Showing posts with label pest. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pest. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Pest in my little garden

Pests are unwanted by all of us. They make a lot of damage and leave us with so much heartache sometimes.

 I have many pest in my garden. From crawling to climbing type.

My cabbages was eaten by the snails. Luckily I found them before much damage done.




Out of anger I throw they out of my garden and they were broken.




caterpillars are frequent visitors to my garden. From big eyes to this spiky type!





Talking about grasshopper, this is called "belalang kunyit" . They are big and good enough to make damage !



Lastly Monkeys but I don't have any pictures of them to share with. They have eaten my pineapple....my sole pineapple that i was waiting to ripe!






Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Mealy bug attack

I realize gardening is not all beautiful. There will be time that we face the failure. Some are due to our ignorance and some because of pest. It's strange that pest seems to know which plant we concentrate less.

Aglaonema is my favorite colourful houseplant. It's quiet easy growing plant and strive well even though we neglect them. I just water them and fertilize 2-3 months once and it's so happy with it. I like them...... beside me the mealy bug love them! It's constantly attacked by this pest all year around. Look at my poor Aglaonema plant. I just realize today morning that mealy bug already attack them quiet badly....sigh....



What is mealy bug? Here I found some information on it ( from wiki). I have a killing mission today! I mean kill the pest.....

Mealybugs are sexually dimorphic, meaning that the sexes have distinct morphological differences. Females are nymphal, exhibit reduced morphology, and are wingless, though unlike many female scale insects, they often retain legs and can move. The females do not change completely and are likely to be neotenic (exhibiting nymphal characteristics). Males are winged and do change completely during their lives. Since mealybugs (as well as all other Hemiptera) are hemimetabolous insects, they do not undergo complete metamorphosis in the true sense of the word, i.e. there are no clear larval, pupal and adult stages, and the wings do not develop internally. However, male mealybugs do exhibit a radical change during their life cycle, changing from wingless, ovoid nymphs to "wasp-like" flying adults.

Mealybug females feed on plant sap, normally in roots or other crevices. They attach themselves to the plant and secrete a powdery wax layer (therefore the name mealybug) used for protection while they suck the plant juices. The males on the other hand, are short-lived as they do not feed at all as adults and only live to fertilize the females. Male citrus mealy bugs fly to the females and resemble fluffy gnats.

Some species of mealybug lay their eggs in the same waxy layer used for protection in quantities of 50–100; other species are born directly from the female.

The most serious pests are mealybugs that feed on citrus; other species damage sugarcane, grapes, pineapple (Jahn et al. 2003), coffee trees, cassava, ferns, cacti, gardenias, papaya, Mulberry, sunflower and orchids. Mealybugs only tend to be serious pests in the presence of ants because the ants protect them from predators and parasites. Mealybugs also infest some species of carnivorous plant such as Sarracenia (pitcher plants), in such cases it is difficult to eradicate them without repeated applications of insecticide such as diazinon. Small infestations may not inflict significant damage. In larger amounts though, they can induce leaf drop.

Fossil specimens of Acropyga genus ants have been recovered from the Burdigalian stage Dominican amber deposits and several individuals are preserved carrying the extinct mealybug genus Electromyrmococcus.[3] These fossils represent the oldest recorded record of the symbiosis between mealybugs and Acropyga species ants.[3]