They come from their mothers of course. Some mealybugs are born live, others hatch from eggs. Fossilized remains of them have been found in Hispaniola, so maybe they came to North American from there.

Mealybugs are unarmored scale insects and are related to aphids and white flies. They generally are not that hard to control, and you have several options.

You can swipe/dab their bodies with a Q-tip dipped in rubbing alcohol. You can spray them with insecticidal soap. You can spray them with a homemade spray consisting of 50% rubbing alcohol, 49% water and 1% detergent or soap.

Ladybugs will eat them, and you even can buy a specific species of ladybug called a mealybug destroyer which can be used to control them, though usually mealybug destroyers work best in a greenhouse where they are a captive audience, so to speak, and not quite as well when released outdoors where they can move around and go where they want, which might not be where you want them to be.

You also can use the standard remedy for scale insects, which is to spray the plants during the dormant season with horticultural oil often referred to as dormant oil. There also is a highly refined super lightweight form of dormant oil made to use during the growing season. It usually is referred to as a summerweight oil. If I was going to use that summer oil on a plant, I'd test it on one leaf first and wait 24 hours to see if it damaged the leaf before I sprayed it on the rest of the plant. In our climate, even superfine summerweight oil sometimes can burn foliage so must be used carefully and sparingly.

Sometimes, after you've sprayed them, they die within a day or two but don't fall off the plant so you may have to come back a day or two later and wipe them off or wash them off the plants. Then, watch carefully for new ones to appear in case there were eggs laid someplace that survived being sprayed.

I've had them on plants once or twice and just left them alone so the ladybugs would have the chance to gobble them up, which they apparently did. Within a week of me seeing the mealybugs, they all were gone.

I think I will move the pot to the fence. I have seen lady bugs in the cukes...though they are a light orangie pink, not the red of common lady bugs, the red ones were on dandylions by the fence this spring. Am I right in thinking female mealy bugs can't fly? I know the males are gnats. I tried q tips and alcohol with the pepper. Every plant in the house was surrounded by cloves of garlic. I tried neem oil and soap spray. They just wouldn't die. I would sacrifice the stevia to attract more lady bugs though. Thanks.

Lady bugs come in lots of different colors, even though the media has conditioned us to think they are only one standard color. I see the red and reddish-orange ones most often, but see a few pink ones most years.

I think female mealy bugs only crawl, but the males fly so they can visit the females in order to fertilize them. That's their only purpose in life, and they don't even eat as adults---they just service the females and then they die. The males start out wingless but then develop wings and do sort of resemble gnats when they are at that stage.

Scale insects are hard to kill at this time of the year, but you can smother them with dormant oil in the winter.