Stewarts Office Plants

We supply many businesses across the South, from Sussex and Surrey, through Hampshire and Dorset to Wiltshire and Somerset. For more information about the services we offer visit our home page, or contact us here. In this blog you'll find news, interesting snippets, stories and pictures of our staff's adventures out on the road.

Tuesday, June 19, 2018

Feature pest: Snow Scale

Now and then I focus on a pest that appears on office plants.

I've done the most common ones (Red Spider Mite, Mealy Bug), so now I am choosing one that is close to my heart due to the fact I played a small part in its identification in the UK.

Snow Scale looks to the untrained eye like Mealy Bug. In fact Mealy Bug is a kind of Scale too, and I'll discuss the common Scale in the future I hope.

So for a long time people just assumed a new kind of Mealy Bug was attacking very specific office plants. I became suspicious that it wasn't the same thing, and having a good friend who is a horticultural entomologist of some note (plant bug expert in plain English) I sent him a sample. He consulted colleagues, identified it as Snow Scale, and told me I was one of the first people to identify it in the UK, and the first in our industry.

So what's it like? It attacks a narrow range of plants: Aspidistras, some Dracaenas and has a go at Sansevierias.
The bad news is it does catastrophic damage to the plants if left untreated; it stays down at the soil level or in the joints of the leaves and can be quite stubborn to clean out. On some Dracaenas in particular it can be deadly.
The good news is that it doesn't seem to travel to adjacent plants (i.e. it comes in on new plants) and does respond to repeat treatment with pesticides like Provado, where use of same is permitted. I have successfully eradicated it on plants of my own, for sure.

Jonathan