How many olive trees are there on the Caltech campus?
What are those plastic bottles I’ve seen hanging in the olive trees? Those are for pest control. They contain Torula yeast tablets in water, which attracts flies who enter the bottles and they are unable to get out again. The fruit fly is the biggest threat to Caltech’s olive production. The adult flies will climb inside the olives to lay their eggs, causing the fruit not to develop properly and causing olives to rot even before they have ripened. Our first year the olives where close to 100% fly infested, meaning that every olive had indications of previous fruit fly inhabitations. Since then, Caltech grounds has diligently sprayed weekly with Spinosad GF120 , an organic fly repellant, and we have seen a significant decrease in fly activity. How was the harvest last year? The 2008 harvest was a lot of fun with over 420 volunteer olive pickers and roughly 2000 people attending the after harvest dinner. Our volunteers managed to pick around 2500 pounds of olives, and with help from the
