The worst thing you can do is declare victory prematurely. I had gone through 3 applications of
Avid and 2 applications of
Forbid, both with a non-ionic surfactant. I couldn't find anything moving in my 100x scope. The only thing I saw were some eggs, some amber, some cloudy, some clear. So I took a break from the nasty stuff and sprayed insect frass tea over two evenings. I figured the frass would help with my first planned spraying of Met 52. But then I started seeing mutated new growth. I thought maybe this was from the heavy sprayings of
Avid. Then I saw tacoing. Then finally I found a video that showed me exactly what I had been missing:
And here's what I was seeing (and not seeing) through a 100x scope:
Using 8x zoom on my phone made it more apparent. See those little pink guys? They're fresh hatched larvae. They move too slow to see their movement without time-lapse but they move fast enough to put a hurt on their victims....
The Russet larvae generally prefer the nooks of leaves, like near the vein ridges. I've also noticed that leaves with their tips touching the ground will have more infestation at the tip than normal, even more than where all the leaflets meet.
People have supposedly had good success with
Forbid but I can tell you that you definitely can't count on that stuff to kill ALL the eggs. I've drenched 'em in the stuff at a higher than recommended rate and I still had live eggs. Just like spider mites the secret to success seems to be applications on regular intervals to get the bastards quickly after they hatch.
I've been able to delay flowering with lights in the evenings but it's getting to the point where I simply can't hold them back from flowering any more. So I'm going to have to rely mainly on Met 52. I'm also going to test a diluted solution of sulfur + isopropyl alcohol + dawn. I was skeptical of sulfur but I keep hearing people say that it's helping control them to some degree.
I can't wait for the day that there's a better understanding of these bugs and they can be wiped out just as easily as spider mites!
