Wednesday, June 10, 2020

樹和他的蟲子們

I cut my shrubs all day today.  all 8 of them.  I know they were infested, but not sure the extent of it until I started to cut them.  It was kind gross and scary, the powder just flied out of the shrubs as I was cutting them.  And the white egg sacs were all over the leaves on the tree and off the tree, like a snow or sugar coating.  I told mom and then we went to a garden center in Tewksbury.  The people there seemed knowledgeable.  When I showed them the picture, the person there said it's a hemlock.  But they showed me a solution to kill the bugs not by spraying, but by feeding the root system and when the bugs drinks the sap from the shrubs, they will be killed.   Sounds like the Roundup, but instead of killing weed through roots, this time, bugs.  And it also said don't do it until the flower season past, otherwise I guess the bees will get hammered.  So we came home and I said I will finished cutting the shrubs first and wait until flower season is over to apply the chemical.  

But man, oh man, it was like a convection sugar...  It was spooky.  At night I was trying to research what is a hemlock.  The name refers to 2 kinds of plants actually.  One is poison hemlock, the other is actually an evergreen, looks just like my tree.  Yew in Chinese is 紫杉;hemlock is 鐵杉。  The only telltale sign maybe its fruit.  Yew produced a red berry like fruit, hemlock the evergreen produces something that looks like a small pine cone.  I also remembered the garden center person mentioned my bug's name is wooly adelgid.  So I looked it up, but I thought my bug is actually mealybug, although I do wonder why I never see a bug similar in pictures.   But the wooly adelgid's picture was not right either, the reason the eggs showed in pictures were shown lying along the leaf shoots, and although eggs are white, but the shape is rounded.  And finally, I saw another page by Umass Amherst about pest for taxus and other plants, one of them is cottony camellia scale.  Their egg sac are white, underside of leaves, and long rectangular shaped.  I think this is the bug!  

I was thinking of cutting all the shrubs, but it's expensive to cut and replace.  I hope my spiders and other bugs could hunt the infestation, but looking at the spread, I don't think so.  But I resist the idea of spray in fear that it could harm my other bugs.  Looking the chemical I got today, it's worse...  I don't see another way out though.   


PS, I see mealybugs now, lots of them, while I was cutting crown of the trees.  I saw spiders and other bugs.  I am really nervous I might killed the whole squad of them.  I am thinking I might have multiple pests, scales, and mealybugs...  

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