SPIDER MITE CONTROL AND PHOTOPERIOD

If you read my first post in this thread I list several predators that are not affected by photoperiod, they are what I use in flowering, as well some of the different predator mites do still work under short photoperiods.
I am glad you confirmed my findings that Phytoseiulus persimilis is a poor choice for flowering Cannabis plants I have told folks this for over a decade.
I also applaud your choice to not use poison sprays, few seem wise enough to make this choice, but if you will smoke it all, of course.
Good luck with prevention in the future, prevention is the key, controling a mite breakout is always harder.
-SamS

i have been wanting to try out some stethorus puctilum, does anyone have any experience or advice specific to them?

Avinash.miles said:

i have been wanting to try out some stethorus puctilum, does anyone have any experience or advice specific to them?

Click to expand...

This may help you.

https://www.evergreengrowers.com/stethorus-punctillum-spider-mite-destroyer.html

https://biocontrol.entomology.cornell.edu/predators/spunctillum.php

Here's another wrench in the gears ( and a little more related to the OP's direction of how photoperiod effects the mites) ..... I did some experiments a while back using blue LED's during the night cycle. It worked for allowing photosynthesis during the dark cycle while not inhibiting the florigen.

With that said, I wonder if the predator mites would survive better when introduced to a garden in the flowering stage, if a blue light was added to the mix.

Do the mites need a full spectrum of light for optimum survival?

Just tossing it out.

I honestly have no idea.
Someone needs to test and find out.

That said, I have read research papers that showed that Phytoseiulus persimilis collected on the Equator, like in Colombia, do not get negatively effected by short light hours, they continue to work under 12 hour days. I tried for years to buy them from sources at the equator, with no luck, then I tried to convince several USA & EU companies that rear their own predator mites to produce these, unsensitive to short photoperiods. No one would do it, but this was when Cannabis was an illegal crop that big companies did not want to help with, all that has changed today.
-SamS

Ringodoggie said:

Here's another wrench in the gears ( and a little more related to the OP's direction of how photoperiod effects the mites) ..... I did some experiments a while back using blue LED's during the night cycle. It worked for allowing photosynthesis during the dark cycle while not inhibiting the florigen.

With that said, I wonder if the predator mites would survive better when introduced to a garden in the flowering stage, if a blue light was added to the mix.

Do the mites need a full spectrum of light for optimum survival?

Just tossing it out.

Click to expand...

I do still have my blue LED on the shelf but unfortunately, I don't have enough room to do a control room AND a test room.

I may add the blue light just to see if the predators last longer than previous applications. But, without a control room to actually compare, any results would be little more than conjecture.

I have noticed a reduction in 2-spotted mites. I saw a couple on the Lemon OG I just cloned. And, I'm sure there's more in the dark corners of my veg room. I have one more batch of persimilis arriving today or tomorrow. I will disperse these in my veg room and on the new clones. In one week, if I see so much as ONE 2-spotted mite, I am going to trash this entire grow and start over. What a shame.

Fortunately, the flowering room is only days away from harvest so I am letting that ride and whatever mites are there can much their hearts away until harvest. LOL

I may add the blue light just for shits and giggles but without a control for comparison, it's just for curiosity, more than anything.

Carotenoids produced by mites to measure time absorb light between 375-525nm. Couldn't hurt to try.

Logic wins again. Blue light is in the room.

Makes one wonder. If one was fighting mites in some way other than predator mites, what, if any, effect might 1000+nm infrared light have on the 2-spotted.

It would be enough for me just to know it was annoying them. LOL

I itch all over. New batch of persimilis came in today. Another nice swarming batch. Some in the bottom we not moving. I'm hoping they're just asleep. LOL

I just know they are in my hair and beard. Scratch, scratch, scratch.

Well, I can't say for sure that the blue light helped but I did still see a persimilis in there and I usually don't see any predator mites after 2 days post application.

However, the plants are still infested. Fortunately, harvest is only about 10 -15 days away.

I did solve the mite problem in my veg room. Got rid of them 100%. I used the New and Improved Ringodoggie Mite Elimination Method.

Here are the happy little plants before the New and Improved Ringodoggie Mite Elimination Method.

And, here they are AFTER the new and improved Ringodoggie Mite Elimination Method. Works every time. Guaranteed or double your money back.

The itch after dealing with them........ It's hit the shower and clean clothes or it will drive me nuts.

What's the plan now to get them out of the tent?

Without anything to eat or drink, they should die within a week or 10 days.

I think.

Can anyone confirm this?

I'm not one to bleach and spray. Hopefully, starvation will rid me of them... and they can suffer a little on the way. Hope the little buggers have a tummy ache.

Ya know, I have to say.... I believe that blue light actually made a difference. Enough so that I think it deserves a controlled experiment.

I recently released another batch of 2000 assorted persimilis, californicus, cucuumeris and swirskii. This is application #5 or 6 for this crop. In all the previous releases without the blue light, within just 4 or 5 hours, I couldn't find a single predator.

When I release them, I dump some of the medium out on a white paper and scan it with a 60x loop. The little buggers are swarming like scarabs on The Mummy. LOL

I'll place the paper into the canopy (flowering plants) and/or sprinkle the medium on the leaves (veg plants).

Within just a few hours, I can't find a single predator. Not on the leaves. Not under the leaves, not on the stems. Not in the soil. This has been the case every time.

Now, the latest 2 applications were under the blue light. I didn't notice any dramatic change last time but this time, I still found predators crawling around 48 hours later.

Better batch of mites? Maybe. Other variables do exist so there's certainly no conclusive evidence. However, the blue light logic and the recent result just gave me a feeling.

Harvest is only a few days away and I hope I'm dead and done with mites forever. However, if they do come back (fingers crossed) I will definitely do a control on this.

I did find out a few things while torturing some of the captured 2-spotted mites.

They don't like the snow. LOL I took a leaf outside and watched them under my little USB microscope. I wasn't sure if they were dying or just holding real still LOL but when I poked them with a tweezers, they don't move. A snowflake laid on their back pretty much meant death. I wonder how long a plant could stand that cold without too much shock. Long enough to kill the mites? At least it's not poison.

A green laser seemed to annoy them a lot but it didn't kill them. Still, it was fun chasing them around the leaf bring their 2-spotted ass.

And, just to end with a decent piece of info, one thing that made an incredible difference was humidity. It's a struggle to keep my rooms at 50% in the Winter. Really, a bare minimum for predator mites and, I'm quite sure, part of my survival problem.

However, I did a release on my clones because I saw 1 or 2 mites on a few plants and 3 days later the predators are still marching around like Rambo. Even right across the tops of the leaves. Incredible difference in survival and visibility.

The difference? The clones are still under domes and the humidity is around 80%.

Incredible difference.

OK, no go on the freezing.... diapause.

Here was an interesting read. Not sure how factual.

WHAT CAUSES SPIDER-MITES TO GO DORMANT?

Spider-mites are some of the most prevalent pests wherever gardeners garden, and they have this sneaky habit of showing back up when you think they're long gone. Sometimes that's just because spider mites are present almost everywhere in the world, and they happily float along on wind currents, crawl, or "hitch-hike" to find new plants to colonize, so they do seem to spread themselves around about everywhere. Come fall and winter, though, they have another tricky feature for surviving dormant through the long winter called "diapause". Under natural outdoor lighting and temperature conditions, in the fall spider-mites "sense" that winter is approaching , and begin undergoing several physiological changes. Adult female spider-mites discontinue feeding, mating, and other normal spider-mite activities, and turn almost completely red in color (as opposed to their normal, semitransparent green color with two black spots, one on each shoulder). The two spots become almost invisible beneath the solid red color. (Body shape becomes the main way to differentiate them from reddish-colored predatory mites at this time.) After these changes occur, spider-mites begin migrating to hiding spots, to survive the winter. Outdoors, these hiding spots might be in a crevice in a tree trunk, or similar protected places. (In cool greenhouses, they'll hide in any crack or crevice available.) They don't become active again until spring, when new foliage begins growing and daylength increases. If you didn't know better, you'd swear they just "showed up" from out of nowhere!

HOW DO SPIDER MITES "SENSE" WHEN TO GO DORMANT? Over eons of time, spider-mites have learned to go dormant when the length of hours of daylight start getting lower, seemingly aware that cold temperatures will soon follow. Other factors enter into it, such as temperature, but photo-period appears to be the main cause. The specific amount of hours of daylight required to bring on dormancy varies according to latitude (farther north, where it gets cold early, they go dormant sooner), but it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 13 hours a day of light everywhere. They don't all go into diapause at that same exact time, either, as individual spider-mites have quite a variance in their response to these stimulations. This ensures that if there's an early winter some will already be in hiding, and if it's a normal or late winter, some die-hard spider-mites are still there munching on plants as long as possible, but generally, they tend to go dormant at daylengths lower than about 13 hours a day. It's a system that's worked real well for spider-mite survival, and virtually guarantees that spider-mites will be a continuing problem for gardeners. Come spring, when the number of hours of daylight increases above their trigger-threshold, they come back out, turn normal color, and resume all normal spider-mite activities, ready for a new season of eating plants.

Unfortunately for indoor gardeners, spider-mites don't necessarily go through this same cycle when they're inside heated indoor and greenhouse environments, so a wintertime reprieve from their damage can't be counted on. That's because, just as cold temperatures help spider-mites go into dormancy, warm temperatures can prevent it, so they can continue staying active all year round irregardless of daylight length. In fact, nature has built in so much adaptability in spider-mites that they just seem to "know" when conditions will be suitable for their success, and they usually seem to show up, often just about the same time every year. Although the cooler temperatures of wintertime slows down spider mite breeding (they don't seem to actually stop breeding unless it's cooler than about 52¡), spider-mites can and do remain as an indoor pest all year long. For these reasons gardeners need to be ever-vigilant for the presence of spider-mites, because they seem to be a near-universal plague for gardeners.


Source: https://www.naturescontrol.com/spidermitedormancy.html

Ringodoggie said:

WHAT CAUSES SPIDER-MITES TO GO DORMANT?

Spider-mites are some of the most prevalent pests wherever gardeners garden, and they have this sneaky habit of showing back up when you think they're long gone.

Click to expand...

Oh Man. That's the fact Jack.

No easy task to get rid of them.

I thought a 2 more possible variables.

Ozone... I have a standard household ozone generator. I took the unit and put it under an upside down drywall bucket and put a leaf in the bucket. That's a pretty high concentration but... LOL

Oddly enough, I had to go through several leaves before finding one with mites. Apparently the predators did a little better job than I thought.

Anyway, I found a leaf with 2 or 3 mites on it. They were kind of hidden in the crotch where the blades meet the petiole. And there were some small webs there.

I placed the leaf in the bucket for about an hour. After an hour, I saw 5 or 6 mites (they must have come out of hiding (little 2-spotted cockroaches). They were definitely more active and the odd thing was, they all changed color, Either dark brown, dark red or even dark green. The few I saw before the ozone were all clear and I couldn't find any clear ones after ozone. Not sure what caused that.

I am only a few days away from harvest but if I can find an ion generator I will try that one last thing, I did read some articles about using an ionizer to kill dust mites. Not sure how (if at all) it would affect the 2-spotted mite.

Great information here - wish I would have read this sooner!

Is the gall midge a good choise for spider mite then ? Don’t get on buds etc ? Sounds epic I’m in flower and this sounds good but at €80 a box is hope it’s a garentee lol

also the odious bug says its feeds on plants also?

I've found moisture is the best thing to keep the predators alive , and even better a foliar spray of beneficial microbes.

I order the sachets to hang on plants and found they die of very quickly liek everyone had mentioned, but when sprayed weekly with beneficial microbes a huge breeding with the Predator mites occur and you will have 5-10 x as many Predator mites than you will ever have just hanging them in the garden.
As mentioned previously by someone the eggs won't hatch under 12/12 very good but when sprayed weekly ( even just the sachets you can spray) within a few days you will have 100's forming on the sachets where without spraying your lucky to see 5 moving around and a few weeks later zero.

If no beneficial microbes to spray I found leaving the sachets in the pot on Soil/coco also helps with breeding and you will see many predators the next day or 2 and then hang the sachet back on the plants.

I use OG Biowar foliar pack and spray for first week or 2 when applying sachets and you will have 100's of predators from each sachet compared to 5 or even less of your unlucky.

Also where you order Predator mites from is a big difference, many shops store old dead sachets in fridge as cold makes them hibernate but they can only live so long in hibernation and 99% of these places you will have near or no activity or life from the predators .

Koppert.com is a great place. Fresh mites shipped weekly, they have shops/website in every country .
Go Koppert.com click your country and contact local seller

Koppert is great, I've used a lot of their species so far.
It's indeed hard to keep the sachet species around for long, and one time I also think that I even introduced spider mites into a grow, via hanging sachets.
Certain species are only eating mites and come with some of them included and since they all produced in the same facilities, some contamination within the food insects can happen.

Due to price & risk, I abstained from buying any more.
But I had enough species introduced in my system, that they started thriving in my new worm bin.

Neoseiulus californicus



Especially the macro mites are easy to "breed" in that environment.
tried to catch some with a small container, filled with male parts i.e. pollen.


they everywhere



For spider mites, I only spray anymore. No extra insects, nor treatments, just moisting the leafs regularly prevents 95% of the troubles. There will be single mites sticking around and creating a new infestations when left unchecked, but once I see fresh bite marks I usually find em quickly under the leaf and just give em the finger of God.
By killing those off manually, you usually get rid off them until the next season.
(all Outdoor of course)

They should just never happen indoors, if they do you're a lazy chump and should propably clean your space for once. It's usually those people that never clean and call it "organic" and "mulch layer". gross!

for flowering plants, I can recommend spraying the infested parts (usually nets already) with 70%+ rubbing alcohol. It will kill any mite on contact and gets rid off the nets after several hits, without any extra chems on your bud, it's just booze if any.

here you can see such a tricky situation...
100d+ flowerings, it happened through autumn into winter, some got in and once the air was bone dry, just exploded.


here you can see a man giving up... no mas!
had the tent closed and lamps off for about a week, it was just mayhem as they actually don't like nor need any light...