10. I was not satisfied with the material being presented, but was very curious about a comment by another coffee farmer. He suggested that we've actually had Coffee Borer Beetle for a number of years and the Beauvaria bassiana fungus.  The fungus has kept the beetle in check, much like the white halo fungus keeps our green scale in check. When we had the worst drought in recorded history this year, the fungus died back and the CBB exploded.  The worst hit farms are in the driest areas of South Kona. This theory was the only one that made any biological or ecological sense to me.

So, I went home to find the fungus. I researched online about it. I was annoyed to find that due to its basic biology, it should not be banned for us to use. Beauvaria bassiana is naturally occurring in the soil, and we have it here already.  There are many strains of it and they are very host specific, so I doubt a strain that kills CBB could kill the native spiders that Fish & Wildlife are worried about. My aha moment came when I started using google images and found pictures of the fungus on coffee cherry.  I had seen it the day before while picking! 

I went out to my worst CBB area and looked through about 100 infested beans before I started finding it. a bit of white crystalline stuff sticking out the beetle exit hole.  When I cut these beans in half, I found dead beetles stuck in the exit with the fungus growing out of their bodies. So, I took the photos you see below. Then I contacted Bob Smith, our representative to the CBB task force.

We are sure this is the B. bassiana fungus, but think we should test it to make sure.  We're going to collect it, grow it out and spray it back on the coffee trees. The coolest thing about this fungus is that its endophytic, which means it gets into the tissue of the coffee trees and lives there year after year, infecting and killing CBB. If we do nothing, probably the CBB will go down over several years as the moisture regrows the population of the fungus, but we can hasten this by spraying an inoculation of it on our trees (and save more crop, more income!).  If we grow out the Kona typica CBB B. bassiana, it will be more effective as its locally adapted,  than any commercial sprays we could buy from off island (if released). We'll probably need to practice some of the sanitation practices as well to keep the population of CBB down as the beetle and fungus come back into balance.  B. bassiana is not a silver bullet, but it will sure keep our threshold down in the manageable range.  And it looks like it has been doing that for years!

Check back here for protocol on how to grow it out.  Go out in your orchard now and see if you can find the B. bassiana fungus.  Collect those beans.

-Melanie Bondera
Kanalani Ohana Farm melaniebondera@kanalanifarm.org
mauka Honaunau

 

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