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big_boy

Tiny whitish bugs

Big_Boy
18 years ago

I noticed leaf-curl on some low leaves of my Early Girls. Within a day or so I had many tiny holes in some leaves. With a magnifying glass I could find tiny bugs on the bottoms of the leaves. Under 20x magnification I could see they are wingless, with bulbous bodies, black dots that appear as eyes, almost translucent, and either whitish or perhaps slightly greenish. They don't hop. Last night I sprayed with pestacide, Sevin. Today there are still bugs on some leaves. They are not bigger than the dot at the end of this sentence.

What are they? What should I do about them?

--thanks for listening

Comments (3)

  • moulman
    18 years ago

    aphids no doubt. spray with a mild dish detergent solution.

  • farkee
    18 years ago

    With a 20X you can see insects/mites not seen with the eye.

    By bulbous if you mean pear shaped you could very well have aphids as moulman suggests. Do you see two small tubes (cornicles) protuding from the rear end? Though if aphids I am surprised you are not finding them on new growth.

    Here is a pic of early stage of white fly? They are flat looking like scale but not scale at all. Translucent. Greenish, dots like eyes but I don't know if someone would call them bulbous. I have limited (newly gained) experience with them and they started on the lower leaves on my plants.

    Aphids are pretty easy to get rid of--whitefly is another story altogether.

    Here is a link that might be useful: whitefly -early stage

  • azkayla
    18 years ago

    Big Boy---, sounds similar to a problem I'm having here in Northern Arizona, "western flower thrips". They are whitish or greenish depending on what stage of life they are in, and they definitly have little dark dots on their large eyes. They are sucking insects which create lots of little tiny holes close together, looks almost like a sieve. When there are enough of them, and the damage is sufficient, the leaves will curl and eventually turn yellow and brown. But the biggest problem with these suckers is that they attack the blossoms. They will cause blossom drop at all stages of development (both before and after pollination). I have lost many pollinated blossoms to these suckers. Have you had any noteable blossom drop recently? The link I included below is a photo of one at the early adult stage of life. During their life cycle they do go through a stage where they do not fly, only crawl around on the plant parts, quick little buggers too, makes um hard to squish!. You said that your bugs are only crawling not flying, they could be in an earlier stage of life. Here is another really informative website: www.gladescropcare.com When you go there, go to the top menu bar and click on the GCC speaks tab, then click on the "thrips identification software", then click the "start thrips program"; look at field activities and image gallery. They will give you ideas on control and lots of photos of typical thrips damage and life cycle info. I have been trying to let the lady beetles and dragon flies take care of the problem here (we have more than usual of these this year), but it is starting to get out of control, so I finally broke down and sprayed with Malathion this morning. My neighbor says this works well for fruit thrips. However, I was disheartened to find more of those little creeps on my plants upon inspection this evening. I suppose I will spray again in 7 days and hope for the best. Maybe someone else will post who has tried other things as well.

    Hope this helps! Good Luck!!!!
    AZ Kayla

    Here is a link that might be useful: Photo of thrip