I have cured my aphid problem. Look on Google images and see the ants sucking the sweet juices from the aphids butts. The ants herd the aphids to the very ends of the branches last leaves and prevent them from traveling back up the branch. They then 'milk' the aphids. Come fall they carry the aphids down into the ground and keep them there until spring, whereupon the cycle repeats when they bring them back up into the tree. My cure is to wrap a nylon stocking around the base of the tree and secure it with a safety pin. Every spring, I renew coatings of sticky Tanglefoot on the stocking and the ants get trapped. They will even build grass blade bridges over the sticky stuff to cross over and get the aphids back working. Go out on a warm night and watch the ants working.
When you take a sweet cherry that is infested with aphids at the ends of its branches, and install a stocking -Tanglefoot barrier, in a matter of days it comes back to life. You can see its new vigor! Be careful, the ants will find ways to climb up between bark furrows and valleys. They will even climb neighboring trees and cross over to the protected tree! Don't apply much Tanglefoot directly on the bark except in places the stocking does not reach like deep valleys. " title="Laughing" />