June is busting out all over.

It’s June and the aphids are busting out all over. Well, all over my lupines in any case. I remember teranika complaining that she had a bad case of them and several of us rushed to the rescue with advice on how to deal with them, and I suggested Safer's soap, which is exactly how I treated my own rash of pests.

Aphids are interesting creatures, reproductively anyway. In the spring, eggs laid the previous fall hatch and pregnant females emerge, giving birth to a myriad of offspring who proceed to suck the life out of the stems and tips of whichever plant group the particular species is attracted to. There are three: legumes, roses and something else. So the aphids on lupines and the aphids on rosebushes are not related.

Anyway, back to their reproductive habits. These females continue to pop out little aphids, which are all female (this is called parthenogenesis, by the way) without any need for gentleman aphids, until late in the season when suddenly they have a change of mind, and produce a bunch of males. I have no idea how they know to do this, if they suddenly decide they’ve had enough of doing it on their own and want some variety in their lives or what. But anyway, they produce a bunch of males and then proceed to have their way with them, which of course means they get pregnant...again...but this time they lay eggs, not more aphids. The eggs winter over, hatch in the spring, and the whole thing starts all over again.

Well, I have never seen as healthy a crop of aphids as we have this year. They are so thick on the stems of the lupines that I can’t see the stems. I hate spraying them with soap because then the plants droop and never quite straighten up again, and the flowers are just getting their colour at the bottom of the spikes on some of them.

And that’s all she wrote.

|

<~~~ * ~~~>