Problem identifying this pest. Help please!

[Rhys777]

The pictures below are unfortunately the best I could get at the time and really stressing balls for my poor girls!

These little buggers seem to only be around the soil and nowhere on the plant, have seen no flying bugs around except for a moth or two that I got rid of very quickly.

They seem to move at quite a pace and are getting bigger and populating extremely quickly.

Could they possible be root aphids?

 

[OldMedUser]

Those are some nasty aphid looking demons that should die easily with a few good sprays of an insecticidal soap like Safer's End All. Get the concentrate and save major $ mixing it up yourself. 10L for the price of 1L pre-mixed.

Add 10ml cheap canola oil to each 1L batch to really knock them out. I recently ended a two year battle against spider mites doing just that. Spray every place you can every 4th day 4 times to make sure they are gone forever. Do right after light's out and a day later use plain water to rinse if you see leaves going bad tho that usually doesn't happen.

Those fat translucent bodies are ripe for suffocation supplied by my recommended treatments. No other chems need apply!

Good luck eh!

 

[OldMedUser]

You can even soak pots with it to wipe out fungus gnats tho a flush may be needed after to re-balance the root zone. Sometimes the plants don't skip a beat tho.

 

[jimbobdaz]

Diatomaceous earth would be a cheap option or even better a sulphur vapouriser which would coat the whole room... great unless the girls are in flower

 

[Lerugged]

Yes DE will work. Slice them chunky bodies to pieces .

 

[Rhys777]

Thanks for the quick replies, going to try go find what I can in town asap. The DE is there a specific way to apply it? Mix in with the first layer or just on top? Will miticide sold at nurseries not work? Aphid specific insecticides?

 

[jimbobdaz]

Not sure how you could effectively mix the DE into the soil while the plant is there... i would start by putting a layer ontop and see how it goes, any of those plump bodies trying to crawl up through wont last long

 

[jimbobdaz]

Also i have no idea if DE works as well when wet

 

[OldMedUser]

Big DE fan here.

If that's the way you want to go then get a decent hand sprayer from a farm supply or some store similar. One that holds a good liter or more and has fine to coarse spray settings.

Then scoop a heaping Tbsp of DE into 1L of RO water in your sprayer. Shake the crap out of it and never stop shaking the whole time you're spraying the hell out of your plants. Make sure you get under the leaves real good. Knock them over to get under there real good!

Do this just after light's out so the water can dry off in the dark leaving that nasty dust all dried out all over the leaves to destroy anything that crawls or wiggles on any surface. Doesn't hurt none if it gets sprayed all overt he top of the soil, walls, floors or any other surface bugs might want to hide on.

The dust is very harmful to your lungs so mind how you go. Not a huge deal for mixing up a spray but if doing a big grow get the proper PPE and be a pro about it.

We've wiped out invasive ants/termites around our small acreage the last 18 years. That Ant-B-Gone liquid is killer when properly used against home invading ants. Surround an ant mound with a ring of DE so they have to walk thru it to go anywhere then put bottle caps with the Ant-B-Gone drops in them inside that circle of death so they eat it up as their only food source. 2 weeks later the whole colony is dead and gone. It's just sugar and borax and you can make your own with honey and 20 Mule Team borax powder. Good for your plants too if you suspect a Boron deficiency tho boric acid is a quicker fix. Common in most eye-drop/rinsing fluids.

We don't give a shit about all the ant mounds on our 7.5 acres unless they try to invade our home. They do a lot of good work recycling dead stuff into good stuff so we let them be for the most part. Magpies are target practice as they eat up all the smaller birds eggs and young. Smart enough like crows to stay away from sites where their families have been wiped out like mine. They f'n know and can pass off info about sites like mine to their young.

Those young will not come here to build their nests and it's rare these days to see or hear a crow, raven or magpie around my place as I've hunted them all with my little 10-22 Ruger with a sweet 4x Bushnell scope zeroed in at 100 yds. Can punch out a quarter at that range. If there's a murder of crows out in my woods then my single shot 16 gauge can get more than one sometimes. Got me my first muskrat in my dugout when I first moved in back in late '02. Nailed a dozen of them over the next two years with the Ruger. Would toss a stick out where the dead rat was to get the dog to swim out there were he would grab the rat and play keep-away for a bit when he brought it in. Then I'd feed it to our other dog, a red siberian husky bitch and she would disappear a 6lb muskrat in under 5 min. I set up the tripod and videod it once but the harddrive I stored it on died and so much stuff was lost. Gross as hell. She'd start at the head and just grind the hell out of it until the last you saw was the back legs and tail going down her maw.

Happy New Year!