FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

Hello and good evening,
i have two new venus flytraps for about a month now and the last days i vahe noticed small white bugs on the pants.
for what i found in the internet the called Planococcus citri and they are probably bad for the plant.
i took pictures of them. Any good solution to get rid of them without damaging the venus flytraps?

Advice from a VFT non-expert:

There are a lot of chemical answers, but I always try submersion first.

Get a bucket or big pot taller than your current pot and plant.

Put your flytrap & pot into the big pot and weigh it down with rocks or stainless steel scrap.

Fill the big pot with distilled/rain/RO filtered/ water until the pot and plant are completely submerged under water.

Leave it under water for a week. If you see any bugs swimming on top of the water, skim them off and destroy them. Most CP grow in areas that are subject to occasional seasonal flooding. Submersion should not hurt it too badly, maybe just make it look ugly for a bit.

This should drown those $%^&*(&^% bugs.

Take your inner pot and plant out, you should be bug-free.

Just my 2¢ worth.

Mealybugs got one of my cephs last year. I just sprayed it with Sulphur fungicide and they never came back.

oh boy mealybugs.... last spring/summer our pitcher plants and a few sundews got absolutely overran by these nasty things. we tried sulfur based sprays, we tried neem oil based, we tried drowning them - nothing solved the problem they kept returning over..and over...and over.

if you see those already you likely have MANY more in the soil/at base of plant also - they like fresh new growth and they will hide and put eggs eeeeeverywhere they can get into.

we ended up using a 1/4-1/2 solution of orthene (97.4% Acephate) mixed up drenched it all, dumped excess in water tray, repeat around one week later. all in all 3 applications and mealy bugs were done for.

its nasty stuff, its vile, but it will kill anything that feeds on the plants for 2-3 months after application. do it at night when no pollinators are abound, wear a respirator if you have one/try not to breath that crap in, and be prepared if you open the container it smells horrrid.

also be sure to keep those plants away from your others! hopefully one of the less noxious options works out better for you than it did us! mealybugs I would wish upon noone!