Specialist · Aphids
Aphidoletes aphidimyza
Sixty-plus aphid species and no identification required — the one to reach for when the colony is already crowded.
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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 square feet?
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
- A few aphids on one growing tip
- No honeydew yet, or one sticky leaf
- Nothing on the plants either side of it
Moderate
- Clusters on several stems and leaf undersides
- Sticky honeydew on the leaves below
- New growth coming in curled
- More than one kind of aphid on the same plant
Heavy
- Stems crowded end to end
- Sooty mould on the honeydew
- Winged aphids, which means they are leaving to start colonies elsewhere
- Ants running the stems
This is the one that gets better as the colony gets worse — the larvae are bulk feeders and a crowded stem is a full larder. For a handful of scattered aphids a parasitic wasp is the more efficient buy; for anything heavier, take the higher level here.
Aphids give birth to live young that are already pregnant, so a colony compounds through the week it takes the first larvae to hatch. Taking the higher level costs a little more once; taking the lower one usually costs you a second release, by which point there is more to fix.
Why more than one round?
Putting it out
- Deal with ants first. They kill Aphidoletes larvae to protect their aphid livestock. A bait or a barrier, two or three days ahead.
- Pull yellow sticky cards. They catch adult midges as efficiently as they catch pests.
- Set it out at dusk, or under low light. The adults are nocturnal and will start searching for egg-laying sites straight away.
- Open the bottle and stand it down — do not scatter it. Upright, low, shaded, in a release box or on moist soil near the base of the worst plants. Midges emerge and fly up, so setting it low puts the whole canopy above them.
- Keep the surface underneath slightly damp while they emerge, and leave the bottle alone for several days.
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 bottle 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?
Aphidoletes is the one you reach for when the aphids are winning. It is not fussy about which species, which is exactly what you want when there is more than one on the plants.
Aphids cluster on stems and the undersides of new leaves, soft and pear-shaped, in greens and pinks and blacks. They leave sticky honeydew, sooty mould follows it, and new growth comes in curled and distorted. A crowded stem is the case this one is built for.
It is an aggressive generalist that feeds on more than sixty species of aphid — green peach, melon and cotton, potato, cabbage, foxglove, cannabis, rose. That breadth is the point: if you cannot positively identify what you have, or there is clearly more than one kind, this is the one that does not need you to know.
Then: is Aphidoletes the right answer to it?
Choose this if
Choose Aphidoletes for a moderate to heavy infestation, or for several aphid species at once. The larvae are bulk feeders — they paralyse aphids and drink them, and they routinely kill more than they can finish — so the knockdown is faster than parasitic wasps working alone. Adults feed only on nectar and honeydew and cannot bite you or your pets.
Choose something else if
It wants humidity above 70% and a room warmer than 59°F. It also reads day length: under fifteen hours the larvae go into the soil to hibernate instead of hunting, so a winter room needs supplemental lighting. And for a handful of scattered aphids a parasitic wasp is the more efficient buy.
What it kills, and what it won't
Sixty-plus aphid species is the headline here. Where the parasitic wasps are specialists that need you to identify the pest first, this one does not — which makes it the sensible choice for a mixed collection.
How it works
What it does to the pest, what it does on the plant, and what that leaves you looking at.
The larvae do the killing
The adult midge is not the predator — it is the parent. It flies at night, finds the colony by scent, and lays its eggs right in it. The orange larvae that hatch paralyse aphids and drink them dry, and they kill more than they get through. No poison, no residue, nothing to become resistant to.
It navigates to the worst of it
They locate aphids by smell, so you do not have to aim. Put the open bottle in the room with the worst cluster, low down and out of direct light, and let the adults find the colony themselves — including the ones on plants you had not checked.
Grey, shrivelled aphids
No bronze mummies here — that is the wasps. The evidence for this one is colonies going grey and shrivelled where the larvae have fed, and small bright orange larvae tucked in among them. They are easy to spot against a green leaf once you know what you are looking for.
Give it a week before judging. Nothing visible happens until the first larvae hatch and start feeding, usually three to seven days after release. That quiet stretch is the product working, not failing.
Will it work in your room?
Two things decide this one. Your lights need to run fifteen hours or longer, because under shorter days the larvae go into the soil to hibernate rather than hunt. And the room wants to be humid — above 70% — or the pupae dry out before they emerge. Deal with any ants first: they kill Aphidoletes larvae to protect their aphid livestock.
About Aphidoletes
A gall midge that hunts aphids for a living. The adults fly at night and lay in the colony; the larvae do the killing. It has no interest in your plants and cannot bite you.
New to beneficials?
Five things that catch almost everyone the first time.
After you release it
What actually changes, how fast, and why the first week looks like nothing.
How you'll know it's working
At first it looks like nothing is happening. The pupae have to emerge, the adults have to fly and lay, and the larvae have to hatch — three to seven days before there is anything to see.
Then aphid colonies start going grey and shrivelled where the larvae have been feeding, small orange larvae turn up tucked into the clusters, and new growth stops curling. There are no bronze mummies here — that is the parasitic wasps, and a different product.
Left undisturbed with a moist pupation site underneath, they will run a second generation on their own. A bone-dry bench breaks the cycle after the first one.
Getting it to you
What is in the bottle, how it travels, and what happens if it arrives wrong.
What arrives
Pupae in a wood fibre carrier inside a ventilated bottle, shipped overnight and packed with temperature-regulating material when the weather asks for it.
Nothing will be moving, and nothing is supposed to be. The adults emerge over the following days, which is why this one asks for a little patience up front.
Do not scatter the carrier. This one emerges; it does not get spread. Open the bottle and set it down — upright, low, out of direct light, on something slightly damp near the base of the worst plants — and leave it there.
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
Set it out at dusk. Adults are nocturnal, so releasing under low light puts them straight into their active window. Open the bottle, stand it upright in a release box or on moist soil in a shaded spot near the base of the plants, keep that surface slightly damp, and leave it alone for several days.
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 midge pupa is smaller than a grain of rice, and it ships in a bottle, in a van, overnight.
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 250-midge bottle leaves here holding more than 250. The ones that do not make it 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 — and pupae, which is what this one ships as. A bottle of fibre and pupae looks exactly the same whether they are viable or not, 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.
Give this one its week first. Nothing is visible until the adults emerge and their larvae hatch, and that quiet stretch catches people out.
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.
The pairing professional growers actually run
Aphidoletes larvae clear out the dense colonies; a parasitic wasp finds the scattered aphids on plants nobody has checked. Each one is weakest exactly where the other is strongest, and they do not interfere with one another. Matricariae is the small-aphid specialist; if yours are the big long-legged sort, run ervi instead.
Down for the release, back up to measure it
Yellow cards catch adult midges as efficiently as they catch pests, so take yours down while the adults are emerging. Then put them back — winged aphids on a yellow card are the early warning that a colony has started shipping out to other plants, which is exactly when you want to know.
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
Will these midges bite me or my pets?
No. Adults feed only on nectar and honeydew, and larvae feed only on aphids. They are completely harmless to humans and pets.
What do the larvae look like?
Look for tiny, bright orange or reddish "maggot-like" larvae crawling among the aphid colonies. They are small but very easy to spot against green leaves.
Why do I need to release them at night?
Adult Aphidoletes are nocturnal. Releasing them at dusk reduces stress and allows them to begin mating and egg-laying in their most active window.
Can I use these in the winter?
Yes, but they require supplemental lighting. If the "daylight" is less than 15 hours, the larvae will go into the soil to hibernate rather than hunting.
How long does it take to see results?
You should see the orange larvae within 3–7 days of release. How fast the aphid population comes down depends on how heavy it was to begin with.
Do they stay in my garden forever?
If you have a greenhouse with natural soil floors, they may pupate in the soil and return. In indoor grow tents or pots, they usually require re-release every 2–4 weeks during an active infestation.