What's going on everyone? Welcome back to the show. Today we're going to be talking about a pest that I thought I'd gotten out of my garden for good.

I was rejoicing because this pest just really wasn't present in my garden anymore and I thought I had escaped its evil clutches until I went up to my brother's house who has a he has got a fiddle leaf fig he's getting into the houseplants and then I saw it sitting there staring at me

mocking me now he probably wasn, mocking me.

Now it probably wasn't mocking me, it was probably just concerned about where to get its next meal.

But the pests we're talking about is the mealy bug.

Specifically, mealy bugs, because mealy bugs kind of are scale insects and I've talked

about scale insects before on the show so we're gonna talk about what these things are

how do we get rid of them, and why they're so annoying.

Honestly, in my opinion, Mealy bugs are one of the more disconcerting looking garden pests when you look at them really closely.

So let's figure out how to get rid of them.

First of all, like I said, they fall under the larger category of scale insects

and they are part of the family pseudo-Coccidae.

They are unarmored meaning they are soft-bodied so they don't have a semi-rigid or

even rigid shell that many other insects in the scale family have.

What they do is they secrete a wax-like coating for their defense.

So it's an interesting little mechanism that they employ to stay safe from people like us who are trying to kill them.

So these are really common in greenhouses, really common in nurseries, as well as attacking quite a few house plants.

So how do we get rid of them?

On this podcast when I talk about pests I always always talk about the life cycle of those pests because when we can disrupt the life

cycle in some way, then we know we're on the right track to eradicating the pest entirely.

So with that said, what is the life cycle of the mealy bug?

So with the exception of the long-tailed mealy bug,

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