They look like aphids to me.

Thank you Fori. Any advice how to get rid of them?

Fairly strong streams of plain water will knock them off. Keep up with those treatments on a regular basis and you'll be in control.

Best do some reading (Google) about aphids so that understand more about these extremely common pests. And check your other plants! Aphids come in yellow, pale green, yellow, red, gray, and black.

Thank you for the advice. This is my first time ever gardening. Loving it. I just have two large potted plants on my patio with no hose access so the strong stream of water is going to be hard. I ready neem oil or even olive oil will kill them but it takes some time. Any experience with that? Thank you.

I think plain old insect soap will fix the aphid problem. And don't spend a lot of money-I just make my own with Dr Bronners castile soap and water.

The ants are a big part of the problem - they carry aphids to plants and then eat their secretions.

NEEM is working very well with me for all kinds of things (very little insect damage but it did NOT stop the pickleworms) but I got my best results when I ditched the stuff from home depot and ordered NEEM pro. The Home depot (Bayer) stuff has a pleasant odor and mixes right up with water. The NEEM pro is cold pressed pure NEEM oil and the odor is NOT pleasant.

I avoid the flooding the blooms with NEEM; there is some bee toxicity though not as bad as with other things. I just don't want it down inside the flowers where they gather nectar.

This post was edited by jocoyn on Thu, Jul 17, 14 at 7:52

Thank you so much Jocoyn. I shall try the Dr. Bronners soap. I had not heard of that. :)