The best way to prevent pests in your indoor plants is to use sticky traps. Here’s how to use sticky traps to get rid of houseplant pests!
Plant pests are extremely annoying and can shatter your garden if they wreak havoc. However, using sticky traps to get rid of them can be a smart way to move forward!
What Are Sticky Traps And How Do They Work?
Sticky traps are adhesive surfaces designed to attract and capture flying pests around your plants, helping to control infestations. These traps are typically bright-colored, which lures in pests like fungus gnats, aphids, and whiteflies. Once the pests land on the sticky surface, they become trapped and are unable to escape or reproduce, effectively reducing their population over time.
However, sticky traps are not a one-time solution. Their effectiveness decreases as they become covered with dust and pests, so it’s important to replace them weekly to maintain their stickiness. Additionally, sticky traps primarily target flying insects and won’t address all pest issues, especially eggs or crawling insects. For comprehensive pest control, it’s crucial to use sticky traps alongside other treatments, such as specialized insecticides or natural remedies, to tackle the problem from all angles.
Sticky traps also serve as an early warning system, allowing you to monitor pest levels and take action before the infestation becomes severe. With various types and colors available, these traps are a handy tool in your pest management arsenal, especially for controlling adult pests.
Tip: You can reuse sticky traps for over a couple of weeks simply by scraping off all trapped insects and coating their surfaces again with specialized glue that generally comes with the pack.
How To Use Sticky Traps For Houseplant Pests?
Almost all sticky traps have sticks that you bury directly inside the soil, letting the sticky part be above ground. Using these is quite easy in that you only have to peel off the adhesive covering that they come with, revealing the glue underneath either on one side or both. You might need to use more than one sticky trap for a plant, depending on the size of the plant as well as the trap. Depending on the type of pest you are dealing with, here are the types of sticky traps you can use.
1) Yellow Sticky Traps
These are the most popular type of sticky traps because most insects are attracted to the yellow color as they resemble the color of pollen-filled flowers. They are most effective against whiteflies, fungus gnats, thrips, and other flying insects. Fungus gnats can be really annoying and can easily get out of hand. With yellow sticky traps, you can catch them as soon as the adults hatch from eggs in the soil and fly out.
2) Blue Sticky Traps
Blue sticky traps are the ones you can use if you are dealing with a trip problem. You will mostly encounter these pesky insects in tomato cultivation, and blue sticky traps can help control them.
3) White Sticky Traps
The white sticky traps can help with several pests, including the apple sawfly, the plum sawfly, California flower thrips, and even the raspberry beetle.
4) Red Sticky Traps
Quite common in vineyards and orchards, the pear blight bottle attacks cherry, pear, and apple trees. This beetle bores into the woody trunk of the trees and lays eggs inside. To control these, you can use some red-hanging sticky traps. The only difference between normal and hanging sticky traps is the latter are hung from the branches of taller trees. They, too, catch flying pests.
Final Thoughts
As mentioned before, you must combine sticky traps with specialized treatments. Though sticky traps trap the adult insects, the larvae hatching out of the eggs inside the soil can cause more damage to your plant, as they might feast on the roots. Nevertheless, sticky traps are the best tools for monitoring your plants and catching a pest infestation as soon as it happens. Remove the pests once and for all with targeted treatments.
