This is not a very good pic -- camera not working well or I'm not working well. This is a white looking bug that's very soft and squishes orange (yuk!). It's about the size of a lady bug and fuzzy like cotton with small vertical lines on its back. My lemon tree that I brought inside for the winter has a number of them. Any guess what they are and what I should use to rid the plant of them?
it looks like one big gigantic mealey bug... which will soon founder a community.. and become more recognizable.. Gordon
Gordon, I got a post on the Florida Gardening forum from Jeremy and he nailed it - it's cottony cushion scale. Yuk! And, yes, it is a founder of a community so I'm on it with hand picking them off and spraying.
OH...Deb... I can only hope they are easier to rid ones self of than the mealies... they both have the white fuzz appearance. making them unattractive I'd imagine.. as prey themselves..
good ID.. I've neverrun up aganst this one....but scale is the worst... usually scale is less insect like... thanks for warning us of this one.. Gordon
I had these last year on my orange and meyer lemon, they are HARD to eradicate, but it can be done with persistence. I used my soapy water spray with rubbing alcohol in it because I will not use anything poisonous on my fruit trees. I went out several times a day and plucked off any leaves I found them on in case of eggs that I could not see, and then sprayed stems. It took a while but they finally disappeared. I still check, just because I am afraid I missed something. My infestation was brought by ants which surprised me, I thought they only farmed aphid, but I eliminated their access using tanglefoot at the bottom of my trunks. If you are unfamiliar with it, it is like a thick gluey product that the ants can't get through and occasionally you need to just use a little stick and stir it around to make it sticky again. Once a season is all you need to do it and works well. Hope you can get a handle on it, don't know how big your trees are, could be tough to use my method on a big tree but mine are all potted trees that I keep trimmed to a really manageable size so I it worked for me. Seems kind of odd I never got them on my dwarf mandarin or my tangelo...
Good luck, I hope you are successful!
Donna
I will second the Tanglefoot recommendation. My trees are containerized rather than in the ground, but I have found that it dramatically reduces the pest problems.
Thanks -- I'll do it!
