Bugs on my Onc...and what looks like a bug egg... what are they and what do I do?!!!

[RosieC]

Thanks John, not sure what I can get in the UK. I'm hoping this soapy water will be enough as it was just aphids.

Thanks everyone for the advice... I'm not feeling so paniced now

[camille1585]

Usually for aphids chemicals aren't needed most of the time if it's not a bad attack. Soap, rubbing alcohol and manual removal usually do the trick. Systemic stuff is a bit of overkill just for aphids, and it's usually recommended to treat aphids on fruit trees for example, because there is no other way of getting to them.

As for the aphid being different from what you're used to, there are hundreds of different species, some of them preferring one type of plant more than another.

[RosieC]

Thanks again Camille,

I think what we call greenfly are just one type of Aphid and that's what I'm used to seeing on my garden plants.

I had greenfly all over one of my garden shrubs in the spring, BUT I spotted about twenty ladybirds (you would probably call them ladybugs) on the shrub so I didn't bother treating then and just kept an eye on whether the ladybirds were keeping on top of the problem.

Last year I kept treating the garden plants with chemicals, but I was planing to use soap this year after my Mum told me about that. I just wasn't expecting them on an orchid in the house so was a bit shocked when I did.

[RosieC]

Found a few more aphids this morning and I picked them off with a q-tip dipped in rubbing alchol.

Also found that sack thing which I thought had been washed off yesterday... definately pollinia, I see now that this has three pairs per flower and loads of them have been knocked off and when I look at some where the pollen cap is missing but the pollinia are still there they look exactly like the one I saw on the leaf, right down to the dark end to the sticky thread.

[camille1585]

Glad that mystery is solved! It's better that it's a pollen cap rather than an egg from a nasty orchid eating insect!

[RosieC]

Yeah, much better

Thanks for suggesting that Camille, because I was blinded by my panic over it