FlyTrapCare Forums

Hi guys, I'm a first time sundew owner and it's growing very well. It's doing so well that it started flowering. But my question is about these tiny black bugs when watering it.

I put the sundew in a water tray and water it directly via the tray. But every week or so, I attempt to water it directly from the top.

I've noticed that in the past couple months, more and more of these tiny black bugs show up in my water tray. I'm assuming since I'm watering from the top, they drain through the moss and end up in the tray.

At first I thought these were fungus gnats and I've been using Gnatrol (bti) on all my plants. However, I don't think this is fungus gnat larva because Doing a Google search for fungus gnats shows white looking larva. Plus I haven't had a gnat problem for months now.

These are gray-ish black insects, very small. No wings. They are about as thin as a single hair on my sundew but a 3rd of the length. Pretty much they look like this symbol without the quotations ":" (but maybe also a 3rd that size) Further inspection shows that there are a lot around the rim of my flower pot. Probably in the 50-100 range. Crawing around very slowly.

After watering, a good number of them (probably 50-60) float around in the water tray. Eventually they drown in the water tray after a day or two.

I was wondering if you could help identify what these are and any remedy for them. I have 2 different sprays. One of neem oil and the other an imidacloprid. I've never sprayed my sundew before, but fear that maybe I may have to.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hello and welcome to FlytrapCare Faluzure!

Have you seen this thread?:
http://www.flytrapcare.com/phpBB3/bug-i ... t6170.html

Perhaps you can identify the insects there and know exactly what to treat them with, if they turn out to be threatening to your sundew.

Here's a link on safe insectizides for Cp's.

http://www.youtube.com/user/SarraceniaN ... bRCdJ8ZNF0

Matt wrote:Hello and welcome to FlytrapCare Faluzure!

Have you seen this thread?:
http://www.flytrapcare.com/phpBB3/bug-i ... t6170.html

Perhaps you can identify the insects there and know exactly what to treat them with, if they turn out to be threatening to your sundew.

Hey Matt thanks for the welcome. Actually I did see that thinking that they might be thrips or aphids, but that's not what they are.

Luckily, I have pictures of the buggers. I had to use my camera with macro settings and manual focus zoom. You can clearly see them in the photos.

Any ideas?

I noticed the forum automatically resized the images. Going to the following URLS shows bigger pictures:

http://home.insightbb.com/faluzure/bugs/

I'm not Matt but I think those like aphids

victorcai wrote:I'm not Matt but I think those like aphids

Hmm... aren't aphids more short & rounder?

http://home.insightbb.com/faluzure/bugs/DSC04068.JPG
http://home.insightbb.com/faluzure/bugs/DSC04072.JPG
http://home.insightbb.com/faluzure/bugs/DSC04074.JPG

Those are the best views.

victorcai wrote:Here's a link on safe insectizides for Cp's.

http://www.youtube.com/user/SarraceniaN ... bRCdJ8ZNF0

Also, wanted to say thanks for the link. I actually have 2 of the sprays that video talks about (even the same brand) and will use the appropriate one for whatever you guys decide on what these black nasties are.

Aphids are white

dantt99 wrote:Aphids are white

There are many colors of aphids. They can be green, red, yellow, black and many other colors in between.

It's hard to tell with your photos, but I'm fairly certain that those are not aphids nor thrips. They look more like springtails or some sort of soil mite to me.

Oh okay, thanks for clarifying...

The insects in your photos do not resemble any destructive insects (destructive to plants) in my experience. Unless your plants begin to show damage that you can attribute to the insects, they are probably harmless. Good luck and best wishes.

Those look like silverfish.

Here is a link about them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverfish

Could you take a picture through a magnifying glass?

It might help.

bananaman wrote:Those look like silverfish.

Here is a link about them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverfish

Yeah, they do look a bit like Silverfish!

Matt wrote:

bananaman wrote:Those look like silverfish.

Here is a link about them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverfish

Yeah, they do look a bit like Silverfish!

Hmm... I don't know if they are silverfish. Reading that entry says that silverfish are typically .5 - .91 inches long. I'm staring at them in my water tray and they aren't nearly that long. I'm trying to find a comparison because they are extremely small. I guess the best comparison I can say is maybe about the half the size of pre-ground black pepper, but they are long in shape. I came up with that comparison as I was eating breakfast this morning. Maybe another size comparison would be half the size of leftover hair stubble from an electric razor (for those of you that use it).

More details on this bug is that I don't see any on the actual plant of my sundew at any given point. However after I drenched the sphagnum moss with the bti solution, they started climbing up around the rim of the flowerpot. After viewing the video of the insecticides from victorcai , I ended up using the one with imidaclorprid. Checking on it maybe an hour later, I saw maybe 20 or so crawing up the sundew, around the base. I sprayed the sundew again with the imidaclorprid spray and now I don't see anymore.

I then looked up the suggestion of springtails by Matt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springtail The way they cluster up on the water makes this image look almost exactly like what I'm seeing in my water tray: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anurida_maritima (a type of springtail). However, I'm not sure how big those are in the picture and reading the description of that particular picture makes me think it might be the relative of those. They are way too small for me to tell if they have antennas. BUT I did some more Googling for springtails and found these two threads:

http://www.dendroboard.com/forum/wanted ... tails.html
http://www.dendroboard.com/forum/food-f ... tails.html

Those almost look exactly like what I have. I guess those guys from the above forum use them to feed baby dart frogs or something.

What do you guys think?

P.S. - Steve_D, I don't think these guys are doing any harm to my sundew, I just noticed that their population has pretty much exploded in the past few months and don't really like them in my sundew.