This post is part 1 of a series that I'm going to call " The Aphid Triad", because there are three important steps in any aphid infestation.
It was the dead of winter 2017/2018 as I started typing this, but then I started school, and had a whirlwind of classes and my big exam, then getting ready for Level 2 exam, but instead getting a job and 2 months of intense training ... and the next thing I knew it's now Sept 22, 2018! We've had about 6" of snow since Thursday night, YUCK! We had snow last week, too, and I lost EVERYTHING in my veggie garden, and will likely lose loads of perennials, too, because they're not ready for winter (GRR!).
I know there are no bugs right now, but I wanted to share some info about aphids now, because spring will be here soon enough. Aphids are pesky little buggers that try to kill off our crops. They have evolved into soooo many different colours & types. I've seen burgundy-red ones, black ones, green ones, and even yellow ones. They don't seem to care about camouflage, and although they are so tiny, they cause a lot of damage!
Aphids are weird little beasties -- they are all female, and they are all born pregnant. They give birth to little live clones, at an alarming rate. They live birth their young, without the need to mate with a male, known as parthenogenesis.
The only time aphids mate & lay eggs is in later fall -- they die off at the end of the summer (in areas that get proper winter, like here), but they need to continue the species... so they'll then give birth to some males with wings that will fly around & mate with as many females as they can before they die. The mother aphids lay eggs on the plants that they know will grow in spring, so that their next generation hatches to a reliable food source.
Once those eggs hatch (many of those ones have wings, just in case the food source was an annual & not coming back), they go off in search of plants to eat.
Now, to give you an idea of exactly how well aphids can reproduce themselves ... I read an article recently in which an entomologist named Stephen A. Marshall (presumably in the USA) was quoted as saying that in an optimal season, a single aphid can produce about 600 BILLION descendants!
That's why your can have just a couple of aphids here & there & within a week have every single plant utterly covered in aphids.
A lot of garden websites & magazine say that dealing with aphids is simple, just knock them off with a stream of water ... well, I am going to argue that point.
Yes, they will get knocked off the plant if you put the hose on them, but they just walk to the nearest plant & start over. It doesn't help reduce their population! I experimented last summer, when my Yarrows were covered in aphids, to see how each "tip & trick" online works, and that particular tip didn't work in the long run -- it just resulted in more plants having aphids on them! (Ants will also help them out by carrying them to different plants, but I will get into that in Part 2) .
In order to get rid of aphids, they need to be killed. I never ever advise using any sort of insecticide spray, even "organic" ones, because they just kill ALL insects, even the good guys! Insecticidal soap doesn't discriminate, it will wipe out ladybugs, parasitic wasps, butterflies, you name it, it it hits them, or a bug lands on a plant still wet with soap, it will die. Same with Diatomaceous Earth -- it kills everyone, and we really don't want that!
So how to get just the aphids.... with my yarrow, I was able to carefully put a small sour cream tub under the flowers or infested sections and shake them off into the container. I accidentally got a few ladybug larvae, so I was able to scoop them out & put them back on the yarrow to continue feasting on the aphids.
The aphids in the bucket got a "bath" with water with a squirt of dish detergent in it so that they'd drown. I dump the bucket out under a spruce tree that's away from my flowerbeds, once the aphids are dead.
I had a few aphids on my sweet peas, not very many, but sweet peas are hard to shake off, so whenever I found a ladybug in the lawn I would move it onto the sweet peas, and that worked quite well. The sweet peas never got into "infested mode" because the ladybugs would eat the few that were there.
Another idea is to plant a bait plant, like yarrow, that will draw the aphids to them. Yarrow is highly scented, and aphids just flock to them. Then you can mainly work with the yarrow instead of other plants that aren't as hardy.
BBC included a section on aphids in their Micro-Monsters series presented by my favourite Natural History presenter, Sir David Attenborough. It was really interesting and really gave insight into the life cycle of these little insects that cause so much damage in such a short time. The video clip below is from Micro Monsters, but I'd highly recommend looking up the entire thing on YouTube and watching the whole thing, it is so fascinating! And BBC always has technology for filming that nobody else has, for the most part. I don't want to go on & on too much, but it's definitely worth watching the whole thing!
Aphids can also decide on giving birth to babies with wings or without wings -- if the mother aphid feels that the plant is at it's threshold for food-source-to-population ratio, it will give birth to babies with wings so they can fly off to find a new food source. Otherwise they don't waste their energy & resources on bothering with wings.
In order to get a handle on controlling the aphids, you also need to understand the full issue of having aphids.....which I will go into a bit more in Part 2.
I'll leave off here for today, though -- I hope you're warm & dry on this crazy winter-like day. I desperately need to get outside & do some hazard control, because I had all kinds f things lined up to get done "before winter hit" not expecting it would hit in what was technically still summer!
Did you have aphid issues this year? Did you know they just clone themselves? I'm curious if other people have issues or if they've noticed them crawling back up onto plants after knocking them off with the water hose!
See you in Part 2!
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