This is a Report from one of the Louisiana papers. I will post the link when I find it again. This was from an email forwarded by some fellow citrus hobbyists in the east coast:

Friday, November 16, 2007

About the time you expect your fruit to start turning orange, you find much to your horror that the skin of your citrus looks as if it got burned in the oven -- so brown it almost looks blackened.

The bronzing fruit is typical of trees infested earlier in the year with the citrus rust mite -- an increasingly common problem on drought-stressed citrus trees. The mites feed on leaves and fruit, but they often avoid feeding in areas that get direct sun all day long -- so your bronzing fruit may have normal orange skin on its sunny side.

Citrus fruits lightly damaged by citrus mites are often fine to eat. But fruit that is entirely bronzed is usually shrunken and of lower quality.

It's too late to address the problem this year. But next year, keep an eye out for citrus pests starting in May and June. Citrus mites, citrus scale and mealybugs and white flies can all be controlled with a simple spray of horticultural oil -- just make sure you coat the entire plant with the oil, most particularly the bottoms of the leaves.

Citrus mites, by the way, are very small -- so small you usually need a powerful magnifying glass to see them. But heavy feeding damage on leaves is quite conspicuous -- the leaves typically look stippled with gray or yellow spots. And if we have the kind of long dry periods we've been experiencing during recent springs, you can just about count infestations of citrus mites (citrus mite populations usually drop off when frequent rains start up in late June).