Ficus Trees Insects Overview
Ficus Plant Family Insects Information Overview
The number one preventative measure to take when dealing with the common indoor and outdoor insects (for ficus) is prevention itself. You should always make sure that you are regularly cleaning your plants leaves. A consistent washing or spraying of the foliage with warm water will minimize or prevent problems. In fact I give my ficus a shower right in my bath-tub. I just place the ficus in its pot, in the tub, shut the curtain, and let the warm water from the shower give it a bath! Not only does this enhance the plant’s overall appearance, but it removes pests as well.
Insect infestations can become a problem quickly for your ficus. So make sure that if your ficus tree is summered outdoors, you may want to check the plant very carefully before bringing it back into your home. The most noticeable signs of an infestation would be visible webbing, sticky, or spotted leaves. Also, remember to clean your clippers or scissors with alcohol after each plant you trim to prevent the spread of diseases or insects.
The three most common insects on Ficus are spider mites, scale and mealy bug. Each of these is a crawling insect that sucks plant sap and then secretes a sticky substance onto the surface of the leaves. This substance is referred to as ‘honeydew’. In a severe infestation, the honeydew will drip from the plant onto lower leaves, carpet and furnishings. The infestation may also result in leaves yellowing, and then dropping.
I do not recommend any pesticides because they are all hazardous to use, and are not 100% effective. But if infestation has already begun than one of your best bets would be to use the following non-toxic treatment: Brand X Foliage Cleaner. It is a silicon-based product so it is very slippery. Its ability to penetrate is probably the key to its effectiveness because it gets into the tiny crevices that other sprays miss. You can also put together your own home remedies using the following concoctions:
- Dish soap and warm water (about 1 tablespoon per pint)
- Rubbing alcohol(and about ½ teaspoon soap)
- Murphy’s oil soap, Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint pure-castile soap
- Cheyenne pepper, Tabasco, jalapeno juice, garlic extract
Note: These home remedies are usually diluted with water. You’ll have to experiment to see what works, and to see what is gentle on the plant.
Common Ficus Plant Insects
Mealy Bugs - In the early stages of their dwelling, the mealy bugs will sometimes appear in a few single white cottony blobs. After they’ve inhabited your plant for a little while, these individual blobs turn into larger cottony masses which are covered in white waxy threads and a waxy coating which makes them so difficult to eliminate. They situate themselves in the nooks and crannies of your plants, where it’s hard to spray or treat them. They can be found on leaves; the axil (where the leaves join the stem), stems and roots (root mealy bug).
Scale Bugs - Scale insects are hard to identify because they don’t look like bugs and don’t appear to move. They are oval, slightly raised bumps about an eighth of an inch long and are usually found along leaf stems or on the undersides of leaves. In the juvenile or crawler stage, scales are translucent and take on the color of the leaf or stem surface. As they mature, scales develop a hard, dark brown shell that is more visible (the shell protects the scale babies underneath).
Spider Mites - If you notice that the leaves and stem of your ficus are starting to bronze in color, followed by a web-like material on the bottom sides of the plant’s leaves, than your culprit is probably the spider mite. The bronzing indicates the higher amount of activity. The main part of their nest is usually where the most damage has been established. Expect to find dead leaves and plant parts in these areas. Spider mites can sometimes result in the death of your ficus, due to their slow migration. They tend to nest around one anther forming little colonies all over your ficus plant. And as the population begins to increase, they just slowly expand outward rather than finding a new host plant.
January 24, 2007
comments [11]
TrackBack-URI
Comments
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Leave a comment
Read more
« Common Ficus Tree - Ficus Altissima
Ficus Trees Blooming Overview »
judith kemmerer posted on June 12, 2007:
i just bought a large outside ficus and noticed the leaves are being turned into pod shapes. I opened one up inside are tiny black thread like bugs. the tree is becoming consumed with pods. ever heard of this.
admin posted on June 14, 2007:
@ judith. It sounds like your ficus tree is infested with thrips! But not to worry, they are pretty easy to control! Thrips are quite tiny, adults look like dark-colored shards or bits of thread. Thrips feed on your plants leaves.
Leaves that are infested with thrips often show silvery streaks where the thrips scrape into leaf tissue before inserting their straw-like mouthparts to suck plant juices. When an infestation is severe, the leaf may pucker or curl around the thrips (these are the pods), and you often can see sprinklings of black feces, which look like finely ground black pepper.
To positively identify thrips, shake the plant over a piece of white paper and look for tiny moving slivers. With a very strong magnifying glass (16X or better), you may be able to see feathery wings on the largest thrips.
The easiest way to control thrips is to wash them off plants with a fine spray of water. This is best done outdoors or in the shower, and it’s a good idea to rinse the plant again after a few days. Should the problem persist, spray the plant with insecticidal soap. Several widely available pesticides kill thrips, including carbaryl. Sticky traps are also a good option. You can make your own sticky trap by coating a piece of blue cardboard or plastic with petroleum jelly or motor oil and installing it in an infested plant like a little flag. While many other pests are attracted to yellow sticky traps, thrips are drawn to bright blue!
I hope some of this information helps! Good luck and happy growing!
Wayne Donnelly posted on June 20, 2007:
Our Company President has a ficus tree in his office. There is a small flying type of insect in/on the leaves. We have to remove the tree ever so often to spray with a dishsoap/water mixture which seems to help some. We put the tree back i his office and the fly’s are back. Could you help us?
Thanks
admin posted on June 21, 2007:
@ Wayne. Take a look at the tree’s soil, I think what you may have are soil gnats or fungus gnats (common for ficus trees). They live in soils that are kept moist and soggy, and they lay their eggs in the top two inches of the plant’s soil. Overwatering is probably the cause of the gnats; that combined with office air (which is usually cooler and more poorly circulated); your plant’s soil may not be getting a chance to dry out! Be careful this can cause root damage over time.
One good control method is to dry the plant’s soil out. This will destroy their habit. A soil dreanch will also kill the larva that hatch in the soil. The flying adults do not live very long.
Because the larvae live in the top 2 inches of the soil, removing that and replacing it with new soil will also help.
You could also try to attract and capture the adult flying gnats, by pouring a little red wine into a small glass (cooking wine will work, if you don’t want to waste the good stuff!) and leave it out for the day. Repeat the treatment as necessary.
Insecticidal soaps also work pretty well on the adults. If you want to kill the larvae, I would turn to BT (bacillus thuringiensis) that is made specifically for fungus gnat larvae. There are 3 different kinds of BT that deal with different insects. Get Bacillus thuringiensis v. israelensis (BT’s) that specifically controls the larva of fungus gnats and helps break the reproductive cycle to get rid of them! Water the solution into the soil.
I hope some of this information has helped. Happy Growing!
Vinay posted on September 16, 2007:
I have ficus Virens, unfortunately its having very tiny round spots of brown color on its leaves. please help what should i do? is it a fungus ?
Thanks
Regards,
Vinay
Steve posted on October 22, 2007:
After 29 years, our wedding present ficus appears to be dying. The leaves have almost all fallen off. I have sprayed it with Raid House and Garden and used an insectidie soap as well as diluting malathion (sp?) and watering it in to the soil in the pot. Will it survive?
christian posted on June 16, 2008:
My ficus has these weird black bugs that live in the leaves. They lay their eggs and the leaves close up around them. The leaf ends up dying. What do I do about this?
Dumas posted on July 3, 2008:
thank you for the site! there’s an outdoor benjimina where i live that needs help, and i have taken on the task of trying to revive it, if possible. it has been neglected for some time. sparse foliage, and some of the smaller, peripheral branches seem to be shriveling up and dying. it is approx. 3.5′-4′ high, and in a 20 gallon conatiner. it’s not a lost cause i don’t think. i noticed that it definitely has brown scale bugs, and i have started to pick them off manually, as suggested here (thanks), as well as using azatrol (an organic, neem based product i believe)to get rid of them. but i also noticed what looked to be a beetle-esque type flying bug on one of he branches. looked more like a fire fly, in a sense, only a little bigger, an uglier. a brownish dorsal/top, and whiteish/yellowish venteral/bottom, orangeish head on the underside. any ideas? a beneficial bug? or more likely no? any help greatly appreciated.
thank you.
ps- so, i may have answered part of my own question, as i have also been using a dr. bronners peppermint dilute, and when i sprayed the ficus w/ azatrol, the bug just moved around the branch, but when i sprayed the dr.bronners, it didnt like that at all and took off rather quickly. but still, i am curious as to what it might be. if it’s a beneficial or not? thank you for your time.
Carrie Gibbs posted on October 12, 2008:
I have a beautiful 8 foot ficus in our front yard. Last year I cut it back because it was getting taller than the roof. It just started growing back leaves but we have noticed that the outer bark is peeling off, the stump seems very week or hollow and there are small (termite like) tunnels in the tree. Can a ficus get termites. I thought I noticed a very small black beetle like bug in the trunk. Is there a fix for this or should we replace?
Dianne posted on April 23, 2009:
I have an indoor standar ficus. There are white dots on the base of a lot of the leaves. They feel like soap and leave a wet mark when I move them.
It looks like it might be sap because they are all in the same spot on the leaf.
What am I dealing with?
Thanks for any help you can give
Briggette posted on May 19, 2009:
My schefflera plant has scale and is leaving honeydew(sticky residue)on the plant and my carpet. Do the bugs get into the carpet, drapes, etc.?
If so how do I treat those items?