Logo

The mites infesting Agri-horticultural crops are gaining increasing importance globally because of their manifold importance both as notorious pests responsible for causing substantial crop loss and others as beneficial predators helping in many cases to suppress the pest mite population below economic injury level. Since there is no book from India documenting consolidated information, the present author made a humble attempt to collage all available information and bring out this book.

This book deals with injurious and beneficial mites on crops like cereals and millets, pulses, fibre crops, oil seeds, plantation crops, fruit trees, vegetables, medicinal-aromatic dye-yielding, spices-condiments-Narcotic plants, ornamentals, weeds, forests trees, cash crops, mushroom, apiculture mites and stored products from India. Apart from that, some basic aspects like, habits and habitats, study techniques, mode of mite feeding and consequent damages, Management by various means, malformation-gall formation- plant abnormalities, resistance development and its consequent effects, pheromones in mite control, biology of predatory mites, predator-prey interaction, mite transmission f plant viruses, parasites and pathogens of mites, etc have also been dealt with. Besides, keys to important taxa of Agri-horticultural mites as well as a list of all known species from India and selected references are also given. The treasure of information given in this will prove worthy to the agricultural entomologists, acarologists, researchers, post graduate students and agricultural policy makers. This will develop awareness about menaces done by mites to crops and help on developing suitable strategy to combat those.