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I cannot find and do not know about any cure for this parasite.

The only treatment I have read about is to kill all visibly infected trees.

This can be done two ways.

One is by individually destroying each infected tree with a very large tracked vehicle that looks like an excavator, and is called a Fecon Bull Hog® -- see picture located on page at:

http://www.landandwater.com/features/vol49no6/vol49no6_1.php

This machine simply grinds up the tree in-place starting from the top down.

A ham-handed approach, no doubt about it, but it seems to at least contain the spread of the parasite.

The second way is to simply clear-cut all infected trees. Obviously not an acceptable solution if you live in a house among the trees and want to keep them.

So we are looking at a pretty grim situation.

The (relatively) good news is that from my own VERY LIMITED and purely PERSONAL experience over the past couple of years, you can manage the infection to a degree. First, clear out ALL underbrush from beneath the tree and for a good radius around it. The underbrush takes a lot of water and nutrients, so if you get rid of it, there's more for the tree. Second, get a good arborist to come in and remove the most heavily infected limbs. This has worked pretty well for a large Coulter pine (a "sugar pine" that has very large cones) about 50 feet tall on my property (which is located near Tehachapi in central-Southern California at about 4,500 foot elevation). The tree is NOT cured or mistletoe free by any means, but it looks MUCH better and I think it will survive for many years in a sort of "Mexican standoff" with the parasite.

I would dearly love and be willing to pay large dollars for some sort of chemical spray, pellets, granules, or whatever to kill this parasite.

I am resigned to probably having to wait for some development that hopefully will come out of the logging industry, which is really losing money on pine mistletoe. A consortium of logging companies might be able to fund research into finding a cure, and then recoup some of their investment from folks like me and you that want to save our few precious trees!

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17y ago

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