Thrips invaded my house in Pennsylvania the Sunday after Thanksgiving. It's now January 15th and I've finally had 2 days free of them. I use peppermint essential oil to keep them off me. Off and deet are useless. The ones I killed have been identified as idolothripinae. Native to the Philippines and SE Asia. We buy things from wal mart or online that comes from China, well now their Thrips and Mites are here. And they are very aggressive. I own no plants and it's taken me all of 6 weeks to get to this point. They disappeared for a week or so around Christmas but that is when the Mites, spider and bird were most prevalent. I know that it was warm after Thanksgiving and had a wood stove going to get the chill out of the air. Well it got a little too hot and I stupidly turned on an AC unit. Just for a few mins I thought. I vividly remember seeing what looked like a whisp of smoke float by as I watched football. I smoke, but looked at my ashtray and thought, that's weird, I put that out ten minutes ago. That "whisp" was their eggs. By morning it was already too late. Within a week they had gotten into everything and were crawling "all" over me. Biting, trying to get into my eyes. The mites came about a week later. Craziest thing I've ever experienced. I having no plant knowledge had to find answers and fast as everything on the Internet said they were harmless, and did not bite. Lol. Not only did they bite, 3 eventually got into my eyes. I would have to deal with at least 50 a day trying. They would also spray eggs as they fly by. More than once I'd look down only to see their eggs and fluid across my shirt. They also are very vindictive. Once a couple weeks back after they resurfaced the 2nd time I found they had made a huge nest in a small crevice between cabinets. I sprayed them and killed them with a sulfur h202 and vinegar mixture (figured that one out. Kills them and their eggs all in one.). That night I was about to fall asleep, and thought I saw the whisps. I drifted in and out of sleep. I suddenly felt an urge to get up. I started to sit up and noticed a small batch of eggs just to the left of me on my comforter. When. I sat up completely to my shock they had laid eggs all around my head. On the pillow and comforter. They are some real sons a B's. But now I am adept at handling them, and getting them out of my clothes, since they would nest in my dryers door gasket. Also the were in my vehicle and would hatch when I turned the heater on. Even worse is they would hatch from what looked like perfectly clean clothing I just took out of the dryer while I was at work. Adding some sulfur powder to the laundry fixed that. The car is being helped as we speak with a cold spell we are getting here. Temp has been below freezing for 2 days. 3 or more should wipe them out. So I turned the heat on full blast on the way to work, so that they hatch only to be stuck in freezing temps for 10 hrs while I work. It's been quite the ordeal. But I've learned the internet hides what these things have evolved to. Not to mention the article in 2020 talking of how the military has started using them for farming purposes to inject plants with whatever. Basically story goes they could stop a plague of locusts by unleashing them and other aphids ahead of the locusts, as they eat the crops they are injecting a chemical to stop the locust and whala no plague. The reality is it's a kick ass bio weapon. At any rate if anyone ends up in a situation like mine, here is what I've learned. H202 kills their eggs. Vinegar kills the insect. Combining the peroxide and vinegar creates paracitic acid. Be careful, it will burn some if left on skin. But it really decimates them. Then using wettable sulfur will kill adults as well as repel if sprayed about your home or yard. Peppermint oil alone is the best repellant if they are aggressive and biting. Air diffusers that you can use essential oils with also help keep them at bay but they won't keep them away if they are hellbent. They killed themselves killing my 1st diffuser. Then the ones that didn't die laid eggs all over the interior of the thing. Was pissed but admired their resolve. At any rate hope this helps someone. Lord knows how desperate I was when this became my life for the last several weeks. I pray this last bout was the end of it. I am moving from this place in a few weeks. But they say it only takes 1 female which can lay 10000 eggs, and the party starts all over again. Good luck.

Alexis, Spider mites usually are present for a long time in low numbers, but what happens is that higher temperatures cause their reproductive rate to speed up. Once we are having hot summer weather, 'baby' spider mites can go from hatching from an egg to egg-laying in as little as 7 days, whereas the reproductive cycle in spring is much slower. Each spider mite can lay 100-300 eggs, so you can see why the population just seems to skyrocket suddenly. I usually see the first spider mites in my garden as early as April, but don't really see the overall population explode until sometime between late June and late July. This year, the spider mites hit the front garden in May, got pretty bad for a while, but mostly are gone now. They didn't start hitting the back garden until July, but their population has skyrocketed in the last couple of weeks. I have them mostly on cucumbers in the back garden, but also on some of the tomato plants back there as well. Success fighting spider mites is highly variable. Some years all I do is put a hose nozzle on my water hose and turn it to a 'jet' setting that puts out a pretty forceful stream of water and I hit the undersides of each and every leaf once or twice a day. You might have to do it for several days to several weeks, but it sometimes helps....and sometimes doesn't. Spraying with neem can be iffy. First of all, read the label on your bottle of neem. It should tell you how often it can be applied to tomato plants. I think the label on my bottle says to spray it at 7-10 day intervals. There can be issues with using neem, though, not the least of which is that it is toxic to bees. Because of that, I rarely use it, and when I do use it, I use it just before twilight when the bees are through foraging for the day. Some people find neem to be highly effective on spider mites. Some don't. You won't know how it will work for you on your plants until you try it. Neem isn't an instant kill product when used for spider mites. It functions more like an anti-feedant,so first they stop feeding, then a few days later they are dead. You have to keep spraying regularly, though, to get the new ones that are continually hatching out. If you already have a huge infestation before you start spraying, it may be too late in the infestation cycle for the neem to kill enough of them to save the plants. My bottle of neem oil says not to spray when temperatures are above 90 degrees. If you spray plants with neem in the summer months when temperatures are pretty hot, it can cause the tomato leaves to look like crap and to curl. So, sometimes it seems like it makes the plants look worse instead of better, and it may kill spider mites and it may not. The bad news is that more mites just keep coming because they can travel on the wind as well as the fact that the hotter it gets, the faster their reproductive cycle speeds up. How well neem oil works for you may depend on what sort of neighborhood you live in and also on what kind of spider mite problem exists. I live in a very rural area with open pasture land/range land/hay fields all around us...on all 4 sides. Spider mites live in all those fields and blow in on the wind and they are a problem every year, and a huge problem in probably 9 out of 10 years. Nothing I do really slows them down much or stops them, so I just ignore them. Eventually they will kill some of the plants, but others will survive. I just plant enough tomato plants that the world doesn't end if some of them die. They are highly selective and, in my garden at least, they seem to prefer tomato and cucumber plants to everything else. They also like verbena bonariensis, though it usually can outlast them. I have them all over the cucumber plants, which are growing on a trellis with four walls and a ceiling like a house. Inside the cucumber house, I have sweet pepper plants (so they can grow in the shade provided by the cucumber house). The cucumber plants have spider mites simply covering the foliage...top, bottom, all over. The pepper plants don't have a single spider mite on them as of this morning. With the tomato plants, there are some mites, but not in the big numbers like I'm seeing on the cucumber plants. If you are in a more urban or suburban setting, you might not have spider mites all around your property in such high numbers and spraying with neem might work just fine on the ones you have. It also depends on whether we're talking about red (two-spotted) spider mites or some other kind of mite, like tomato russett mites. I don't know if neem works on tomato russett mites. The normal recommended treatment for TRM is sulphur, but you cannot spray both sulfur and neem on the same plants because together they can severely damage and kill tomato plants. Usually if you can see the mites on the foliage with the naked eye, you have two-spotted mites or some other kind that is not tomato russet mites. The TRMs are not visible to the naked human eye. If you only see obvious spider mite damage and not spider mites, you might have TRMs. Your plants still look pretty good overall considering it is August in Oklahoma, so I think it would be worth your while to try to fight the mites. In future years, watch for them on the undersides of the leaves early in the season. If you see them then before the temperatures get too hot, you can treat with neem, insecticidal soap or a superfine/summerweight horticultural oil. I really like the horticultural oil, but don't like to use it at hot temperatures. All these products work just fine in May when used according to label directions, but then the hotter it gets in summer, the higher the chance that using them can result in phytotoxicity because of our high temperatures. I just won't spray much at all on plants once we are above 90 degrees. Another option that may or may not work for you is a combination product that contains canola oil and pyrethrins. I have a spray bottle of Take Down in my potting shed, and have used it even at high temperatures with no damage to the plants, but I spray it sparingly and usually only on the worst, hardest-to-kill pests, like leaf-footed bugs, stink bugs and squash bugs. It generally kills them if I spray it directly on the pest. Spider mites can travel from plant to plant on the wind, so if I was going to treat a few tomato plants for spider mites, I'd treat them all at the same time. Whatever you do, don't spray your plants with a chemical pesticide. My dad used to spray his tomato plants with certain commonly-used chemical pesticides when I was a kid and even later on when I was a young adult living in the same neighborhood. Every time he sprayed those on his plants (one was the oft-recommended miticide called Kelthane, and other products he sprayed were pesticides like Sevin or Malathion), it would seem like they worked....for 2 or 3 or 4 days. Then, the population would rebound bigger and stronger. Knowing what I know now, I think the Kelthane likely was killing the beneficial mites that were helping keep his spider mite numbers lower (even though he couldn't have known that at the time because I don't think we even knew beneficial mites existed back then). Once the Kelthane killed the mites, the spider mites rebounded more quickly than the beneficial mites and that helped the spider mite population get even more out of control. With the pesticides, it was more or less the same issue where the pesticides killed the beneficial insects that were helping to control the mites. After I began gardening organically when I was in my late 20s or early 30s, he gradually stopped using miticides and pesticides and had less of a spider mite issue than before, which astonished him. I wonder now if neem would have helped his plants, but we cannot go backwards 20 or 30 or 40 years in time to see. Whatever you do, remember that new mites will be hatching out literally every day, so once you select a course of action, stick to it consistently. What I have found is that I can spend a lot of time and effort trying to control them, or I can do virtually nothing, and in either case. some plants survive and outlast them, and some plants don't. Their population likely is at its peak right now, and by mid-August should start decreasing naturally. At least, that's what I have experienced here. Good luck with them, Dawn

I had a really bad problem with tomato russet mites last year. I actually lost a lot of plants before I recognized the problem. I worked with a farm agent and people at Penn State. All of the things they recommended either came in gallon containers or cost several hundred or more dollars. All things considered I would recommend you try insecticidal soaps and liquid sulfur. Good luck and let me know how you do. Lubadub@aol.com

Interesting. I hadn't noticed any thrips around (not that I'm totally sure I could identify them), but there haven't been any insect infestations that I'm aware of. Today, there was a single white fly and what may or may not have been an egg on the leaves (which I removed). I'll try and get a decent picture tomorrow. Any sort of damage control I can start right away in the morning? Thanks for your help.