can you describe or show the difference between an adult and a larve?
Newly hatched larvae are very small little sausage-like guys. They're little pink guys in the pictures I posted earlier in this thread. In Venial's pics they are the little orange sausages. Their color just depends the lighting. When they are very young larvae they can barely be seen with my 100x scope, but I can see them more easily when I look at the pictures taken through the scope. I *think* they can be observed moving when they are toward the end of the larval stage but young larvae can't be observed moving without time-lapse photography. A good way to get a sense of their size is by seeing one inside its egg. I'd estimate they're visually about 1/10th the size of the egg. I have only seen an adult once and it was dead and had 3 eggs loaded in it's body. The adult stage is much larger, like the length of 6-8 eggs, and could be seen with only a 20x scope. I think the larvae are what do the worst damage and the adults are mainly a problem because they propagate more larvae.
Here's a good video showing some pics of larvae at high magnifications:
I like to use a 20x scope to get a better overall view of things like eggs, but ya gotta take the time with a scope of 100x or higher to really know whether you've got larvae.
Hi ASD, I'm curious why the Dawn detergent and not a castile (vegetable oil-based) soap.
Dawn dish soap has been recommended to me a few times, in part for being a desiccant so that the bugs more readily absorb other substances, but also obviously for being a surfactant. I actually added some
yucca (natural surfactant) to the mix which required that I reduce the amount of dawn soap in order to not have too much soap bubbles. The isopropyl alcohol and surfactants are added to help suspend the sulfur in the solution. I'm not sure if a vegetable oil-based soap would work well with sulfur considering that it is advised "do not use sulfur within 2 weeks of an oil spray". So no neem or other potentially useful oil sprays while sulfur is on the leaves. The other drawback of sulfur is that it can cause damage in hot weather. When I used it earlier in the season I would spray it at night and then wash it off in the morning before it got hot. With temperatures cooling down now (highs in the low-mid 90's) I thought I could just leave the sulfur on but yesterday got hotter than expected, almost 100, and there was some burned leaf edges on a few of the girls.
Next spring I'll probably be dusting the entire garden with sulfur and
diatomaceous earth.