Little white crawling bugs & a scale!

[LuvPhals]

Hello all. I thought we were doing so good here. Leaves emerging and growing, flowers budding and looking great ... today when I said good morning to my orchids I see a little white bug crawling on them. Then a leaf with some brown raised scale. Now what do I do? Does this mean these bug are in the medium bark too? Do I repot them or how do I treat the bark along with the plant? What should I use? My fan in the room went out for a week so there was alot of humid non-moving air. We went a year without any problems till now. Thank you!

[Discus]

It would help to have a good picture of the problem just to make sure it is scale; you can try removing the scale by rubbing it off with earbuds dipped in rubbing alcohol, surgical spirits or isopropyl alcohol.

You may find however that you need to treat the entire plant with an insecticide to kill it off totally; they do sometimes infest roots, and they often hide out between leaves and in the "crown" where they're almost impossible to kill manually.

[LuvPhals]

Oh I dropped my camera a while ago and haven't replaced it so I can't send a picture of it. I will try the alcohol with q-tips. I've seen reference by someto using an insecticide spray for roses but is that good to do? I have to address this today because I have 11 Phals.

[Discus]

Start with the q-tips and alcohol; it depends on the spray for roses. If it is scale, it can be really quite tough to eradicate (because the armour partly protects them from the spray, and also they often hide out in inaccessible parts of the plant). I'm currently using some imidacloprid, and it seems to be helping to kill the stuff. Scale populations seem to be able to magically pop up in vast numbers seemingly overnight.

You may find
Orchid Pests
and
North Jersey Orchid Society
useful; I'm currently using the dose rate from the latter site across my collection.

[silken]

The rose spray I think you refer to is Bayers and it does have the imidacloprid which is a systemic and should take care of the scale in the long run. It takes a while to get into the plant's system so you might want to manually remove them as you see them too. What are the white bugs? If they are mealy bugs, those can be dabbed with alcohol and killed but they too would be killed by the rose spray and in both cases eggs will hatch and keep re-populating until something is done to eradicate them such as spraying or treating weakly. The systemic is good for that.

[Discus]

Systemic insecticide (like imidacloprid) kills the buggers no matter where they're hiding once they start sucking on your plants - but you need to do treatments for quite a while to completely wipe them out through all life stages; many other insecticides are "contact" insecticides, which have to directly "touch" the offending insect itself, so those that aren't sprayed, and those that have a tough exoskeleton, may well make it through and continue the plague.

If you're using the q-tip make sure to swap out to a clean one regularly and make sure it's really well soaked in alcohol. Definitely change them between plants.

[LuvPhals]

The bug looks like a small white ant.

[RosieC]

I used to use imidacloprid and it does kill everything really well. But then I heard that it is thought to be responsible for killing off bees and so since then I've very careful how I use it and only then on indoor plants when I can't get rid of something another way