Tuesday, February 05, 2008
Pesky Whiteflies no more using tiny Natural Predators:
It all started with this gorgeous plant. Beautiful, glossy, orange flowers, and later I found out that it came with a case of whiteflies. The small greenhouse whiteflies to be exact. There are two types of whitefly that usually infest indoor gardens, greenhouse whitefly and citrus whitefly. However other types of whitefly do exist, depending on the type you have it may not be easy to treat since the insect has a hard waxy coating on the outside of it's body which can be difficult to penetrate with sprays.
The greenhouse whitefly are smaller and have a different wing shape than the citrus whitefly. Look up the two types in google images or click on the links to see which case you've got if you got the little buggers. Sometimes you don't notice you have whiteflies until after brushing the leaves of a plant which may cause the lurking whiteflies to take flight. Plants may also appear to lose vigor, and grow poorly. To eliminate these pests every good gardener must go to battle.
I usually start my first defense with a case of yellow sticky traps, not only are they good for catching gnats but they are a graveyard for catching whiteflies. Gently shake or brush your plants and watch the whiteflies hover to the sticky traps - elimination by sheer numbers.
The second defense is to spray the plants with an insecticide that targets whitefly like Pest-Out, Organocide, or Safer Insecticidal Soap Spray. You can repeat the spraying every three days until control is established. Depending on the leaf type, soft clothes dipped in rubbing alcohol can be rubbed on the leaves to dislodge the whitefly eggs and pupae on the underside of the leaves.
A combination of eliminating whitefly numbers, eggs, using sticky traps, and spraying is usually pretty good to contain a whitefly infestation. But if you want to step up the battle a notch and achieve the winning combination the best thing to use in addition to the aformentioned weapons, is some Encarsia formosa.
Encarsia what? Encarsia formosa, or Whitefly Parasites. Do such things exist? Yes. We can order them for you, they arrive in the mail, little eggs glued on cards that are placed on a branch or stem of a plant. Underneath in the shaded canopy of leaves, the tiny eggs hatch and turn into Whitefly Parasites .
What do these Whitefly Parasites do for you? During their life-span hatched parasites eat young whiteflies, and lay their eggs into many more whitefly eggs. This kills the developing whiteflies, and produces a new generation of parasites 4 weeks later that can continue to feed on any existing whiteflies.
The amazing thing is you may not even ever see these Whitefly Parasites at work battling for you, they're so small. You'll just notice the parasatized whitefly eggs that turn black and a huge reduction in the whitefly population. Also spraying organic insecticides at least 3 days before releasing predators appears to have no effect on the predators.
To summarize, we had greenhouse whiteflies. But due to our vigilance, and the help of Encarsia formosa, we don't have whiteflies anymore. Good luck battling!
