I'm creeped out by spruce beetles. I run if I even see them flying within a 100 meter radius. Who can blame me!! When I was 6 I had one fly down the back of my shirt. Mom didn't believe me. I was too calm? But inside I"m SCREAMING!! I remember the horror. So my brother, who is a year younger, was playing pirate and had a REAL hook to be Captain Hook. All sharp and curved and...yeah, moms don't let their 5 year olds play with that kind of thing these days, but there you go--implement of death. Anyways, he fished the spruce beetle out for me--impaled it on his hook! (Don't like Captain Hook either anymore, so two phobias for the price of one!)

I had some BW's in my Passionvine... I thought I'd "live and let live" until I saw them killing my Gulf Fritillary caterpillars! At least, the ones I had missed and didn't bring in to be hand-raised, anyway. I just knocked them to the ground and beat them with my hand spade. Yuk! I agree that wasps are an enemy of many spiders including the BW but they also prey upon caterpillars. So, I probably have a different feeling than many others here about wasps. Some are predatory, while others are parasitic. The parasitic wasps will lay eggs on a butterfly caterpillar and the larva burrows into the caterpillar. One may never know this has happened until the time draws close for the new butterfly to emerge from the chrysalis... only to have nothing happen except for a bunch of bugs to come out and a dead butterfly. Certain flies do the same thing. I just had that happen to a Giant Swallowtail... the chrysalis began to darken as though it were getting ready to emerge... I could see the markings of the new butterfly inside... but then the pupa just burst and all these bugs came out. Made me mad! Megan :)

Jean - Thanks for the links added to the thread w/ the pix. I have no idea what had happened last nite & why i couldn't get uploads in my thread. So for ppl reading this looking for pix, plz check Jean's posts...they are of my mystery critters. Kimmsr - They are in the soil only, usually around the roots of a plant and the wood chips from the potting mix. as i had said in the main entry, there are a lot of them, but finding them isn't always easy because they are so small. looking for them is like looking at the night sky...you can't focus or you'll never see them. you have to let your vision go soft then you can detect movement. once detected, getting them isolated is another story because they can shrink themselves up so tiny that they hide easily so i can have 1/8 of a teaspoon of soil i know one of the worms is in and still be unable to find it even w/in 30 mins of diligent searching. water does NOT make them surface. they have survived cold pressed neem oil, dish soap mixed in w/ the neem oil soil drench, and gognat soil drench. Jean and Kimmsr - they are about 5 mm long unless they are in motion then they stretch to unbelievable proportions. my jaw dropped when i saw the stretching up to 1/2 an inch. the camera is using a macro lens where the tiniest grandule of soil looks large, so the magnification on this is quite high. the best comparison would be they are about the diameter of a tiny eyelash or angelhair. (not the pasta, the decorative angel hair medium) it would take probably 50 un-stretched worms to make up the size of a small green garden pea. rhizo - i took the photo of them in a champagne size mercury glass, so there is a mirrored reflection of them. it was the first thing i could grab to put them in. the worms themselves are all white. anything clear is not a worm. even when these die, they retain a whitish color. (they died in the glass from the light and dehydration.) i realized that the lights and the lack of soil shelter was killing them, so that gives me the idea that they are not air breathers and that they need some kind of moisture to survive. the one large one on the right stretched itself out to about 1/2" at one point in time freaking me out, and then curled up and died from what i'm concluding is exposure. as for plant damage, i cannot be certain of any damage they are doing but i have all my seedlings die from something in the soil and from my treating the soil as well as some established plants die inexplicably. Yet, the plant these are in is still alive but not necessarily thriving, hence my checking the soil and finding these worms. from what i can tell, they aren't doing anything. i cannot see them on stems or leaves. they seem soil bound. no sign of them in the water tray. they do strive to bury themselves in soil when removed. they will cross the glass for a granule of soil. i don't have a video camera w/ a macro lens to record them or believe me, i certainly would. they curl up, ball up, spin, stretch, etc. i don't see any signs of legs. i also don't see the dark head area as seen on fungus gnat larvae photos. if they are larvae of fungus gnats, i would like to control (get rid) that. if they are the larvae of ANY insect, i definitely need to control that. i recently had to have my house bombed for weevils. i have parrots in my home and bugs, pests, etc make me very nervous.

Are you sure they were white mites and not just recently hatched fly larva? From your description of the waffle iron with moldy rotting waffle detritus, it's sounds to me like they'd be maggots (fly larva) not mites which typically live in unmoldy stuff. The good side (to the maggot hypothesis) is that without food to live on (or after they eat up all the food, pupate and emerge as flies) they are gone. And absent further rotting food your problem is solved. Flies and maggots are Nature's clean-up crew and once they've done their thing they (or actually their decendants) are on to the next mess. You could go out to the trash and see if they have grown larger (trash can living won't faze them and they grow very fast). Both freezing and very high heat (closed car on sunny July day) work to kill ongoing infestations of insects, but for flies, just removing the maggots to the outside and general cleaning solves your problem with far less trouble. Cleaning up after maggots is smelly and gross. The smell part comes from their excreta (poop), but hot water and strong soap resolves all that. I'd use heavy-duty dishwashing gloves for that part .... HTH L.