How to identify and get rid of mealybugs
 (Read 50+ times)
By Jared Garrett
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Mealybugs are about the nastiest pest your plants can have. These little beasties are tiny and come in many shapes and sizes. Some male mealybugs have wings and can fly, but the majority of these critters are tiny and possessed of longish tails and many waxy filaments on the body. Under a microscope, you might be surprised to learn that they sort of look something like a pale porcupine.
How do you tell if you have mealybugs? This is not very hard. Mealybugs can infest both indoor and outdoor plants. If you have plants that seem strangely stunted, are brown in the leaves or even have curling, unhealthy foliage, you may have aphids or mealybugs. The treatment, thankfully, is the same for both pests.
If you suspect you have mealybugs doing damage to your plants, pray that the plants are outdoor plants! If this infestation is outdoors, import some ladybugs to the infested plants and let the ladybugs do their thing. Ladybugs will eat hundreds of mealybugs and their larvae in one day. So head to the Internet or you local garden center and buy some ladybugs.
However, indoor plants are more problematic. In fact, if you have put your indoor plant outside at any time, you may have brought the mealybugs in with it when you brought it back inside. In any case, there are a few options for dealing with these pests on indoor plants.
*If you don't like pesticide, try rubbing alcohol. You need to get a cotton swab and dip it in the alcohol, then seek and destroy each bug. If you find a colony, drench it to kill it. If even one bug escapes, it can repopulate a colony, as mealybugs do no always need fertilization to reproduce.
*Some plants are too far gone to be saved. Clean off one section of the plant and take a cutting. Then trash the plant. This is especially true if you have mealybugs attacking the roots.
Good luck with these mealybugs. They are not mealworms! They are tiny, nasty creatures and you really want to do everything to avoid them.
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Author Bio Box: Jared Garrett
 http://www.helium.com/user/show/45690
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