PLANTS AS BIOPRODUCERS OF BIOCIDAL SUBSTANCES AND PROSPECTS OF CREATING BIOLOGICAL INSECTOACARICIDES ON THEIR BASIS
The biological method of protecting agricultural crops from pests is now recognized as a priority direction in the development of scientific research throughout the world. However, in Russia environmentally friendly and biological means, in comparison with chemical ones, occupy a very modest place in the range of means for suppressing harmful populations of arthropods. There are absolutely no insecticides based on biologically active substances of plant origin, although the biocidal properties of many plants have been known for a long time. The application of extracts of such substances as insectoacaricides has not been worked out in practice. Many technological aspects of development of plant-based drugs have not been resolved. Thus, the main goal of research was to find the most technologically suitable plant species and to establish the possibility of achieving high biological efficiency when using their extracts. More than 70 experiments were carried out involving more than 40 plant species and 8 types of test objects from the groups of leaf-eating and sucking phytophages. This article summarizes the results of two years of research on this issue. The authors discuss the difficulties of obtaining alcohol extracts with high biocidal activity, technological methods of their concentration, as well as the results of laboratory tests of samples of extracts that are most promising for the creation of a new plant preparation against the group of chewing and sucking arthropods. Among the studied plant species, the most suitable for this purpose are white hellebore and Sosnowsky’s hogweed, the biological efficiency of which at technologically acceptable working concentrations reached 95-100% and was not inferior to the well-known avermectin preparations such as Fitoverm and Vertimec.