Why are people more into Recycling than ever?When they should have thought about this years ago!?
Best and cheapest way is to spray or swab them directly with 70% alcoholYou have to do it about three times, every 7 days to catch all the babies hatching outJust be sure to take the plant out of the sun before you spray it.
You can purchase an aerosol spray for this purpose, but in my experience, several applications were ineffective to stopping the infestationMealybugs are hard to controlIn the end I gave up and the plant diedI actually read somewhere that hand-picking them off the plant is effectivePour yourself a cup of tea and turn mealybug picking into a pastimeGood luck.
Since they're house plants, buy Bug Stop at the hardware storeI've found it at AceSpray in every corner of the house and around the foundationThe directions say to spray 3 ft out from the house, but they just want you to go through more of itAlso, spray outside around every door and window you can reachAll bugs in your house should be dead within a dayHappy hunting!
Use a systemic pesticideMealybugs live around the plants roots as well as on the leavesThere is no use spraying with a normal contact pesticideImidochlraprid is a non toxic chemical that will move around in the sap of a plant and only kill insects that are sucking the sap outThis stuff is also the main ingredient in advantage flea treatments for cats as it flows through the cats blood and kills fleas when they biteIn Australia this chemical is marketted as ConfidorSpray your whole garden with it if you can, i do mine about every 3 months.
I asked a very similar question in a different section last weekI can tell you this : when my friends and I were really getting into the whole global warming and recycling stuff back in the late 80's and early 90's, we were thought of as tree huggers, granolas, and other derogatory thingsThe politicians of the day thought it was all hooey, and we were a bunch of idiotsNow, 20 years later, it's the in thing, and unfortunately, I had given up on it a long time agoNow, in some sick way, I'm just waiting for something drastic to happenTo make things worse, people in countries like China and India are being told Wait - you can't build your economies like that - you're going to create too much pollution (and we've already pretty much wrecked everything - sorry about that!)And, understandably, they think we are a bunch of buttheads for itAnd to put it bluntly, I think we are - or were - and that the only hope for this planet is if about 5.5 billion of us go bye bye, by one means or another, and those who are left can start over again with something other than greed or the thirst for wealth and power driving the decisions.
