Looks like bugs are eating my Meyer lemons! Help!

[Michelle DiPinto]

We inherited this lemon tree and I have no experience with fruit trees at all. As you can see by the photos it had been cut way back at some point in the past and the branches are hardly strong enough to hold the fruit but produced nicely. This fall it started looking a little under the weather but it was teaming with lemons so I left it alone. Now the lemons are looking terrible! It looks like they are infected or being eaten.... And they're falling off like crazy! I found a snail on the tree this afternoon. Can anyone help me figure out what to do? How to treat it, if I should prune it and if so how? Will it ever be a strong lemon tree or is it doomed to be this shape forever?

 

[Chuck]

That looks like Grackle damage to me. It is only the young birds that do this. But it might not be birds in which case you should spray the tree with a spinosad based insecticide.
If it turns out to be Grackles doing this there isn't much you can do. The fruit usually stays palatable with the pecking marks only into the white not all the way into the meat of the lemon.
Are there any green or unripe lemons falling off? If not this is just what citrus trees do. The fruit becomes a little over ripe and falls off.