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Fungus gnats or WINGED ROOT APHIDS???

yerboyblue

Member
Actually come to think of it, it was on my second app of orthene like a few weeks later, but even the combined dosage was still less than 3.3g per gallon. I'm just posting my experience, I'm sure the 3.3g dosage works fine, I would just recommend doing a couple test plants a day or two prior to commiting the whole crop, couldn't hurt you know?
 

yerboyblue

Member
^ ya it's legal, some counties will ban it tho. It's mostly got to do with it affecting birds and bees when it's sprayed, and toxic gases vaporizing in the 24 hour period after applied, and also can be transmitted via pollen because it is systemic. These don't really affect us since we are watering it in the dirt, probably not producing pollen outdoors with our plants in most cases, and our rooms are carbon filtered, removing a lot of the poisinous gases.
 

Granger2

Active member
Veteran
cannabinauts,
I'm curing 4 plants I harvested out of 9 in 3 gal AeroBags w/coco80%/perlite20%* under an air cooled 600w HPS. Using a 3x3 stall in a sealed room w/CO2, AC, Dehumidifier. Organic grow using Earth Juice and ACT's.
NOTE: I now [4-10-14] use 2-3 tsp/gal. Higher concentrations cause root damage. Best to try on expendable plants, flush, wait 7-10 days to see if they pass. Very effective repellant too. -granger
Trying to stay on top of RootMoFoAphids using, at various times, Insecticide soap drench, Cedarcide PCO Choice drench, multiple drenches with Botanigard, and multiple apps of nematodes. When I went to 12/12, I sprayed foliage with Azasol.

So far, so good. No above ground outbreaks, and RA's seem to be under control. I have no hope of ever being rid of them no matter what I were to use, chems included.

These plants were vegged under 12/1. No nanners so far that I have seen. Yield was excellent, and quality is as good as any I've grown.

I'm curing 1 Big Buddha Cheese grown in coco, 1 BB Chz *grown in potting soil w/ EWC and perlite added, 1 Sensi NL#5xHaze coco, and 1 NL5xHaze grown in the *soil mix. Haven't weighed anything yet, but the soil yield was 1/2 the coco yield, at best. Did the soil-coco side by side to see if quality [taste, odor] was better in soil. Jury's still out.

Still have 1 Delicious Critical Yumbolt freebie with an absolutedly bizarre growth habit [flushing], 1 Delicious Critical Jack Herer freebie, flushing 1 Barney's Vanilla Kush, and will start flush in about a week on 3 Barney's Tangerine Dream [3 different seed].

Summer at 30th parallel only allows me to use one light. Have twice sprayed buds with Actinovate to hopefully prevent botrytis. The Tang Drm have the fattest buds I've grown, so time will tell if disaster is in store. Will update again with pics. -granger
 

medicalmj

Active member
Veteran
Never had the RAs thank god, but hear an Imid drench is the only way to kill em good. Just don't use after 2-3 wks of flwr...
 

krazay

Member
I use an alternative treatment that will work for both root aphids and fungas gnats. Nematodes are microscopic worms that you put in your res and you can actually water the soil with (remove the screen filter). The nematodes will feed on the eggs and larvae in the soil and stop the breeding cycle.

can find more info at http://www.bcbugs.ca/shop/nematodes/
 

MF Grimm

Member
Never had the RAs thank god, but hear an Imid drench is the only way to kill em good. Just don't use after 2-3 wks of flwr...

Pretty much this.

I just dealt with them myself. My ladies were giving me phantom lockout problems, looked like a CaMg def. Anyways, one day I saw a couple of these guys floating in my res when it flooded. I went and added some SM-90 to the res cause that seemed to work last time I saw these critters...

Well that barely put but a dent in them this time, and within 3 days, I went from 10s to 100s to 1000s of these things.

After doing some research, primarily in this thread, and confirming that I did indeed have root aphids, I decided to get up to Home Depot and pick up some Bayer Fruit & Vegetable Insect Killer with Imid.

I added 10ml/gallon in my 25 gallon res and flooded it for about an hour. I also ran a pump from my res and top fed them really good, giving them a good rinsing with the Imid.

All those fuckers started climbing out of the hydroton and to the top of my pots, and looked like they were going crazy.

I waited about 10 hours, then gave my plants a good flushing with Clearex, and all these dead RAs just started dumping out.

I haven't seen anything in 4 days since treatment, and am pretty stoked because my girls looked noticeably healthier after treatment.

I'm spreading the gospel of using Imid as a preventative in veg, and in an emergency, no later than 14 days into flower. It truly works the most effective. If you use the other sprays or products, you just aren't going to get every single RA and egg. And it only takes one friggin' one to fuck shit up since they reproduce asexually.

Here's a pic of my slightly yellowing plants with the CaMg def, when there was no reason they should have had one, except for these damn bugs lol!

2012-09-07111730.jpg


Here is one of the reddish translucent bodied ones:

2012-09-06203821.jpg


Here is a more mature "beetle like" looking one:

2012-09-06203950.jpg


Here is a view of the more mature winged root aphid. Looks exactly like the previous picture but with wings if you look closely:

2012-09-07134807.jpg


And here is my plants looking happier only 12 hours after the Imid treatment:

2012-09-10133151.jpg
 

MF Grimm

Member
Here are a couple more images I had, since I could only fit 5 on a page.

Sick plants, pre Imid:

2012-09-07111703.jpg


Nasty RAs after treatment...clinging to last breaths of life:

2012-09-07134659.jpg


And another view of the winged RA:

2012-09-07134748.jpg
 

Granger2

Active member
Veteran
Growers,
Summer crop is done. No nanners. Yield is great. The Sensi Northern Lights#5xHaze and the Big Buddha Cheese side by side w/ soil and with coco/perlite show little or no difference in taste, aroma, potency. Massive difference in yield. Sticking with coco. Used 12/1 in veg, straight 12/12 in bloom. Sprayed buds with actinovate at 2-3 weeks into 12/12 and again about week 7-8. No bud rot. Here are a few pics.

This is the keeper of the 3 Barney's Tangerine Dream Fem seed.


Freebie Delicious Critical Jack Herer. A keeper with good taste, aroma, yield, potency, and a very nice up high, not speedy.


My little hard working buddies.
 
T

TribalSeeds

Will the flyers lay eggs in my buds? My crop finishes in a couple of weeks. Im moving and thinking about burning everything and just keeping my buds and hoods. Can I still bring these over to my new place in my buds?
 
T

TribalSeeds

No!
They give live birth.

Arent there a bunch of different stages and types of ra's?
I was under the impression they do have eggs in certain stages?
The bugs Ive seen along with fungus gnats in my room look very similar to the gnat but they have a clear belly with stripes. Not the beetle looking bodies though
 
Great Pics!!

RA's seem to have many stages, and I've seen them in all stages and colors (white, red, green black, brown). I even wonder if one type of RA can actually be many types. I've seen adult flyers spitting babies out their butts, adult aphids pooping smaller identical ones all in a line all the way up stalks, 3 or 4 types of crawlers pouring out the bottom of pots, the white micro ones in the rootzone, they are masters of disguise.

Imid has worked for me, Annual brand tree and shrub has Only Imid at 1.47% (Bayer has other stuff and nutes) and I just ordered Merit75 for the big kill in the future. Preventative use in veg and week 1 lets me run to the end.

One place I have had RA's that I couldn't kill, had to start over fresh. There, along with resetting, I used Imid, Azamax, Evergreen, MET52, and Pyrethryn bombs, in a cycle, and things seem to be back on track.

I haven't been able to ever 100% eliminate them in years, but I have been able to keep them at bay so as to not affect my yields or quality.



Here are a couple more images I had, since I could only fit 5 on a page.

Sick plants, pre Imid:

View Image

Nasty RAs after treatment...clinging to last breaths of life:

View Image

And another view of the winged RA:

View Image
 

RetroGrow

Active member
Veteran
I believe that many who have a continuing RA problem live in the country, have back yards, lots of outdoor vegetation where they live, and they continually get back in the house/grow room from outside.
 

Cofi

New member
i went back the last ten or so pages of this thread......seems noone is talking about met 52 heres a write up i did on another forum

Ok I have been using met 52 for roughly 2 1/2 weeks now. I wanted to share my impressions.... first a little background, I have a massively infested grow right now. Yields went from 2 to 2 1/2# per 1000w light, to 11 oz to maybe a pound. It is also all terrible looking, larfy as shit. I have had to use gravity recently, and i hate that shit. I went from having 3 gallon smart pots just busting out with roots to having to run one gallons that have no roots coming out and are almost solid white from that waxy build up on the outside.

So I started a little quarantine tent, I took new clones in rapid rooters waited for them to pop then applied 5 grams o9f met on their first transplant into 4" pots, that was almost 3 weeks ago. Here is what I have observed so far; I'm in coco on ebb and flow tables...

1. there are no snowflakes (waxy buildup) on top of the medium, none
2. the roots that i can see poking out of the bottom of the pots seem to be white and healthy
3. i have observed a FEW RA in the larvae stage on top of the pots
4. there are a tremendous amount of flyers present; however, they are not following normal RA flyer behavior, they are acting like fungus gnats i.e. staying low not flying up at the lights

Ok so what does that tell me? I have seen flyers when a plant gets really bad, this is usually precluded by a ton of waxy build up, basically tons of those little larvae on the surface. The plant will start to wilt and die, and when the plant cannot support the colony, they send out the motherships to go mess with the other plants in the grow.

Well, in this case there is none of that happening. The plants seem healthy enough as do the roots. My early theory (and some wishful thinking here if im honest) is that the RA colony can sense that the medium is toxic to them, and is trying to abandon ship. However, maybe the flyers are being affected by the met and are not able to fly like normal and are hopefully being consumed by fungus

update 3 weeks later

man the flyers got worse and worse i finally broke down and bought a scope turns out there just fungus gnats :D

so i believe the met 52 is working REALLY well.... imid is NOT a cure on its own in fact im starting to think that there is no cure so to speak but if you keep up on your ipm and rotate your pesticides you can control them.....what ive found with imid is that yes the plants bounce back but a couple of weeks later the aphids are back and just kick the shit out of your plants

so 5 weeks in theres no snowflakes no real colony growth
 

Granger2

Active member
Veteran
Cofi,
Please keep us updated with what develops. I've concluded and accepted that I won't ever eradicate them. I hope to keep their numbers small with no outbreaks. Thanks. -granger
 
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