For bugs like that my first port of call (as per aphids) is the perennial standby of a home-made spray of water with a bit of washing-up liquid (dish soap) and maybe some lemon juice. But I guess neem oil does much the same thing.
Maybe worth trying the iNaturalist app (or something similar) to identify what this beastie is.
Asian pears, bartlett pears, elderberries and moonglow pears. About 1/2 our crop. Ran out of crates!
Do you sell some? That is a lot of food!
Iām feeling some elderberry jealousy!
The elders are having a really good year. Thatās the 5th bucket like that Iāve brought in. My wife is debating selling some pears, but usually we send surplus to the local food bank. We also can, dehyddate and ferment a ton of things. She is currently looking for recipes for vanilla bourbon pears, because my dad is coming next week and Mom used to make that for him. This is the first year the Asian pears have done anything, so we are still figuring that out. Asian pear mead is definitely in the cards.
Iām surprised you donāt make pear cider. Yummy stuff!
Yay! That is very nice
Elderberry mead, pear cider, and bourbon pears? All sounds delish.
We are slowly coming out the dog days of summer, I think. We might get some more tomatoes in the next few months and the peppers are doing great. Gotta decide if I want to gamble on getting some other plants going.
I donāt know the proper term gor pear mead, but it will happen!
I am still waiting for tomatoes to ripen. They seem to shut down in the heat, and we have had a buttload of that. Finally seeing some pink, but damnā¦
āPear meadā? What, mead (made from honey), flavoured by pears?
Or do you mean pear cider? In which case the technical term is āperryā.
Honey, pear juice and yeast. Not technically peary, strictly speaking a melomel, but so is pyment (grape), cyser (apple) and acerglyn (maple syrup.) I suspect there is a term for pear mead, but have not been able to find it.
Oh, cool.
Going from the pattern in Rhodomel and Rudamel, Iād make the equivalent as Apiomel (from į¼ĻĪ¹ĪæĪ½ = pear)
If itās like Indiana, the problem is the combo of high heat and too much rain in the early part of the season. Fertilizer wonāt help. Stop any extra watering (let the heavens do it, or not) and hope. Ours finally started ripening, after at least a month of being full sized but hard and green.
What youāve got there is scale insect. Not sure what species, but one randomly found online looks similar: Icerya purchasi - Wikipedia
brilliant! yes, that is definitely it.
thank you so much for taking the time to look into it.
now to see about controlling the bastards!
edit to add:
mixed up some dish soap, mouthwash in water in a pump sprayer and dowsed the plant up and down and back again. some branches were heavily infested and dying and had to be removed.
pics are still fuzzy - camera wanted to focus on the gravel and not so much on the bug, but you can clearly tell this is a scale bug infestation like @oncebce pointed out, ācottony cushion scale bugā. may be i need to introduce beneficial predator bugs like ladybugs and a certain predator fly. i can get those from my organic dealer (Arbico Organics, if any body is interested. mail order online.)
on to the pix:
Not posing as any sort of expert, but might manual removal be an option?
ewwwā¦ you mean touch it?!
yeah. distasteful as it is (to me), after the soapy spraydown, i did remove as many as i could see, as well as cutting the highly damaged branches and discarding in the rubbish - not the greenwaste bin - so as not to somehow spread any that might remain viable after county compost.
" ewwwā¦ you mean touch it?!"
Yeahā¦ my go to would be some type of āmaterial handingā gloves to maintain dexterity without too much tactile feedbackā¦
I be jelly. Critters killed all of my sunflowers this year. I only planted mammoths. 
Itās been a constant battle, mostly against one groundhog, and Iāve trapped a trash panda, a juvi skunk and a juvi 'possum, no senior-ass groundhog. Iām quite frustrated going into the harvest. I guess Iām going to require the males of the house to pea around the neighborās fences for the rest of this fall. 
