Generalist · Thrips & Whiteflies
Amblydromalus limonicus
The glutton. Takes thrips larvae and whitefly at high rates at the same time, and starts working earlier in the year than swirskii does.
$90.00
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How much, and how often
Two questions — how bad it is, and how many plants. You get a size and the dates to put it out.
How bad is it?
Pick the one that sounds like your room. If you are between two, take the higher.
How many plants?
Six-inch pots. Count a large specimen with a dense canopy as three or four.
Your size and schedule
More about this dose
The three things people ask once they have their size. Open any of them.
Am I light, moderate or heavy?
Light
- You had to hunt for the damage — a few silvered streaks on older leaves.
- Tap a flower or growing tip over white paper: nothing falls, or one larva.
- One or two whitefly lift off when you brush the plant.
- New growth is coming in clean.
- One or two plants. The rest of the shelf is fine.
Moderate
- You notice it walking past, without stopping to inspect.
- The tap test drops one or two larvae most times you try it.
- A handful of whitefly lift off and settle straight back down.
- New growth is marked but not distorted.
- A few plants in the same area have it.
Heavy
- You saw it from across the room — silvering across whole leaves.
- The tap test drops several larvae from one flower or tip.
- Brushing the plant puts up a visible cloud of whitefly.
- New growth is scarred or distorted.
- It has reached plants that were never touching.
Overshooting costs you very little — limonicus holds for a fortnight on pollen when prey runs short. Under-dosing costs you the round.
Thrips and whitefly are built to be underestimated:
- Damage is a record, not a reading. Silvering stays on the leaf long after the thrips that made it have gone.
- The stages doing the eating are the ones you cannot see. The adults flying up when you brush the plant are the visible minority, not the size of it.
- It travels before it shows. Plants touching an obviously bad one are usually already carrying it.
Why more than one round?
Eggs already in the leaf go on hatching for about three weeks after you start, and nothing you put out on day one reaches them. Round two is there to meet the ones that were not born yet.
Putting it out
- Rotate, don't shake. End over end, gently, to lift the mites back through the carrier.
- Dust the tops and the flowers. That is where thrips and whitefly gather.
- Every affected plant, plus its neighbours. Anything touching is already part of the same room.
- Lights off, or evening. They walk away from bright heat, and you want them walking into the canopy.
Everything else is optional. Get these four and the release has done what it can.
A cleaner way
On a display plant, tip small piles into bio-boxes or paper cups hung in the branches instead of dusting the foliage. Same dose, nothing visible on the leaf.
The failure is forgetting. Very few programs fail because the mite underperformed. They fail in week five, when the plants look fine, the reorder does not happen, and the population holding the line ages out with nothing behind it.
A schedule is the same decision, made once. A tube when it looks bad, then another when it looks bad again, is already a rhythm — just one you have to remember at the exact moment the plants look fine.
Change the size or the frequency, skip a box, pause or cancel from your account at any time.
Is this the right beneficial for your problem?
Five questions, in the order a grower actually asks them: what have you got, is this the answer to it, what will it eat, how does it do the killing, and will it survive your room.
Is this your pest?
Limonicus treats two. If neither of these looks like your plant, the product you want is a different one.
Thrips rasp the leaf surface and leave silvery scarring with black frass specks. Whitefly leave sticky honeydew, sooty mould on the leaves below, and a cloud of small white adults when you disturb the plant — the eggs and young nymphs sit on the undersides.
Limonicus takes thrips larvae and whitefly eggs and young nymphs — the stages doing the feeding and the multiplying. It does not take adult thrips: that is Orius, and the soil stages are Sf nematodes.
Then: is limonicus the right answer to it?
Choose this if
Choose limonicus for heavy thrips and whitefly pressure together on plants worth the premium, in a room you can hold above 70% humidity. It is active from 55°F, where the warm-weather mites are still slow.
Choose something else if
Humidity is the whole decision. Below about 70% RH its eggs will not hatch — it will still eat pests, but it will not build a population, and you are paying for a population. In a dry room choose swirskii; for thrips alone in a cool room choose cucumeris, which is cheaper and ignores whitefly entirely; outdoors or in swinging conditions choose Special Blend, because limonicus is a greenhouse specialist and dislikes fluctuation.
What it kills, and what it won't
It also feeds on pollen, which is not a pest — it is how the population holds on a clean plant between outbreaks instead of starving out.
How it works
What it does to the pest, what it does on the plant, and what that leaves you looking at.
It hunts, one at a time
Limonicus is a predator — not a poison, not a repellent, nothing systemic. It walks the leaf, finds a thrips larva or a whitefly egg, and feeds on it directly. There is no residue on the plant afterwards, and there is nothing here for a pest to become resistant to.
It breeds where it lands
What you release is the start of the population, not the whole of it. In a humid canopy they lay on the leaf and the next generation does a large part of the work. Below about 70% humidity the eggs do not hatch: the adults still eat, but nothing replaces them.
Pest numbers, not mites
You will rarely watch this happen. They are under a millimetre and they work on leaf undersides. Judge it the way a grower does — new growth coming in clean, fewer adults on the cards week to week — rather than by how many predators you can find.
It is not a knockdown. The silvering already on a leaf is scar tissue and it stays there whatever happens next. The first thing that actually changes is the growth that comes after.
Will it work in your room?
If your room runs below 70% humidity, this is the wrong mite. Its eggs will not hatch, so it eats what is there and then the population dies out. Swirskii is the one for a dry room.
About limonicus
A predatory mite about half a millimetre long that hunts on leaves. It has no interest in your plant and no interest in you — it eats other arthropods, and when there are none left it eats pollen until there are.
New to beneficials?
Five things that catch almost everyone the first time.
After you release it
What actually changes, how fast, and the three things this one does not reach.
How you'll know it's working
Existing damage does not heal. A leaf that was silvered stays silvered after every thrips on it is dead, because that is scar tissue and not an infestation.
So judge by three things instead: fewer live larvae on the undersides, no fresh silvering on new leaves, and falling counts on a dated blue card.
Reinspect at 7–10 days. Adults still flying after that usually means an untreated life stage elsewhere — not that the mites failed.
Getting it to you
What is in the tube, how it travels, and what happens if it arrives wrong.
What arrives
A mixed-stage population with food mites and carrier — the bran and vermiculite grit the mites travel in. The food mites are provisions, not passengers, and they keep the predators going until you release them.
Limonicus is unusually active, so unlike most of the catalogue you should actually see movement in the carrier.
Release on arrival. Do not hold it more than 24 hours — 50–55°F, never frozen.
When it ships, and when it lands
Shipping
We ship when they're ready to travel. Live orders go out Monday to Thursday. If a colony needs a beat to peak, or we're propagating a fresh batch, yours might hold up to a week. All mites and insects ship 2-day or Overnight depending on what's best for them.
When it lands
Open it that day. Release on arrival if you can; 24 hours at 50–55°F if you truly cannot, and never the freezer.
About the ones that don't make it
Some of them die on the way. That is why we send more than you paid for.
A predatory mite is the size of a grain of table salt. It ships in a cardboard tube, in a van, for two days.
Roughly 15% will not survive that. We cannot prevent it, so we price it in: the number on the label gets counted out, and then the cushion goes in on top of it.
Your 500-mite tube leaves here holding more than 500. The dead ones are already paid for.
If you can see them
Ladybugs, lacewing larvae, Orius — the minute pirate bug — and the beetles. Tip a few onto white paper and give them twenty minutes at room temperature before you judge anybody.
Cold insects are genuinely good at playing dead. The deceased have been known to get up and walk off the counter.
Still more than about one in seven not moving? Photograph them and file a report.
The photo is not us doubting you. It is how we tell a bad batch from a bad courier day from a mailbox that hit 104°F.
If you can't see them
Mites, nematodes, eggs — most of what we sell, this one included. A tube of carrier looks the same whether it holds 500 live mites or none, and no photograph settles that. So we don't ask you to take one.
You file the report and our entomologist takes you through the diagnostic instead — the tap test on dark paper, where the box sat, what your room was doing, and then what the pest is doing about ten days later.
Limonicus is the partial exception. It is active enough that the carrier visibly moves, which makes it the only tube in the catalogue where stillness is worth telling us about — though not until it has warmed up.
Seventy-two hours from delivery, either way, with your order number. Replacement or store credit, your pick.
What it does not reach
Three gaps this page has already named, and the beneficial that closes each one.
Limonicus sachets
The tube puts a working population on the plant this week. A sachet keeps a smaller one arriving for a month, so the tail of the hatch meets something. Across the catalogue this is the pairing customers make most often.
Stratiolaelaps scimitus
Thrips drop off the leaf to pupate in the top inch of the medium. Limonicus never goes there, so that generation completes underneath a working foliar release.
Orius insidiosus
Limonicus will not touch an adult thrips. Orius will, and it hunts them in the flowers where they feed. Worth it when you can see them moving, not when you are working off damage alone.
Two cheap things that make the rest work harder. Blue cards give you the dated count this page keeps asking you to read. Breeder's Blend is pollen and Artemia; it keeps the population fed through the lull when prey gets scarce.
Questions
Why is Limonicus more expensive than Swirskii?
Limonicus is much harder to rear in the lab. It requires specific diets and conditions to mass-produce. However, its higher kill rate means you often need fewer mites to get the same result, justifying the premium price.
Will it eat Spider Mites?
Yes, and it is actually very good at it! While Persimilis is the King of Spider Mite control, Limonicus is unique because it controls Whitefly/Thrips and helps suppress Spider Mites at the same time. Swirskii and Cucumeris generally ignore Spider Mites.
What if my humidity drops?
If humidity drops below 60% for long periods, the Limonicus eggs will dehydrate and fail to hatch. The adults will keep eating, but the population won't sustain itself. If you have dry air, stick to Californicus or Swirskii.
Can I use it on Roses?
Yes! Limonicus is excellent for cut flowers like Roses and Gerberas because it feeds on Thrips larvae, preventing the damage that ruins the flower petals.
Does it bite humans?
No. It is strictly a predator of small insects and mites.
How do I apply them without getting bran in my pots?
Since Limonicus is sold as loose material, we recommend using small paper cups, "Bio-Boxes," or even coffee filters hung on the plant stems. Pour a small pile of the mite mixture into the cup. Limonicus mites are extremely active and mobile; they will quickly crawl out of the cup and onto the plant to hunt, leaving the carrier material behind in the cup. This keeps your flower sites clean while still giving you the aggressive protection you need.