Yep!!! It is definitely mealy bugs. In addition to the insecticidal soap, daily washings under the water hose, kitchen sink sprayer or whatever you have handy to wash it with will help to remove them from your plant. Again, I can't stress persistence as one of the keys to getting rid of this pest, because they are so persistent themselves. Additionally, you might want to isolate your plant from the rest of your plants to prevent spreading. Good Luck, Ms. Faith

For future reference: I am now pretty sure these were indeed spider mites. I sprayed the plant heavily with a solution of 1 teaspoon dish soap in 1 liter of water, being especially thorough with the underside of the leaves. I did this twice, three days apart, and the problem seems to have been resolved. I never saw any mites on the plant. However, it spread to a couple of nearby plants, on those I could see small black specks underneath the leaves, which appeared to be spider mites. Luckily, it seems the spraying has been more successful then I could ever hope, and all the plants now look clean.

I never have seen mealy bugs on anything except indoor plants or greenhouse plants. I'm not saying you don't have mealy bugs, just that they are more of an indoor pest that an outdoor one and they are hard to combat outdoors. Different pests have different kinds of life cycles. Mealy bugs only live 6 or 8 weeks, I think, but have numerous life cycles per year. Because mealy bugs are related to scale, you can treat for them the same way that you treat plants for scale....by spraying the plants during the DORMANT season with dormant oil. I wouldn't spray even a superfine summer-weight oil in the kind of heat we're having now because it could damage or even kill the plants. You might try spraying the mealybugs themselves with neem oil. You might try spraying with insecticidal soap, especially during this week's cool spell. When you have a small infestation of mealybugs on a houseplant, you often can take care of them by wiping or dabbing the bugs with a swab or cottonball dipped in rubbing alcohol. Jay, who posts here as Elkwc, has been experimenting with spraying some of his plants with rubbing alcohol. If you want to talk with him about how he's doing it in terms of strength of the alcohol and frequency of the spraying, just start a new thread and put Jay's name in the title so he'll be sure to read it. There probably are chemical insecticides that are used for mealybugs, but I don't use chemical insecticides so am not current on them. Certain insects live a part of their life cycle in the soil, but you can't get away from them by moving your herb garden, because they'll just move to the new locations. For grasshoppers, the best solution is Nolo Bait or Semaspore, but they are most effective only when applied at the right temperatures in the spring (April-May) and when grasshoppers are in the younger instars. The best solution for all pest problems is to build up a healthy population of carnivore insects (aka beneficial insects) to eat the herbivore insects, and to encourage the presence of reptiles, apmhibians and birds because they help control pests too. One of my biggest garden helpers is the wild birds. I feed them a little bird seed and keep a birdbath full of clean water for them, and they reward me by sticking around and eating grasshoppers and other pests. Healthy soil will contain microorganisms that help control pests. Healthy soil needs regular additions of organic matter like compost. Dawn

I have to agree with Ken on this one. (Surprised, Ken??) Some battles aren't worth fighting, and this is one of them. Euonymus scale insects are an extremely persistent insect; at the same time Euonymus is very, very susceptible to this pest. With an infestation that appears to be at such an advanced stage as yours...taking years to get to this point....very few experts would advise that you try to 'fight the good fight'. You would be signing on for pesticide treatments for the life of these plants....something that is not good for YOU, or anything else. Me? I'd be planning my way out of this mess. I would remove the plants entirely promptly, stumps and all. That would give me the summer to clean all of the debris and sort of get used to what my landscape looks like without the euonymus. Then, in whatever is the optimum planting time for you (fall, winter, early spring), I'd slowly replace them with completely different shrubs, ground cover, or perennials. I'm attaching a google page of university based fact sheets for you to glean some further information about these nasty insects. I've moved into properties that had euonymus plantings and ripped them out before I unpacked my boxes! If I had a FEW of these plants forced on me before I could see any sign of scale whatsoever, I'd begin treatments with a horticultural oil right away. It is not impossible at all to prevent a terrible infestation but it takes persistence and a lot of horticultural oil. So! Are your plants shrubs or groundcover? How many do you have? How old do you think that they are? Here is a link that might be useful: click here for great information