The Western flower thrips is one variety of thrips that can cause extensive damage on over 500 species of plants.
How to Identify and Get Rid of Thrips
Identifying Thrips
Adult thrips are slender and tiny, at 1 / 50- to 1 / 25-inches long. Their colors can be anywhere from yellow to brown or black, and if you try to get close to them, they will probably leap or fly away. They have narrow, fringed wings. The nymphs look like even smaller adults, though they tend to be light green or yellow rather than darker colors. Their wings are also not fully developed, and they sometimes have red eyes.
Thrips appear to be tiny dark slivers on your plants. It is hard to see their bodies well without a magnifying glass, but up close, they look a bit like lobsters. Shake them onto a white background in order to see them well.
Thrips Damage
Thrips damage includes streaks, silvery speckling, and small white patches. This happens because the thrips suck plant cells from many garden plants, flowers, fruits, and shade trees. If you have a major infestation of thrips, your plants might be stunted with damaged flowers and fruit. The damage that you notice might instead come from the virus that the thrips spread (usually tomato spotted wilt virus).
Photo Credit: University of Florida. These streaks of damage on roses come from chilli thrips.
How to Get Rid of Thrips
- To keep thrips populations under control, try using yellow or blue sticky traps.
- Shaking branches to remove the thrips and catching them on a cloth underneath is one easy way to quickly remove the thrips from your plants.
- For onion thrips: Take a dark piece of paper into the garden and knock the onion tops against it; if thrips are present, you will spot their tan-colored bodies on the paper. A couple of treatments with insecticidal soap kills them. Follow the package directions. Spray the plants twice, three days apart, and the thrips should disappear.
- For fruit trees: Spray dormant oil on the trees.
- As a last resort, dust the undersides of leaves with diatomaceous earth.
Photo credit: Steven Arthurs/University of Florida. Black thrips and thrip damage on a fig tree.
How to Prevent Thrips
- For flower thrips on gladiolus: Mix 1 tablespoon Lysol household cleaner with 1 gallon water. Soak gladiolus corms in the liquid and plant while still wet to prevent thrips.
- You can plant various flowers to attract beneficial insects that are natural predators to thrips. Some good predators include pirate bugs, lacewings, and lady bugs. Learn more about attracting those predators.
- For onion and western flower thrips, try releasing minute pirate bugs or the predatory mite Amblyseius cucumeris.
- Reflective mulches can help to hide your plants from thrips.
- If there is a very big thrips problem in your area, some plants have resistant varieties.
- Try not to overfertilize plants, as this can lead to more thrips damage.
Do you have more tips for controlling thrips? Let us know below!
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I do Rose Photography and plant them around San Diego CA. The most problem we have is Trips and Spider Mites. The trip goes inside Blossom and eats juice of Rose paddles and the top of Paddles becomes black. I use BioAdvanced just reduce them. Spider Mites is also used by this brand. the water around F 98 spray back leaves can reduce them. you can see my roses using this web address. https://www.flickr.com/photos/irajnz/51961058998/in/dateposted/
@karenhinds -
I'm having the same exact issue with them biting me. They are driving me crazy. Have you found anything that helps?
Ive never been biten..this ariticle has some good idead.
I am having a terrible time with bug bites.....Can you tell me if you have found any solution??
Thank you!
susan
Thanks yall...hppeffully, eveyone fnds answers.
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